Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [3]
According to those who do remember a few facts from the past, either we should be whizzing around gleaming clean cities in silent cars powered solely by solar panels and micro-turbines or green tech is an engineering bust that has been given ample opportunity to prosper, but it has only succeeded in failing spectacularly.
There’s almost no institutional memory of what happened before the energy crises of the ’70s, and little of what happened technologically during that time has been documented in any serious way. Far more people know about the Enola Gay or the rise of Disneyland or the demise of the spotted owl than about any solar, wind, wave, water, or geothermal project.
Nonetheless, some remnants of the past endure. In 2007, when I typed the word “solar” into the search box of the American Memory collection on the Library of Congress Web site, I got one good search result. The link I clicked read, “Death Valley Ranch, Solar Heater, Death Valley Junction vicinity, Inyo county, CA.” Three black-and-white photos and an architectural drawing provided details.
They show a rotting wooden building on a concrete foundation maybe sixty feet long and nine feet wide, taller in the back than the front, so the front surface slopes at a 36-degree angle. It’s covered in copper metal coils that are painted black and snake back and forth. Behind it a tall cylinder, wrapped in felt made from cattle hair and what looks like aluminum foil, rises twenty feet into the air. The entire scene is surrounded by desert—cactus, rock, sand, sky. The caption reads, “The Solar Heater at Death Valley Ranch is a rare surviving example of a solar industry that thrived in Southern California before World War II and before the widespread use of natural gas.”1
Wait, what?
There was a flourishing solar industry in California before World War II? Why did people start using solar heaters? If they worked, why did they stop? (You can read all about it on pages 84–89.)
As my research continued, I found the six million windmills of the prairies, the California wave motor craze of the 1890s, the electric cars of the early 1900s, the solar home boom of mid-century, the world’s first megawatt wind turbine, which went online in 1941, the oil companies’ contribution to photovoltaics, decades-old algal biodiesel programs, and the huge solar farm of the Reagan years.
The history was long and deep, but criminally obscure. It’s understandable ; victors don’t only write the history in military battles. The popular view of technology is that the best one wins. We assume that alternatives did not exist or that, if they did, they were obviously and irreversibly inferior to the options that were chosen.
Recent historians of technology have pounded away at this way of thinking. One of the best, Imperial College of London’s David Edgerton, has a simple remedy for fixing this cognitive blind spot: Forget calling all these human-made objects and systems technology and call them “things” instead. “Thinking about the use of things, rather than of technology, connects us directly with the world we know rather than the strange world in which ‘technology’ lives,” Edgerton wrote in his superb history, The Shock of the Old.2
Furthermore, things don’t have to be radically better to beat out other things. Many technologies persist, even if they aren’t dominant. “The paper-clip is ubiquitous not because it is an earth-shatteringly important technology,” Edgerton pointed out. “There are many ways of holding paper together: pin it, staple it, punch holes and secure it with ‘Treasury tags,’ use Sellotape, put it in a ring-bind or other sort of folder, or bind it into a book. We use paper-clips so much because they are, for many uses, marginally better than the alternatives, and we know this.”3
Another