Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [103]
Making RE cheaper than coal is going to be difficult for a few structural reasons. Take a look at a rushing river. Let’s take the Columbia, the fiercest of all the rivers in North America. The river exists because the sun evaporates water from the world’s oceans, which is carried in the form of clouds into the continental United States. The clouds cool and when they hit the Rockies, they are forced to rise and get even colder. Precipitation falls and the water seeks the path of least resistance, running on a meandering path from the mountains south and west through the West. Through numerous combinations, the Columbia’s path was created, wearing a bed into the crust of the earth over thousands of years. The force delivered by the water derives from gravity, which pulls the water down to sea.
Humans used to know the river by the work that it took them to fight it or the work it let them escape when they worked with its force. The same could be said of the wind of the plains or the sun of the deserts. In his book The Organic Machine, Richard White wrote,
Engineers can measure the potential energy and the kinetic energy of the Columbia with some precision, but early voyagers . . . recognized the power—the energy—by more immediate if cruder measures. They measured it by the damage it did as it threw ships or boats or bodies against rocks or sandbars. And they measured it by the work they had to perform to counter the river’s work.11
The river did not respect human boundaries of force. People drowned. People died. The water of the river, with no anthropomorphizing necessary, played by its own rules. The complex thermodynamics of the water flow was beyond human understanding.
A wild river served humans only incidentally. We had to find ways to satisfy our own needs within its physical behavior. Boat captains learned how to use the natural flows and eddies to do what they needed to do, but they were ultimately riding at the pleasure of the river. Mark Twain called piloting a “wonderful science” that let him read the wild Mississippi like a book.
Even if we dam a river, some part of it remains outside human control. The places where we burn coal are some of the most highly engineered places on earth. They use special types of steel to isolate the coal burning from the outside world. They are completely manmade systems.
Green-tech machines, however, are harder to build and even test. As far back as the 1830s, engineers at the Franklin Institute in Pennsylvania were trying to build a better water wheel. They created an elaborate machine to run tests and model how the water’s force worked with different water wheels. A chamber for water was connected to a series of valves, a bell, and a timing device. The input water was standardized so that the same amount fell on each wheel. Measuring how much water the wheel could raise how far, a common measure of power, similarly quantified the output of the wheel.
The experimenters ran 1,381 experiments with the machine, and the publication of the results was considered a tremendous success. The problem was that the human parts of the system weren’t really the variables that mattered. Rainfall, the particulars of a river’s location, seasonality—those were the things that made a big difference. The machine was just one small part of the overall operation. Too many variables could not be accounted for. The same goes double for solar power and triple for wind. The overall energy system has to be shaped