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Powering the Future
AUGUST 2005
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By Michael
Parfit
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Photographs by Sarah
Leen
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| Where on
Earth can our energy-hungry society turn to replace oil,
coal, and natural gas? |
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Freedom!
I stand in a
cluttered room surrounded by the debris of electrical
enthusiasm: wire peelings, snippets of copper, yellow
connectors, insulated pliers. For me these are the tools
of freedom. I have just installed a dozen solar panels
on my roof, and they work. A meter shows that 1,285
watts of power are blasting straight from the sun into
my system, charging my batteries, cooling my
refrigerator, humming through my computer, liberating my
life.
The euphoria of energy freedom is
addictive. Don't get me wrong; I love fossil fuels. I
live on an island that happens to have no utilities, but
otherwise my wife and I have a normal American life. We
don't want propane refrigerators, kerosene lamps, or
composting toilets. We want a lot of electrical outlets
and a cappuccino maker. But when I turn on those panels,
wow!
Maybe that's because for me, as for most
Americans, one energy crisis or another has shadowed
most of the past three decades. From the OPEC crunch of
the 1970s to the skyrocketing cost of oil and gasoline
today, the world's concern over energy has haunted
presidential speeches, congressional campaigns, disaster
books, and my own sense of well-being with the same kind
of gnawing unease that characterized the Cold War.
As National Geographic reported in
June
2004, oil, no longer
cheap, may soon decline. Instability where most oil is
found, from the Persian Gulf to Nigeria to Venezuela,
makes this lifeline fragile. Natural gas can be hard to
transport and is prone to shortages. We won't run out of
coal anytime soon, or the largely untapped deposits of
tar sands and oil shale. But it's clear that the carbon
dioxide spewed by coal and other fossil fuels is warming
the planet, as this magazine reported last
September.
Cutting loose from that worry is
enticing. With my new panels, nothing stands between me
and limitless energy—no foreign nation, no power
company, no carbon-emission guilt. I'm free!
Well, almost. Here comes a cloud.
Shade
steals across my panels and over my heart. The meter
shows only 120 watts. I'm going to have to start the
generator and burn some more gasoline. This isn't going
to be easy after all.
The trouble with energy
freedom is that it's addictive; when you get a little,
you want a lot. In microcosm I'm like people in
government, industry, and private life all over the
world, who have tasted a bit of this curious and
compelling kind of liberty and are determined to find
more.
Some experts think this pursuit is even
more important than the war on terrorism. "Terrorism
doesn't threaten the viability of the heart of our
high-technology lifestyle," says Martin Hoffert, a
professor of physics at New York University. "But energy
really does."
Energy conservation can stave off
the day of reckoning, but in the end you can't conserve
what you don't have. So Hoffert and others have no
doubt: It's time to step up the search for the next
great fuel for the hungry engine of humankind.
Is
there such a fuel? The short answer is no. Experts say
it like a mantra: "There is no silver bullet." Though a
few true believers claim that only vast conspiracies or
lack of funds stand between us and endless energy from
the vacuum of space or the core of the Earth, the truth
is that there's no single great new fuel waiting in the
heart of an equation or at the end of a drill
bit.
Enthusiasm about hydrogen-fueled cars may
give the wrong impression. Hydrogen is not a source of
energy. It's found along with oxygen in plain old water,
but it isn't there for the taking. Hydrogen has to be
freed before it is useful, and that costs more energy
than the hydrogen gives back. These days, this energy
comes mostly from fossil fuels. No silver bullet
there.
The long answer about our next fuel is not
so grim, however. In fact, plenty of contenders for the
energy crown now held by fossil fuels are already at
hand: wind, solar, even nuclear, to name a few. But the
successor will have to be a congress, not a king.
Virtually every energy expert I met did something
unexpected: He pushed not just his own specialty but
everyone else's too.
"We're going to need
everything we can get from biomass, everything we can
get from solar, everything we can get from wind," says
Michael Pacheco, director of the National Bioenergy
Center, part of the National Renewable Energy
Laboratories (NREL) in Golden, Colorado. "And still the
question is, can we get enough?"
The big problem
is big numbers. The world uses some 320 billion
kilowatt-hours of energy a day. It's equal to about 22
bulbs burning nonstop for every person on the planet. No
wonder the sparkle is seen from space. Hoffert's team
estimates that within the next century humanity could
use three times that much. Fossil fuels have met the
growing demand because they pack millions of years of
the sun's energy into a compact form, but we will not
find their like again.
