The Grid

I have been hearing about solar roof's in Japan, and now see, we have them coming up in California. I have been thinking about solar roofing for years as the natural evolution of what human beings have been doing with housing as civilisation advances.
click here to see article featuring the 'Governator'.
Think of how much the human home resembles different artifacts of the natural world- on an abstract or unconscious level. Pillars are like the trunks of trees (if you doubt this, consider that trunks in a forest are said to hold up the "canopy" or the "ceiling" of the forest, and in ancient Egypt and Rome, artisans modeled their pillars with leaf and floral molding as a reflection of the functional and aesthetic similarity to their natural antecedent- the trunk). ' Carpets' of grass are like the carpets in our houses (again in terms of their aesthetic form as well as their function). Windows and doorways would be like the breaks and spaces in the forest, and the dappled canopy much like windowing permits a comfortable filtering of illumination. In a way we have been designing less perfect dwellings then the bird have inhabited since time immemorial.

What are leaves but tiny, super efficient solar panels distributing energy perfectly, wasting not a mole of it's inexhaustible resource, but feeding it to the tree, and then when the leaf dies, creating rich soil from it's own body. One of humanity's goals then is to now learn from nature how to conserve.

As a practical matter, it would seem to me that the only way for this to really work well is to get these houses all plugged in to the/an electric grid, along with wind turbine electricity generators. Otherwise, you have a situation in which individuals will have to store their energy in batteries- a bad idea for a lot of reasons- one of which, you are still wasting a lot of energy that way, and you then have to replace the battery periodically and dispose of the old one. Naturally a grid system would require capacitors and batteries but not nearly the agrigate number which would be required by so many disconnected households.

One obstacle to plugging these into the grid so that the solar energy is "communised" (so to speak) is our very economic philosophy. There is a farmer who wanted to plug his turbine into the grid and receive some kind of reimbursement for the negative electric reading on his meter every month and was bared from doing it. He was the first to want to do something like that so there had been no law conceived about it. Mind you- they made a law for the situation quickly enouph. Capitalist notions of competition on one hand, and "greed is good" on another have a usefulness- but I suspect we are reaching the ceiling of their usefulness. (concerning this farmer- I hope I can find the citation later and include it. I heard about it on NPR perhaps in 07 or so)

The exigencies of the age we live in will require a new economy and a more mature and less primitive economic philosophy- at least a less simplistic one. I'm sure that capitalism in some form will and has always existed in most places- and some degree of it is a good and a necessary thing. I just have outgrown the idea that capitalism is as self-maintaining and benign as we have been led to believe. I think like any social order it requires rigor, scrutiny, many eyes, transparency and (most imprtanly) limitations upon it's powers and scope in order to do it's best job.

I frequently hear capitalisms proponents intimating that "the economy" will solve this or that problem on it's own. It seems there is an underlying faith that the less we interfere witht he natural course of capitalism and with it's native gears and cogs of competition and self-interest, the better it works and the more problems it automatically resolves. It would seem capitalism is a vertually maintnenence-free philosophy- an unqualified good for every situation it encounters. Tell me though for example, what is the market 'automatically' doing about world hunger? Um, making it worse infact as far as I am able to tell. What was 'the market' automatically doing about environmental exploitation or species extinction? I would say it's fair to point out that before the EPA came along to limit the powers and scope of capitalism, the market fiddled while Rome burned on that issue as well such that if aligator hand-bags were fashionable, and supply dwindled, the preciousness of aligator skin was increased in tandem with scarcity pooring gasoline on the problems the species faced.

My point is not that capitalism is evil- just that it has limitations and that it also isn't designed to to have an automatically beneficial effect upon everything it touches. It's a good Pavlovian way to motivate a person away from discomfort and towards pleasure. It's needful. We need more than 'greed is good' that however to build a goodly and sustainable society which will shelter, rear and serve our descendents at least as well as it has done for us.