potrero view

March 2009

Publisher’s View: Organic Energy

Steven J. Moss


Americans love technological solutions to tough problems.  Too many insects eating the crops?  Pesticides will take care of that.  Gasoline running out?  No problem, let’s use electricity for our cars!  Natural gas-powered electricity becoming environmentally costly?  Slap-up some solar panels!  

Our fascination with technology is well-earned.  Almost since the birth of the Republic, America has ridden a wave of new inventions to greater prosperity.  The cotton gin dramatically reduced the amount of farm laborers needed to harvest cotton, undermining the need for slaves.  The steam engine led to transcontinental railroads, which opened-up settlement routes from east to west, and helped create the nation.

More recently, technology has enabled us to solve vexing problems without having to alter our lifestyles.  Adoption of the catalytic converter in automobiles dramatically reduced nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, and hydrocarbon emissions, lowering health-threatening air pollution while enabling us to continue to speed along our way in our cherished cars.  

While technology can help solve problems, it brings a host of other challenges.  Highly mechanized, chemically-dependent agriculture brought us winter-time fruits and food abundance.  But it also degrades the land, destroys family farms, and threatens public health.  And reliance on laboratory-created seed strains, while enhancing yields, can create a dependency on large corporations, and prompt risks associated with catastrophic crops failures, placing all of our seeds in one basket, so to speak.  Diversity is the best defense against systematic collapse.  A given disease or natural calamity may wipe out one crop of many, but not all of them.  

Similarly, an energy strategy that focuses on replacing fossil fuels to power our centrally-structured electricity system with large-scale renewable facilities will help reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and slash polluting air and greenhouse gas emissions.  But pursuing such an approach would be expensive, concentrate the risk of failures into a handful of technologies, and maintain a status quo in which we depend on an unknown engineer typically located far away from where we live to keep the lights on.  

In the case of our food system, the antidote to an overly technological agriculture has been organic farming, in which fewer chemicals are used, and slow foods, which emphasize place-specific, labor-intensive, products.  Since not everyone can afford organic strawberries or artesian goat cheese, these alternatives supplement, rather than fully replace, large, technologically-dependent farming.  Over time, however, thoughtfully cultivated foods will hopefully occupy a greater portion of our diets.

Smart growth offers another example of this approach.  During the last century much of the United States was developed along a similar spoke and wheels model as the electricity system.  Large cities were connected to suburbs by expansive freeways, producing a fossil fuel-powered car-dependent culture that, in many places, sucked people out of densely-packed urban areas and deposited them on quarter-acre spreads.  Diversity, in the form of commercial districts populated by home-grown stores and restaurants and a greater chance of accidental mixing of different cultural and ethnic groups, was replaced by homogeneous chain stores serving segregated suburbanites.  

Over the past few decades, smart growth planners have advocated for a return to denser neighborhoods, serviced by multiple transportation options – including walking, biking, and shared taxis – and more diverse, locally-owned, shopping opportunities.  The goal is to create less energy-intensive, more reliable, human-scale and environmentally- friendly cities.      

Lessons from the food and land use movements should be applied to our electricity system.  Rather than continuing to replicate our spoke and wheels model – large capital-intensive generating clusters at the end of massive land-gobbling transmission lines – we should create structures that allow for a more diverse, localized, set of energy resources.  This system would be similar to a natural eco-system, which can accommodate a multitude of creatures that work, often unintentionally, in ways that benefit the whole.  

For example, electricity could be generated by a myriad of neighborhood-based facilities, including solar and wind.  Small biomass-fueled heat and power units could be fed with locally-produced waste, including food scraps and dog dung, thereby closing a resource-intense garbage stream that has to be trucked many miles to be disposed of.  State-of-the-art storage technologies – including in the form of ice that’s produced during the night for use in cooling during the day – and new-fangled electric car batteries, could be used to smooth supply disruptions that occur when the wind fails, or the sun doesn’t shine.  Increased adoption of conservation, energy efficiency, and voluntary curtailments would complement a diminishing role for a centralized system.  

This approach, call it “organic energy,” would require fewer expensive transmission lines marring the landscape, and depend on more job-intensive “weeding” of energy hogging devices and installation of a more neighborly energy eco-system.   Technological capital, in the form of large power plants and massive wires, would be replaced by human-scale devices and intellectual capital:  thoughtful, community-oriented designers, installers, and educators.  Railing about “those dumb bureaucrats” located far-away would be replaced by walking across the street to check on the local digester.

Ironically for a constantly changing place, Americans don’t like change.  Many of us prefer not knowing were our electricity comes from, and certainly don’t want to have to do anything more than flip a switch to access it.  This ignorance and ease comes at a cost, though.  Our existing system consolidates power into utility monopolies and capital-dependent corporations who aren’t our neighbors and don’t necessarily act in our best interests.  What’s more, our dependence on a few thick straws to suck power generated by a handful of feed stocks from one place to another prompts numerous risks, including that the straw will break, or materials to create the feed stock, such as silicates in the case of photovoltaics, will become scarce or environmentally damaging.

It’s tempting to try to solve our energy problems with billion dollar investments in nifty big science technologies.  But that’s an incomplete answer, which will lead us right back to where we started from.  Shifting to an organic energy system doesn’t provide one big solution to our problems, but it does offer a multitude of smaller, more sustainable and easily digestible, ones.

San Francisco has an opportunity to become a leader in an organic energy movement.  City policy makers are currently weighing how best to close the Potrero Power Plant’s units four, five, and six; the largest unit, three, should become unnecessary once the Trans Bay Cable is operational in 2010.  Four options are on the table:  additional transmission; the development of a new, City-owned, generating facility; repowering four, five and six to make them less dirty; and investing in an organic energy system.  A hard-look should be taken at all of them.  Perhaps it’s time, though, for San Francisco to embrace not only a slow, organic food system and smart land use planning, but a similar concept as applied to the way we produce and consume energy.

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