Fired up by my taste of
energy freedom, I went looking for technologies that can
address those numbers. "If you have a big problem, you
must give a big answer," says a genial energy guru named
Hermann Scheer, a member of the German parliament.
"Otherwise people don't believe."
The answers are
out there. But they all require one more thing of us
humans who huddle around the fossil fuel fire: We're
going to have to make a big leap—toward a different kind
of world.
SOLAR: FREE ENERGY, AT A
PRICE
On a cloudy day near the city of
Leipzig in the former East Germany, I walked across a
field of fresh grass, past a pond where wild swans fed.
The field was also sown with 33,500 photovoltaic panels,
planted in rows like silver flowers all turned sunward,
undulating gently across the contours of the land. It's
one of the largest solar arrays ever. When the sun
emerges, the field produces up to five megawatts of
power, and it averages enough for 1,800
homes.
Nearby are gaping pits where coal was
mined for generations to feed power plants and
factories. The skies used to be brown with smoke and
acrid with sulfur. Now the mines are being turned into
lakes, and power that once came from coal is made in a
furnace 93 million miles (150 million kilometers)
away.
Solar electric systems catch energy
directly from the sun—no fire, no emissions. Some labs
and companies are trying out the grown-up version of a
child's magnifying glass: giant mirrored bowls or
troughs to concentrate the sun's rays, producing heat
that can drive a generator. But for now, sun power
mostly means solar cells.
The idea is simple:
Sunlight falling on a layer of semiconductor jostles
electrons, creating a current. Yet the cost of the
cells, once astronomical, is still high. My modest
system cost over $15,000, about $10 a watt of capacity,
including batteries to store power for when the sun
doesn't shine.
Like most things electronic, solar
power has been getting cheaper. "Thirty years ago it was
cost-effective on satellites," says Daniel Shugar,
president of PowerLight Corporation, a fast-growing
California company that has built solar installations
for clients including Toyota and Target. "Today it can
be cost-effective for powering houses and businesses,"
at least where utility power is expensive or
unavailable. Tomorrow, he says, it will make sense for
almost everyone.
Martin Roscheisen, CEO of a
company called Nanosolar, sees that future in a set of
red-topped vials, filled with tiny particles of
semiconductor. "I put some of that on my finger, and it
disappeared right into my skin," he says. He won't say
exactly what the particles are, but the "nano" in the
company name is a hint: They are less than a hundred
nanometers across—about the size of a virus, and so
small they slip right through skin.
Roscheisen
believes those particles promise a low-cost way to
create solar cells. Instead of making the cells from
slabs of silicon, his company will paint the particles
onto a foil-like material, where they will self-assemble
to create a semiconductor surface. The result: a
flexible solar-cell material 50 times thinner than
today's solar panels. Roscheisen hopes to sell it in
sheets, for about 50 cents a watt.
"Fifty cents a
watt is kind of the holy grail," says David Pearce,
president and CEO of Miasolé, one of many other
companies working on "thin-film" solar cells. At that
price solar could compete with utilities and might take
off. If prices continued to drop, solar cells might
change the whole idea of energy by making it cheap and
easy for individuals to gather for themselves. That's
what techies call a "disruptive
technology."
"Automobiles were disruptive to the
horse and buggy business," Dan Shugar says. "PCs were
disruptive to the typewriter industry. We believe solar
electric systems will be disruptive to the energy
industry."
Yet price isn't the only hurdle solar
faces. There are the small matters of clouds and
darkness, which call for better ways of storing energy
than the bulky lead-acid batteries in my system. But
even if those hurdles are overcome, can solar really
make the big energy we need?
With solar now
providing less than one percent of the world's energy,
that would take "a massive (but not insurmountable)
scale-up," NYU's Hoffert and his colleagues said in an
article in Science. At present levels of
efficiency, it would take about 10,000 square miles
(30,000 square kilometers) of solar panels—an area
bigger than Vermont—to satisfy all of the United States'
electricity needs. But the land requirement sounds more
daunting than it is: Open country wouldn't have to be
covered. All those panels could fit on less than a
quarter of the roof and pavement space in cities and
suburbs.
