Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [118]
Maintaining popular support for a technology as it grows through (very public) growing pains is difficult, particularly if hopes about the technology have been raised.
When Barack Obama stood before MIT in autumn of 2009 to deliver a major speech on energy, he echoed Lyndon Johnson at Holy Cross: “Countries on every corner of this Earth now recognize that energy supplies are growing scarcer, energy demands are growing larger, and rising energy use imperils the planet we will leave to future generations,” Obama said. The answer to these problems lay in innovation in clean energy. He went on to state that “the nation that harnessed electricity and the energy contained in the atom, that developed the steamboat and the modern solar cell” will “lead the clean energy economy of tomorrow.”46
Again, the problem was energy, the environment, and a rising population. Again, the solution was technology. Only now, it’s the wind and the sun and energy efficiency that are going to fix the world’s problems. The promise is the same—can the end result be different?
Climate legislation, which would increase the cost of fossil-fuel generation in one way or another, is the obvious next step to “make renewable energy the profitable kind of energy in America.” Whereas incentives for nuclear power were about decreasing the risks and costs associated with it, green technologists are using disincentives for other types of energy production combined with federal R&D programs that are expected to push green-tech costs down.
Green-tech advocates, spreading out from the venture capital centers of the country, have succeeded in installing green technology as the carrier of technological and economic progress. As General Electric and Westinghouse provided key expertise and financial support for an immature technology, so now do venture capital firms and newly created energy companies. It’s a different, far less centralized model, but the effect is the same: Momentum has swung to the side of green advocates in the public eye. Those same companies are also pumping billions of dollars into developing technologies that for decades languished in labs or were cast off as side projects.
The road to generating 20 percent of the country’s electricity, though, is going to require hundreds of billions of dollars more. Costs will have to be driven down and green jobs delivered to those who have been promised them. Local environmental concerns over the use of the Mojave Desert or Cape Cod or West Virginia hilltops for wind farms threaten to derail the coalition of people supporting green technology. There will be problems with the technologies, and if history is any guide, their adoption will almost certainly go slower than the optimists expect.47 In a democracy like the United States, with its messy, human processes, perhaps Alvin Weinberg provides the best advice for would-be green-tech revolutionaries at the end of his sad elegy for the nuclear industry of his day. “It never occurred to us that we not only had to engineer a nuclear system that was sound technically, but also one that was ‘right’ politically,” he concluded.48
chapter 24
The Five-Cent Turbine and the Siren Call of the Breakthrough
THE 33M-VS was not just another wind turbine; it was the answer to the problem of fossil fuels and it was the would-be foundation of the next great American technology company.
Designed between 1989 and 1993 by Kenetech, the world’s largest wind turbine maker, along with a consortium of electric utilities, it was touted as a technological breakthrough. The “marriage of aerospace and microelectronics