The inevitable wisdom of going solar

Guest Post from ClubOrlov

By Eerik Wissenz, GoSol.org for ClubOrlov

Technological progress, to qualify as such, has to increase the efficiency of exploiting natural resources. This is quite intuitive if we keep in mind that the ultimate purpose of consuming resources in a modern economy is to enable us to consume more resources, producing the sine qua non of modern politics and economics, economic growth. So, if we consume resources more efficiently, we make it possible to consume even more resources, even more efficiently. There is no paradox here. We have chosen to build an economy which not only places no limits to consuming whatever resources are available, but considers doing so a desirable and noble undertaking. Making an economy more efficient simply creates more of it, exactly as we might expect.

Could we have chosen differently? Is a different choice available to us now—one that doesn’t result in us shivering in the dark while slowly starving? Many of us would prefer to think that a different choice is possible, and wish that a sufficient number of us would choose to build a different economy. But what is needed is not strength in numbers but coherent action that addresses the factors that place limits on sustainable ways of living.

If some number of us do decide to make an effort to build a sustainable society, we would first need to build the tools for doing so: appropriate technology. Note that developing such technology is unlikely to automatically result in a widespread public embrace of it simply because it is a moral choice. On the other hand, if we don’t develop this technology ahead of time, then all of our talk about sustainability will be for nothing.

Lastly, if we develop technologies that will, in the foreseeable future, provide people with a superior alternative to what is available to them, and if we sow the seeds of this technology in enough places, then it is possible that its adoption will be a matter of following the path of least resistance, and make the adoption of the entire sustainable toolkit much easier, greatly accelerating positive change.

Sustainable toolkit

Solar concentrators are a technology that can make a sustainable local economy possible. Other important parts of this technology suite include:

Permaculture, forestry and forest gardening

Aquaculture and water management

Making shelter and clothes out of locally sourced materials.

These form the core of the sustainable toolset. Everything in the core toolset is, by definition, necessary. But there are important interdependencies between the elements. We need:

Water and heat to cook and preserve food

Food and energy to transport and build things

Thermal and mechanical energy to transform materials

a heat source to maintain comfortable temperatures.

In deploying this toolkit, at any given time and in any given place, we encounter limiting factors, both in the development of the techniques required and in the local understanding of them. The increasing pressures on land and water resources in many parts of the world are frequent topics of discussion, but there is one particular resource that will be particularly scarce: thermal energy. At present, in the economically developed nations of the world, we practically bathe in almost free energy generated by burning fossil fuels. The entire fossil fuel system hinges on the availability of transport fuels—jet fuel, gasoline and diesel—and these are all made from crude oil. Conventional crude oil production peaked in 2005; unconventional oil production (including oil from shale and tar sands) is expected to peak within this decade. Disruption of the global fossil fuel supply chains already caries non-negligible risk. We should also expect that most industrial alternative forms of energy, which rely on fossil fuels for their manufacture and maintenance, will be priced out of many markets.

In order to understand where we might be heading, let’s imagine, for a moment, that all fossil fuels are suddenly gone. What will we have left? Some photovoltaic panels will provide illumination and power communications systems. A few windmills will pump water and grind grain (the two niche applications in which wind-power is most successful). A few waterwheels will be used to saw lumber and to run spinning jennies and looms. Pack and draft animals will once again be used for transportation on land, and sailboats, rowboats and barges on water. But the most widely used form of energy—thermal energy—will come down to just one easily accessible source: firewood. Easily accessible—but not for long, because the use of firewood to make up for the shortfall in energy caused by the demise of fossil fuels will lead to very rapid deforestation. This, then, is the problem that is simply screaming for a technological solution.

What sustainable energy systems do we currently have? In theory, forests can be used to supply timber and firewood in a sustainable manner, but, again, a stressed, energy-deprived population is exceedingly unlikely to practice sustainable forestry. Beyond that, all of the energy installations we have are at an industrial scale and/or tied into existing industrial infrastructure, which runs on fossil fuels.

