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Green-tech plants require tight integration with a place in the world. To effectively use them, we have to scientifically understand those places. Progress on that score has been slow and steady. The first tool to even measure the amount of solar energy hitting the earth at a particular location, the bolometer, wasn’t even developed until 1878, eight years after coal power overtook water as the dominant manufacturing power source.

Much research has been done since then, but better data will go a long way toward dealing with the problems of renewable energy. The best-case scenario for our relationship to wind and solar energy can be summed up by Samuel L. Jackson’s comments in the movie Jackie Brown about his rather unfaithful part-time girlfriend: “You can’t trust Melanie, but you can trust Melanie to be Melanie.” That is to say, she’s not dependable in the absolute sense, but because he knows how she works, he can dependably predict that behavior in general, regardless of what it might be in particular. Likewise, the more we learn about how natural energy sources work, the more we can learn to trust them to be themselves, even if they are less faithful than coal.

If renewable energy systems aren’t perfect, they do have one major thing going for them: They don’t use fire. The material we put into them is not destroyed when we use it. No waste is generated, and no carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere as they operate. The same cannot be said for coal, natural gas, and oil.

In the purple prose of the 1930s writer Paul Lewis, waterpower (and we could extend the same idea to wind and solar) allows humans to get power “right down here on the rock-bottom of cosmological causation.” There’s no need for “the explosive combinations of oil or gas which these fuels enable him to make use of. [Man] is down on the everlasting elements—water and magnetism.” If this is a harnessing of nature, it’s certainly a gentler version than that wrought by Prometheus. “The conquering of Nature!—” Lewis concluded, “but into her friendly bosom again even as we conquer her.”13

In more scholarly terms, White, author of The Organic Machine, suggests that humans have never actually conquered nature. We have merely become more and more deeply enmeshed in the world. “Labor, rather than ‘conquering’ nature, involves human beings with the world so thoroughly that they can never be disentangled.”14

Consequently, renewable energy sources entangle us ever more with the world in which we live, and that’s not a bad thing. But making RE beat C around the world is going to take a tremendous amount of innovation. This section looks at ideas, technologies, policies, and methods that could help the world get there.

Society’s intricate mechanisms share a symbiotic relationship with energy. We live in a time when their billions of people are colliding with new ideas, technologies, and the few limits that matter. The continuing information revolution, breakdown of traditional economic models, and decreasing availability of oil in an urbanizing world are deep trends. If the past is any record, changes this big will push civilization to a new equilibrium point. Different ways of doing things will make sense, and the world will change. How it does so, however, is up to us.

chapter 22

The First Megawatt and Failing Smart

IN THE WEE HOURS of March 26, 1945, the wind was blowing at a sleepy five miles per hour, far too slow for the turbine to make electricity. Harold Perry, a construction foreman, had been working nonstop for the twenty-three grueling days since the wind power plant had gone back online after some repairs. That night, an elevator carried Perry one hundred feet up through the oil derrick-like tower to the small, armored building that housed the controls for the world’s largest wind machine.

In the years before World War II, this machine, the Smith-Putnam wind turbine, stood as a testament to the power of human—and American—ingenuity. A decade before, the Soviet Union had built the world