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informed opinion
Fixing Congress Will take a Webroots campaign
Collective intelligence can catalyze continuous green innovation.
By MICHAEL TOTTEN
Michael Totten is chief
adviser on climate,
water and ecosystem
services at Conservation
International. Contact
him at m.totten@
conservation.org.
Poll after poll shows that 80 percent of Americans
want their electric power to come from efficiency,
solar, wind and other renewable sources. Time
after time, Congress disregards these views. Your Congress
responds to entrenched lobbyists by allocating 80 percent
of federal energy subsidies to nuclear and fossil sources.
At the end of January, the Senate Appropriations Committee inserted $50 billion into the economic stimulus legislation for loan guarantees to resuscitate the moribund
nuclear industry. This was on top of $38 billion in loan
guarantees provided under the Energy Policy Act. The
action blatantly ignores fiscally prudent, economically
compelling, ecologically superior and national security-enhancing priorities exemplified by end-use efficiency,
wind and solar power. At a time when citizens demand
transformational actions, not incremental steps, giving any
tax dollars to nuclear power only results in decremental
backstepping. That level of funding could, for example,
build out the transmission and distribution lines that deliver windpower from the Great Plains, sufficient for half the
nation’s electrical consumption.
We should be able to motivate
a million supporters to phone their
senators on a given Monday.
As Joe Romm has detailed at climateprogress.org, new
nuclear plants will deliver electricity for 15 to 20 cents per
kilowatt-hour, or more. By comparison, wind power and
on-site combined heat and power can deliver power at
less than 5 cents per kilowatt-hour, and end-use efficiency
improvements at the equivalent of 1 cent per kilowatt-hour. If it got the same level of sustained support provided
to nuclear power over the past half century, photovoltaic
(PV) power could be at grid parity by 2015, before any
new nuclear plant can be commissioned and long before
any coal plant with carbon capture and storage (CCS) can
become commercially viable.
What’s a nation to do? Campaign. Unleash “
collective intelligence” through the Internet. The web is less than
5,000 days old, yet it’s already accessible to 70 percent of
North Americans. Within the next 5,000 days, experts
project a global Internet mesh connecting not only most
citizens, but most energy, water and resource-consuming
devices embedded with smart wireless sensors.
Wikipedia exemplifies this growth model. Within 72
50 June 2009 SOLAR TODAY
solartoday.org
months and with just half a dozen paid employees, Wikipedia grew to be 10 times larger than any other encyclopedia. It is expanded, edited and error-corrected daily. Files
are translated into 150 different languages, all managed by
80,000 volunteers.
Internet maven Clay Shirky points out that 100 million
hours have been expended to create this open source public
asset — equivalent to the time Americans spend watching
TV ads each weekend. The 1.5 billion web-connected folks
worldwide watch 1 trillion hours of TV per year — a “
cognitive surplus” equivalent to producing 10,000 unique Wikipedias. Just a tiny fraction of this viewer potential could
trigger continuous green innovation.
The Obama campaign owes its success to web-based
campaigning. The Obama web campaign team focused on
building a list of cellphone contacts who could be text-mes-saged for quick action on the local level. Renewable energy
advocates need to emulate that pattern. We should be able
to motivate a million supporters to phone their senators on
a given Monday and demand, for instance, that $50 billion
in loan guarantees for nuclear plants be stricken from the
stimulus bill or allocated for transmission lines to deliver
wind power.
Officials in Silicon Valley, like San Francisco Mayor
Gavin Newsom, totally get it. “The future is in networks,”
he is fond of saying. Citizens of all ages and walks of life can
network nearly anywhere and at any time, using a diversity
of web tools to help create valuable open source public
assets. Beyond political action, citizens can create and use
web-based technology enabling renewable energy.
For instance, web-linked citizens should be able to
monitor daily solar flows falling on their land area or
inventory the area available for installing on-site, building-integrated and ground-erected PV systems sufficient to
generate the entire city’s electricity needs. Web programs
can be used to design and implement accordion-structured
financing (i.e., a blend of municipal, utility, state, federal
and private capital) capable of making the solar PV systems
cash-positive from the day of installation or to visualize
power flow around the community in real time. Why not
analyze power flow and heat loss in specific houses to move
all buildings toward zero net energy by some target date?
Technology can also enable smart green procurement practices; coordinate plug-in vehicles with the intelligent grid;
and map and transition traffic patterns for safe biking and
walking. Efforts like these should then be showcased for
all the world to see, so others can learn how to do similar
initiatives in their own cities. ST