WIND: FEAST OR
FAMINE
Wind, ultimately driven by sun-warmed
air, is just another way of collecting solar energy, but
it works on cloudy days. One afternoon I stood in a
field near Denmark's west coast under a sky so dark and
heavy it would have put my own solar panels into a coma.
But right above me clean power was being cranked out by
the megawatt. A blade longer than an airplane wing
turned slowly in a strong south breeze. It was a wind
turbine.
The turbine's lazy sweep was misleading.
Each time one of the three 130-foot (40-meter) blades
swung past, it hissed as it sliced the air. Tip speed
can be well over 100 miles (160 kilometers) an hour.
This single tower was capable of producing two
megawatts, almost half the entire output of the Leipzig
solar farm.
In Denmark, turning blades are always
on the horizon, in small or large groups, like spokes of
wheels rolling toward a strange new world. Denmark's
total installed wind power is now more than 3,000
megawatts—about 20 percent of the nation's electrical
needs. All over Europe generous incentives designed to
reduce carbon emissions and wean economies from oil and
coal have led to a wind boom. The continent leads the
world in wind power, with almost 35,000 megawatts,
equivalent to 35 large coal-fired power plants. North
America, even though it has huge potential for wind
energy, remains a distant second, with just over 7,000
megawatts. With the exception of hydroelectric
power—which has been driving machines for centuries but
has little room to grow in developed countries—wind is
currently the biggest success story in renewable
energy.
"When I started in 1987, I spent a lot of
time sitting in farmers' houses until midnight talking
to the neighbors, just selling one turbine," says Hans
Buus. He's director of project development for a Danish
energy company called Elsam. "I would not have been able
to imagine the level it is today."
He means not
only the number of turbines but also their sheer size.
In Germany I saw a fiberglass-and-steel prototype that
stands 600 feet (200 meters) tall, has blades 200 feet
(60 meters) long, and can generate five megawatts. It's
not just a monument to engineering but also an effort to
overcome some new obstacles to wind power
development.
One is aesthetic. England's Lake
District is a spectacular landscape of bracken-clad
hills and secluded valleys, mostly protected as a
national park. But on a ridge just outside the park,
though not outside the magnificence, 27 towers are
planned, each as big as the two-megawatt machine in
Denmark. Many locals are protesting. "This is a
high-quality landscape," says one. "They shouldn't be
putting those things in here."
Danes seem to like
turbines more than the British, perhaps because many
Danish turbines belong to cooperatives of local
residents. It's harder to say "not in my backyard" if
the thing in your backyard helps pay for your house. But
environmental opposition is not the only trouble facing
wind development. Across Europe many of the windiest
sites are already occupied. So the five-megawatt German
machine is designed to help take wind power away from
the scenery and out to abundant new sites at
sea.
Many coastlines have broad areas of shallow
continental shelf where the wind blows more steadily
than on land and where, as one wind expert puts it, "the
seagulls don't vote." (Real voters, however, sometimes
still object to the sight of towers on the horizon.) It
costs more to build and maintain turbines offshore than
on land, but an underwater foundation for a
five-megawatt tower is cheaper per megawatt than a
smaller foundation. Hence the German giant.
There
are other challenges. Like sailboats, wind turbines can
be becalmed for days. To keep the grid humming, other
sources, such as coal-fired power plants, have to stand
ready to take up the slack. But when a strong wind dumps
power into the grid, the other generators have to be
turned down, and plants that burn fuel are not quickly
adjustable. A wind-power bonanza can become a glut.
Denmark, for example, is sometimes forced to unload
power at uneconomic rates to neighbors like Norway and
Germany.
What's needed for wind as well as solar
is a way to store a large energy surplus. Technology
already exists to turn it into fuels such as hydrogen or
ethanol or harness it to compress air or spin flywheels,
banking energy that can later churn out electricity. But
most systems are still decades from becoming
economically feasible.
On the plus side, both
wind and solar can provide what's called distributed
energy: They can make power on a small scale near the
user. You can't have a private coal plant, but you can
have your own windmill, with batteries for calm days.
The more houses or communities make their own wind
power, the smaller and cheaper central power plants and
transmission lines can be.
In Europe's big push
toward wind power, the turbines keep growing. But in
Flagstaff, Arizona, Southwest Windpower makes turbines
with blades you can pick up in one hand. The company has
sold about 60,000 of the little turbines, most of them
for off-grid homes, sailboats, and remote sites like
lighthouses and weather stations. At 400 watts apiece
they can't power more than a few lights.
