Designing the Future
“We’re going to have a lot of solar panels.” — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Feb. 7, 2019, NPR.
She’s not wrong.
The world is moving rapidly in the direction of a Green New Deal.
McKinsey estimates, for example, that 64% of all new electric power generation built by 2050 will be solar energy. That’s 7.7 TW of new capacity, half the energy the world currently consumes, including transportation.
What’s more, as Bloomberg’s Michael Liebreich points out, every forecast of solar energy investment over the past decade has badly undershot the mark.
If you’re counting, that’s something like 30 billion solar panels: four per person on the planet.
As Representative Ocasio-Cortez suggests, it’s a lot of solar panels.
For a lot of people, the only relevant questions are how fast we can deploy solar energy and how much it will cost. These are important questions.
The most important question of all often goes unasked, however.
How will we design the solar energy future?
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Solar energy is a profound design challenge unlike any that humanity has ever faced.
Design is often thought of in terms of function. Engineering design is what makes a system work. Solar panels have to work. They have to integrate with our electricity grids and our food, water, communication, manufacturing, and transportation systems. They have to power the global economy.
But the design of technologies, as we’ve seen recently with the digital revolution, is also about the design of society. It’s about how we live, work, and play; values and ethics; ownership and investment; practices of inclusion and exclusion; the distribution of wealth and power; product lifecycles and sustainability; culture and aesthetics.
If we make the same kind of mistakes with solar energy as we did with Facebook, we’ll all be in trouble.
Meeting this design challenge successfully will not be easy.
Part of the work, as NPR reported yesterday, is to imagine what might be possible in 2050.
But we also need to do what we might call design spade work:
· We need to figure out what our design choices are: how many different ways we can arrange 30 billion solar panels on the Earth.
· We need to anticipate and assess what potential design choices imply for all sorts of things that we care about.
· And we need to make thoughtful choices about what kinds of futures we want our children to inherit.
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Energy is integral to human societies. Every form of human activity requires energy, from the neurons that power the human imagination to the spaceships it sends to the moon and Mars. We eat and drink thanks to energy. We travel. We talk. We share information.
Not surprisingly, as a result, energy powerfully shapes human cultures. Some of the most important aspects of human societies derive directly from how we produce and consume energy:
· How we live, work, and play each day
· Our 24/7/365 culture
· The layout of our houses, neighborhoods, communities, and cities
· The balance of capital and labor in our markets
· When and where we go to war
Solar energy will be no different. The choices we make about the design of solar energy will profoundly shape the futures of our societies.
Every two years, cultural entrepreneurs Elizabeth Monoian and Robert Ferry host a global competition, the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI), to design the future of energy.
LAGI’s goal is to envision the “wonders of the post-carbon world”: to create, in every city, an “iconic renewable energy power plant,” a monument to public art that also powers the city’s hunger for energy.
The results are awe inspiring. Teams from all over the world compete. They’ve worked with some of the world’s most recognizable urban skylines: Dubai, New York City, Copenhagen, Santa Monica. And they’ve created some of the most beautiful power plant designs ever imagined, designs that are regenerative, that nourish the soul, fire the imagination, and motivate action to accelerate decarbonization.
LAGI highlights the power of solar energy design as a project of cultural transformation. As Ferry and Monoian point out in Energy Overlays, “Our culture is a reflection of our energy,” and at the same time, “the way that we decide to produce and consume energy is also a reflection of our culture. To change one is to change the other.”
Energy is us. What we eat may define our bodies; how we make and use energy defines our societies.
Ferry and Monoian, again: “Culture can be thought of as a reflection of a society’s ability to orchestrate the use of energy beyond that require for the most basic human survival.”
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The world will be radically different if everyone owns their own solar panels or if Elon Musk owns them all.
If the youth in the world’s poorest communities become solar entrepreneurs or if China deploys giant solar power plants in space.
If we create bottom-up solar initiatives or new transcontinental electricity grids that carry power from Riyadh to Beijing or from Africa to Europe.
Solar energy is arguably the most flexible energy technology humans have ever invented. Technologically, it can be used to power everything from handheld calculators to GW-scale power plants. Socially and economically, they’re just as flexible.
So, what kind of solar energy futures will we design?
That’s the question at the heart of Designing in Sunlight, a space we’re launching today as a project of the Center for Energy & Society at Arizona State University.
Designing in Sunlight is a space for writers and readers to creatively and critically explore the human dimensions of clean energy transitions. If the social design of clean energy futures matters just as much as the engineering design, then it also deserves the same level of careful attention, analysis, and deliberation. We look forward to sharing new stories and essays with you on a regular basis.
We’re also extremely pleased to announce an exciting new book, The Weight of Light: A Collection of Solar Futures, that uses science fiction and sociotechnical analysis to paint a picture of what the future of solar energy might look like in human terms. The book is the result of an amazing collaboration at Arizona State University of the research teams at the Center for Science and the Imagination, Center for Energy & Society, and Quantum Energy and Sustainable Solar Technologies (QESST) Engineering Research Center.
The Weight of Light presents collaboratively written stories, artwork, and essays exploring four future photon societies, powered by light, each in different ways, and the forms of social, political, and economic organization that make them run.
This work, we hope, will be the start of a global design conversation about solar energy.
The book is free, so get your copy now!
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Energy is the principle link between human and planetary wellbeing.
Energy is the glue that binds us in communities, from the village to the globe. It is everywhere, invisible but essential.
In turn, global energy systems emit over three-quarters of the world’s greenhouse gases. They are the climate crisis. Full stop.
The International Energy Agency estimates that creating a carbon-neutral future will cost upwards of $70 trillion or more. That is an enormous down payment on the human future.
What can we accomplish with that investment?
What will a solar-powered future be like?
What are the social and cultural design possibilities? What are the design criteria? Who will they include? Who will they empower?
These are the kinds of questions that motivate us here at Designing in Sunlight.
The sun bathes the Earth in enough energy each day to power a thousand civilizations, if we can harness it to humane purposes.
Carbon-neutrality just isn’t ambitious enough. We want energy innovation to create generative, inclusive, empowering futures for all.
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The photo gracing the Designing in Sunlight homepage is an award-winning picture of Dubai’s Mohammed Bin Rashid Solar Park, taken by Ghadir Shaar, who has now won the Middle East Solar Award for Solar Energy Picture of the Year two years running.