There is really just one sustainable energy system: you. Your body is capable of converting food (with help from a bit of sunlight) into thermal and mechanical energy. The precise technical term for it is endosomatic energy. Your body is largely self-maintaining and self-reproducing (if you are a woman and there is a man to help). Keeping you fed sustinably is also possible: sustainable food systems have been successfully developed to very mature states and have been shown to be deployable globally.

Endosomatic energy is all that most animals need to survive. But we humans, at some early point in our evolution as a species, have discovered fire, and have been using it to warm ourselves and to cook our food, making us crucially rely on exosomatic energy: energy that comes from outside of our bodies. And it is exosomatic energy that turns out to be the major limiting factor, because at the moment we consume far more energy in fuel than in food. Even if we learn to do our best to produce food using endosomatic energy, and to conserve our body heat with good shelter and clothes, we would still need a lot of exosomatic energy in order to prepare that food and to make that shelter and clothes. Most of the energy we will require to build local economies will be in the form of heat. It is this exosomatic energy that will be the limiting factor, because its default source—firewood—is, it bears repeating, insufficient.

Industrial effort

It is possible to imagine the development of sustainable energy technology as an extension of industrial activity—although complete reliance on industrial production is most likely going to be insufficient, if only because of high transportation costs from the factories to the poorer regions of the world, which are most at risk of deforestation. At present, all of the energy technology that is being touted as “sustainable” (wind farms, photovoltaic installations, large-scale solar power plants, biofuels from sugar cane and algae) crucially depend on the industrial manufacturing base for their production and on the global transport network for sourcing components and for final shipping to the installation site.

Furthermore, almost all of the focus has been on developing technologies that produce electricity to support the electric grid. All of them are required to be compatible with other capital-intensive industrial infrastructure projects, which feature high energy and materials inputs and low labor inputs and are expected to produce a value-added form of energy—electricity for those able to pay market rates for it—thus maximizing profit for the investor.

Thus, profit maximization does not necessarily point the way forward to solving global problems. Profitability of an energy source is maximized by it generating the greatest positive cash flow in the shortest period of time. Thus, if a greater profit can be had right now in developing a technology that is only relevant for 10% of people, and only for the next 2-3 years, that’s the direction in which the financial system will direct capital. The supposed sustainability of such a venture is seldom more than a public relations talking point. Even when sustainability is considered a value in itself, that value is swiftly reinterpreted as a market value, and intense pressure is brought to bear to classify stores of energy, ecosystems in particular, as “sustainable sources,” and to draw down these stocks in the shortest period of time, generating the most profit, politics being an inconvenient but generally surmountable obstacle to doing so. If such a scheme did manage to produce a sustainable source of energy, this would be a most surprising side-effect!

Of course, industrial renewable energy sources can still play a positive role. For instance, photovoltaic panels can make it possible to get local energy systems up and running. But complete reliance on industrial renewable energy, in the hope that it will displace some of the fossil fuels, runs straight into Jevons’ paradox. It is far more likely that it will make the use of fossil fuels more efficient, thus maximizing their use. Although it is preferable to doubling down on low-quality fossil fuel sources such as shale and tar sands, it will not solve the problem.

Good bye trees

If industrial renewable energy technologies are either unaffordable or unavailable in the quantities and on the time scale required, then the default alternative, throughout the world, is to resort to burning trees to meet our cooking, heating and materials processing needs. If we consider firewood as our source of fuel for a sustainable economy, this quickly becomes problematic, because we currently consume prodigious amounts of energy. Industrialized countries are extremely unlikely to be able to swiftly reduce energy consumption to a point compatible with local wood burning. Deforestation, both historic and ongoing, provides ample evidence that it isn’t feasible to implement sustainable forestry management on a global scale as a replacement for fossil energy; the vast reductions in energy use are simply not achievable.

To put this into perspective, a person can grow all the food they need on a small piece of land, but growing all the wood they’d need for cooking, food preservation, constructing shelter, etc., requires a far greater land area. To make matters worse, wood-burning is far more destructive of soil fertility than growing food. When we grow, eat and excrete plant matter, we can compost the result and return the nutrients back to the soil. If we are careful and clever, we can keep fed and build soil fertility. But when we harvest and burn plants most of those nutrients go up in smoke. What’s more, a tree can provide a significant amount of food, in the form of fruits, nuts and sap, with no harm done to the tree, which continues to provide many essential ecosystem services, both above and below ground. Cutting down and burning that tree destroys a productive resource. So burning wood wastes soil nutrients and destroys long term biological systems.