But
David Calley, Southwest's president, whose father built
his first wind turbine out of washing machine parts, is
testing a new product he calls an energy appliance. It
will stand on a tower as tall as a telephone pole,
produce up to two kilowatts in a moderate wind, and come
with all the electronics needed to plug it into the
house.
Many U.S. utilities are required to pay
for power that individuals put back into the grid, so
anyone in a relatively breezy place could pop up the
energy appliance in the yard, use the power when it's
needed, and feed it back into the grid when it's not.
Except for the heavy loads of heating and
air-conditioning, this setup could reduce a home's
annual power bill to near zero. If, as Calley hopes, he
can ultimately sell the energy appliance for under
$3,000, it would pay for itself with energy savings
within a few years.
Somewhere in this mix of the
grand and the personal, there may be big numbers in wind
too.
BIOMASS: FARMING YOUR
FUEL
In Germany, driving from the giant wind
turbine near Hamburg to Berlin, I regularly got an odd
whiff: the sort-of-appetizing scent of fast food. It was
a puzzle until a tanker truck passed, emblazoned with
the word "biodiesel." The scent was of burning vegetable
oil. Germany uses about 450 million gallons (1,700
million liters) of biodiesel a year, about 3 percent of
its total diesel consumption.
Biomass energy has
ancient roots. The logs in your fire are biomass. But
today biomass means ethanol, biogas, and biodiesel—fuels
as easy to burn as oil or gas, but made from plants.
These technologies are proven. Ethanol produced from
corn goes into gasoline blends in the U.S.; ethanol from
sugarcane provides 50 percent of automobile fuel in
Brazil. In the U.S. and other nations, biodiesel from
vegetable oil is burned, pure or mixed with regular
diesel, in unmodified engines. "Biofuels are the easiest
fuels to slot into the existing fuel system," says
Michael Pacheco, the National Bioenergy Center
director.
What limits biomass is land.
Photosynthesis, the process that captures the sun's
energy in plants, is far less efficient per square foot
than solar panels, so catching energy in plants gobbles
up even more land. Estimates suggest that powering all
the world's vehicles with biofuels would mean doubling
the amount of land devoted to farming.
At the
National Bioenergy Center, scientists are trying to make
fuel-farming more efficient. Today's biomass fuels are
based on plant starches, oils, and sugars, but the
center is testing organisms that can digest woody
cellulose, abundant in plants, so that it too could
yield liquid fuel. More productive fuel crops could help
as well.
One is switchgrass, a plant native to
North America's prairies that grows faster and needs
less fertilizer than corn, the source of most ethanol
fuel made in the U.S. It also thrives on land unfit for
other crops and does double duty as a source of animal
food, further reducing the pressure on
farmland.
"Preliminary results look promising,"
says Thomas Foust, the center's technology manager. "If
you increase automobile efficiency to the level of a
hybrid and go with the switchgrass crop mix, you could
meet two-thirds of the U.S. transportation fuel demand
with no additional land."
But technically
possible doesn't mean politically feasible. From corn to
sugarcane, all crops have their own lobbyists. "We're
looking down a lot of alleys," says Pacheco. "And every
alley has its own vested interest group. Frankly, one of
the biggest challenges with biomass is that there are so
many options."
NUCLEAR: STILL A
CONTENDER
Nuclear fission appeared to lead
the race as an energy alternative decades ago, as
countries began building reactors. Worldwide, about 440
plants now generate 16 percent of the planet's electric
power, and some countries have gone heavily nuclear.
France, for instance, gets 78 percent of its electricity
from fission.
The allure is clear: abundant
power, no carbon dioxide emissions, no blots on the
landscape except an occasional containment dome and
cooling tower. But along with its familiar woes—the
accidents at Three Mile Island and Chornobyl, poor
economics compared with fossil fuel plants, and the
challenge of radioactive waste disposal—nuclear power is
far from renewable. The readily available uranium fuel
won't last much more than 50 years.
Yet
enthusiasm is reviving. China, facing a shortage of
electric power, has started to build new reactors at a
brisk pace—one or two a year. In the U.S., where some
hydrogen-car boosters see nuclear plants as a good
source of energy for making hydrogen from water, Vice
President Dick Cheney has called for "a fresh look" at
nuclear. And Japan, which lacks its own oil, gas, and
coal, continues to encourage a fission program. Yumi
Akimoto, a Japanese elder statesman of nuclear
chemistry, saw the flash of the bomb at Hiroshima as a
boy yet describes nuclear fission as "the pillar of the
next century."
