O Sole Mio

There's no indie cred for this kind of thing, but I've been an alternate energy goob since the '70s, when we really could have started working on alternate energy and had it make a difference by now. NOT THAT I'M BITTER. Solar energy in particular has always been a big deal to me. It's also always been too expensive.

I'm going to take the scenic route through my economic theory before we get back to solar power.

I've always found Mr. Smith's invisible hand of capitalism suspect, the idea that people acting in a consistently self-interested manner creates a suitable economic equilibrium. This is a pretty idea from 10,000 feet. On the ground, there's a hella lot of misery before equilibrium makes the scene.

In general, economists and mathematicians seem to treat economics as some great, mysterious ocean where we bob like tubs. That's bogus. The economy is what we all do. We can make the economy do whatever we want it to. There is no invisible hand. There is predictable consequence for our choices.

This is not a top 1% thing. This is everybody. Do we want to create more jobs? Then those of us who own businesses can choose to forgo some profit and hire more people. Do we want to slow down inflation? Then we all agree to charge each other less for our services.

This is simplistic, but not very. We just need a common vision and our decisions from there will cause everything else to fall into place. It's happening now. Right now, our common vision is that each person optimally amasses resources for him or herself. This is called "enlightened self-interest" and assumes that we'll all choose to be greedy.

However, we can also choose not to be greedy. We can decide to amass fewer resources as individuals, and give more to other individuals or community purposes. I'm not talking about charity, I'm talking about mutually finding another base assumption besides, "Everyone will be greedy because that's how people are."

Many people would cheat and act greedy anyway, sure, but many people also steal. We can have common behavioral standards which many people break, and retain a functional society.

Yet a number of people draw a weird, crooked line that says, "We believe theft is bad, even though many people steal anyway; however, we won't believe greed is bad, because everybody's greedy, right? Right?"

I'm not making an airtight argument, I know, but stay with me. My point is that we make the economy every day; the economy does not make us. To think differently is to allow yourself to be controlled.

Okay: solar power.

To run your house on solar energy currently costs about 2-5 times as much as buying electricity through your local utility (solarbuzz.com). The argument has been that photovoltaic (PV) cells are too expensive, and it requires open, unclouded sky, and you pay all the infrastructure costs yourself, and a bunch of other reasons. Therefore, common sense economics tell us that solar is nice, but no one will do it because it's too expensive.

If you slogged through my opinion on economics, you can tell I think this is horsefeces. Not because I think we can all magically decide to charge less for solar. Rather, because we've put 250 years and unknown trillions of R&D dollars into making fossil fuels work, whereas we've been working on solar energy seriously for maybe 20 years, funded mainly by government grants. We decided to make fossil fuels more important.

Solar power is not inherently more expensive. Solar power is more expensive because our common vision has valued fossil fuels over solar power. We choose to make solar power more expensive.

Just in this decade though, a small number of us (mostly science-types and venture capitalists) are choosing to find ways to not make solar power more expensive. Newly discovered technology is showing up that makes the whole deal cheaper. Two examples:

• Prism Solar Technologies is making holographic solar collectors to feed PV cell. No big mirror banks, just a rainbow array of holographs that steers light into PV cells. Non-technical explanation here.
• Spheral Solar makes "denim-power," flexible solar cells that look like denim, and use recycled silicon -- silicon shortages become irrelevant.

As more people decide to care about solar power, it will become cheaper. In the next 10 years, solar could replace fossil fuel energy. It won't. We're in for mixed use for a long time. But if we found a common vision, we could be green by 2015. I know that's crazy fast, but it rhymes. Sounded like a nice slogan for somebody, maybe. "Green by 2015!"

It would be very, very hard to do, but not impossible. It's just that we're going to choose to not do it.