With extremely careful selective branch cutting (coppicing) it’s possible to burn trees sustainably, but very few societies have managed to do so over the long term. Felling a tree today provides an immediate economic benefit, and so there is always pressure to do so, especially in times of crisis. Afghanistan was once known for its splendid orchards; a few decades of war later—not any more!

In spite of much evidence from the developing world and from the past, the unsustainability of using firewood as a source of energy tends to be disregarded. Partly this is because wood-burning isn’t as significant today, because we currently burn fossil fuels. But the examples of what will happen are there for all to see: Haiti, with its dependence on wood burning, has been massively deforested, and now has just 2% forest cover. Meanwhile, the Dominican Republic, which shares with Haiti the island of Hispaniola, still has good forest cover, but this is only because the Dominicans can still afford to cook with propane. Once propane is no longer available and wood remains as the only alternative, there is no reason to assume that a massive deforestation process will be avoided, especially if we consider that fossil fuel delivery shortfalls and price spikes are unlikely to promote the stability that is required for meticulous forest management.

As fossil fuels rise in price, we should expect that firewood will begin to be substituted for them. This process has been well under way ever since crude oil left behind the good old days when it was just $20 a barrel. Growing trees for fuel is a major cause of deforestation already, yet it only represents a small part of our fuel consumption, because fossil fuels are still relatively easy to get, even after a swift 500% increase in the price of crude oil. Once the extraction rate rate of fossil fuels starts to decline, there will be a major risk of a massive, global deforestation event. Faced with hardship and with no other choice, people turn to burning trees.

People want energy

It is vitally important to understand that exosomatic energy is what enables the production of the four core tools of the sustainable toolkit: permaculture and forest gardening, aquaculture and water management, shelter and clothes. A significant investment of exosomatic energy is required to build and maintain a system encompassing these four elements—much greater than the amount of endosomatic food energy.

Look at the budget of anyone doing even a modest sustainability project: the part of it spent on food is a relatively small slice of the initial investment. Yes, there have been tribes that managed to survive even in the high Arctic with an igloo for shelter, fir parkas for clothing, and a tallow lamp for heat and illumination. But most people alive today exhibit a near-universal cultural preference for investing in significantly greater infrastructure, for style and comfort, and a shortage of fossil fuels is unlikely to stop them. Ecological infrastructure projects, of the sort people in industrialized, developed countries generally find acceptable, require a large investment in the transport of materials, materials processing, and even heavy machinery. Taking money as a proxy for energy, it becomes clear that it is exosomatic energy that is the limiting factor.

If we look non-industrial countries, where cultural preferences allow for much humbler adaptations, we still find that an initial energy investment the limiting factor. Although there the amount of exosomatic energy can be much smaller than for an ecological project in a rich country, it still tends to be more than what’s available. In countries both rich and poor, finance is a barrier. Working and saving to accumulate the capital to buy land and build a sustainable place is in practice often impossible: population pressures within the capitalist system continuously push wages down to subsistence level while the accumulation of wealth at the top bids up the price of land.

Trade goods

After the sustainable toolkit is put together and starts functioning, it continues to require external inputs, in the form of tools, supplies, and, of course, exosomatic energy, to meet its maintenance needs. Complete self-sufficiency is either impossible or intolerable for the vast majority of people. Even a small amount of trade is extremely valuable. Any sort of trade requires the local production of trade goods of some sort, and the production of trade goods requires exosomatic energy. An ecovillage can be as self-sufficient in food, shelter, clothing and entertainment as it wishes to be, but it must still produce trade goods, and remain competitive in trade or barter, in order to maintain its infrastructure over the long term.