In the town of Rokkasho at the
northernmost tip of Honshu Island, Japan is working to
get around the limits of the uranium supply. Inside a
new 20-billion-dollar complex, workers wear pale blue
work suits and an air of patient haste. I looked in on
cylindrical centrifuges for enriching uranium and a pool
partly filled with rods of spent nuclear fuel, cooling.
Spent fuel is rich in plutonium and leftover
uranium—valuable nuclear material that the plant is
designed to salvage. It will "reprocess" the spent fuel
into a mixture of enriched uranium and plutonium called
MOX, for mixed oxide fuel. MOX can be burned in some
modern reactors and could stretch the fuel supply for
decades or more.
Reprocessing plants in other
countries also turn spent fuel into MOX. But those
plants originally made plutonium for nuclear weapons, so
the Japanese like to say that theirs, due to start up in
2007, is the first such plant built entirely for
peaceful use. To assure the world that it will stay that
way, the Rokkasho complex includes a building for
inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency,
the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, who will make
certain that none of the plutonium is diverted for
weapons.
That doesn't satisfy nuclear energy
opponents. Opposition has mounted in Japan after fatal
accidents at the country's nuclear plants, including one
that killed two workers and exposed others to radiation.
Shortly after my visit to Rokkasho, about a hundred
protesters marched outside the plant in a
blizzard.
A bigger controversy would greet what
some nuclear proponents think is a crucial next step: a
move to breeder reactors. Breeders can make more fuel
than they consume, in the form of plutonium that can be
extracted by reprocessing the spent fuel. But
experimental breeder reactors have proved to be
temperamental, and a full-scale breeder program could be
an arms-control nightmare because of all the plutonium
it would put in circulation.
Akimoto, for one,
believes that society has to get comfortable with fuel
reprocessing if it wants to count on nuclear energy. He
spoke to me through an interpreter, but to emphasize
this point he jumped into English: "If we are going to
accept nuclear power, we have to accept the total
system. Sometimes we want to get the first crop of fruit
but forget how to grow the trees."
FUSION:
THE FIRE SOME TIME
Fusion is the gaudiest of
hopes, the fire of the stars in the human hearth.
Produced when two atoms fuse into one, fusion energy
could satisfy huge chunks of future demand. The fuel
would last millennia. Fusion would produce no long-lived
radioactive waste and nothing for terrorists or
governments to turn into weapons. It also requires some
of the most complex machinery on Earth.
A few
scientists have claimed that cold fusion, which promises
energy from a simple jar instead of a high-tech
crucible, might work. The verdict so far: No such luck.
Hot fusion is more likely to succeed, but it will be a
decades-long quest costing billions of
dollars.
Hot fusion is tough because the fuel—a
kind of hydrogen—has to be heated to a hundred million
degrees Celsius or so before the atoms start fusing. At
those temperatures the hydrogen forms a roiling, unruly
vapor of electrically charged particles, called plasma.
"Plasma is the most common state of matter in the
universe," says one physicist, "but it's also the most
chaotic and the least easily controlled." Creating and
containing plasma is so challenging that no fusion
experiment has yet returned more than 65 percent of the
energy it took to start the reaction.
Now
scientists in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. are refining
the process, learning better ways to control plasma and
trying to push up the energy output. They hope that a
six-billion-dollar test reactor called ITER will get the
fusion bonfire blazing—what physicists call "igniting
the plasma." The next step would be a demonstration
plant to actually generate power, followed by commercial
plants in 50 years or so.
"I am 100 percent sure
we can ignite the plasma," says Jerome Pamela, the
project manager of a fusion machine called the Joint
European Torus, or JET, at Britain's Culham Science
Center. "The biggest challenge is the transition between
the plasma and the outside world." He means finding the
right materials for the lining of the ITER plasma
chamber, where they will have to withstand a bombardment
of neutrons and transfer heat to electric
generators.
At Culham I saw an experiment in a
tokamak, a device that cages plasma in a magnetic field
shaped like a doughnut—the standard design for most
fusion efforts, including ITER. The physicists sent a
huge electrical charge into the gas-filled container, a
scaled-down version of JET. It raised the temperature to
about ten million degrees Celsius, not enough to start
fusion but enough to create plasma.
The
experiment lasted a quarter of a second. A video camera
shooting 2,250 frames a second captured it. As it played
back, a faint glow blossomed in the chamber, wavered,
grew into a haze visible only on its cooling edges, and
vanished.
It was—well, disappointing. I had
expected the plasma to look like a movie shot of an
exploding automobile. This was more like a ghost in an
English paneled library.
But this phantom was
energy incarnate: the universal but elusive magic that
all our varied technologies—solar, wind, biomass,
fission, fusion, and many others large or small,
mainstream or crazy—seek to wrestle into our
service.
Taming that ghost is not just a
scientific challenge. The ITER project has been held up
by a seemingly simple problem. Since 2003 the
participating countries—including much of the developed
world—have been deadlocked over where to build the
machine. The choice has come down to two sites, one in
France and one in Japan.
As all energy experts
will tell you, this proves a well-established theory.
There's only one force tougher to manage than plasma:
politics.
Although some politicians believe the
task of developing the new energy technologies should be
left to market forces, many experts disagree. That's not
just because it's expensive to get new technology
started, but also because government can often take
risks that private enterprise won't.
"Most of the
modern technology that has been driving the U.S. economy
did not come spontaneously from market forces," NYU's
Martin Hoffert says, ticking off jet planes, satellite
communications, integrated circuits, computers. "The
Internet was supported for 20 years by the military and
for 10 more years by the National Science Foundation
before Wall Street found it."
Without a big push
from government, he says, we may be condemned to rely on
increasingly dirty fossil fuels as cleaner ones like oil
and gas run out, with dire consequences for the climate.
"If we don't have a proactive energy policy," he says,
"we'll just wind up using coal, then shale, then tar
sands, and it will be a continually diminishing return,
and eventually our civilization will collapse. But it
doesn't have to end that way. We have a
choice."
It's a matter of self-interest, says
Hermann Scheer, the German member of parliament. "I
don't appeal to the people to change their conscience,"
he said in his Berlin office, where a small model of a
wind turbine turned lazily in a window. "You can't go
around like a priest." Instead, his message is that
nurturing new forms of energy is necessary for an
environmentally and economically sound future. "There is
no alternative."
Already, change is rising from
the grass roots. In the U.S., state and local
governments are pushing alternative energies by offering
subsidies and requiring that utility companies include
renewable sources in their plans. And in Europe
financial incentives for both wind and solar energy have
broad support even though they raise electric
bills.
Alternative energy is also catching on in
parts of the developing world where it's a necessity,
not a choice. Solar power, for example, is making
inroads in African communities lacking power lines and
generators. "If you want to overcome poverty, what do
people need to focus on?" asks Germany's environment
minister, Jürgen Trittin. "They need fresh water and
they need energy. For filling the needs of remote
villages, renewable energy is highly
competitive."
In developed countries there's a
sense that alternative energy—once seen as a quaint
hippie enthusiasm—is no longer alternative culture. It's
edging into the mainstream. The excitement of energy
freedom seems contagious.
One afternoon last
year, near a village north of Munich, a small group of
townspeople and workers inaugurated a solar facility. It
would soon surpass the Leipzig field as the largest in
the world, with six megawatts of power.
About 15
people gathered on a little man-made hill beside the
solar farm and planted four cherry trees on the summit.
The mayor of the tidy nearby town brought out souvenir
bottles of schnapps. Almost everyone had a swig,
including the mayor.
Then he said he would sing
to the project's construction supervisor and a landscape
artist, both American women. The two women stood
together, grinning, with the field of solar panels
soaking up energy behind them. The German mayor
straightened his dark suit, and the other men leaned on
their shovels.
Fifty years ago, I thought, there
were still bombed-out ruins in the cities of Europe. The
Soviet Union was planning Sputnik. Texas oil was $2.82 a
barrel. At the most, we have 50 years to make the world
over again. But people change, adapt, and make crazy new
stuff work. I thought about Dan Shugar talking about
disruptive technologies. "There's a sense of
excitement," he had said. "There's a sense of urgency.
There's a sense that we cannot fail."
On the
hilltop, the mayor took a deep breath. He sang, in a
booming tenor, without missing a note or a word, the
entire song "O Sole Mio." Everyone
cheered.
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