If a sustainability project is designed to produce competitively priced trade goods, then this neatly removes the financial barrier to establishing it. The sustainability project becomes bankable: suddenly it has a viable business plan, can take out a construction loan and pay it back by selling trade goods. It is much easier to justify investing one’s own time and resources, and to find partners and investors, if the proposed project looks profitable. Food production, on a small scale, is very difficult to make profitable. However, even a small piece of land can be used to make a community largely self-sufficient in food, and to also produce trade goods. The production of trade goods can greatly accelerate the construction of sustainable systems, but the exosomatic energy for that production has to come from somewhere. Since the default mode of production of exosomatic energy in absence of fossil fuels—burning firewood—is both of limited scope and environmentally destructive, another solution is needed.

Although it can be argued that we may be able to sustain ourselves with very little wood burning, perhaps even do so sustainably, this becomes completely impossible as soon as we try to use firewood to fuel production of trade goods. As soon as people are able to turn a profit, they tend to want to turn more of it, and the pressure to cut and burn trees becomes relentless. Even if a conscious effort is made to avoid deforestation, the inevitable “norm creep” achieves the same result over time without anyone noticing. History is full of examples of entire provinces becoming deforested thanks to the production of plaster, or bronze, after which point production there collapsed due to lack of firewood. The availability of transport fuels makes the problem worse. In India, for instance, firewood is burnt to fire bricks, but the brick-makers don’t suddenly shut down their operations as soon as their immediate surroundings are stripped of trees; they simply pay to have their firewood delivered from elsewhere.

Localism vs. Urbanism

The above discussion assumes that a sustainable mode of living is achievable on a small piece of land, with relatively short resource cycles. For instance, the relatively closed cycle of

soil➝food➝storage➝mouth➝compost➝soil

can be constructed on less than a few hundred square meters. (In contrast, in industrialized countries the average piece of food travels over a thousand kilometres, and the nutrients it contains are eventually flushed into the ocean.) Similarly, most of the building materials needed to construct shelter can be grown on site, harvested sustainably, transported a few hundred meters to the building site and worked using hand tools. Once the shelter is demolished is replaced, the woody matter of which was made can dug into the soil to improve its water retention, where it will slowly decay, returning the nutrients to the soil.

Can such closed cycles be constructed in an urban setting? Urban population densities for the world’s large cities vary between 10k and 42k residents per square kilometre. This translates to 100 m² per person at the bottom of the range, and only 23 m² per person at the top. In neither case is this amount of land sufficient to both provide housing and workspace, and to also grow food, building materials, materials to make clothing, and materials to make trade goods. Large, dense cities are unsustainable.

One often hears the claim that large-scale urbanism is now inevitable because the world is now over 50% urbanized. People assume that passing the 50% threshold marks some sort of point of no return: now the trend must run its course until the planet is 100% urbanized. This claim is so lacking in critical thinking that it’s not worthwhile to consider it further, beyond briefly noting that it happens to be false. A far more reasonable assumption is that peak urban density will have roughly coincided with peak fossil fuels production, and as the latter heads down, so will the former.

Sustainability requires localism, localism requires access to land, and access to land requires a rural environment; therefore, sustainability requires a rural environment. Alternatives along the lines of “urban sustainability” are essentially science-fiction-based fantasies that flout the laws of physics. The ecological vision of industrial urbanism is basically a version of contemporary fossil fuel-powered society envisioned by General Motors, but instead powered by magic high-tech green technology and managed by all-knowing computers gazing down from the cloud.

Decentralized energy production

Centralized, urban societies require centralized, highly concentrated energy sources: natural gas pipelines, the electric grid, paved roads and plentiful transportation fuels. It is significantly less efficient to power a centralized society using decentralized energy sources: its advantages of scale swiftly vanish. On the other hand, powering a decentralized society with decentralized energy sources is not a problem. In the case of energy systems and energy sources, opposites don’t attract. The local level of energy consumption must match the size of the local energy source, in each location.

The highly concentrated energy of fossil fuels allows for more efficient production in energy hubs: over half of the worlds GDP is produced in just three global industrial mega-centres. Fossil fuels also enable the distribution of products from these energy hubs. It is inefficient to decentralize fossil fuel-powered production by distributing it across the landscape; it is much more cost-effective to produce both fuels and goods in a few central locations and to transport the final product, as the weight of the final product is always less than its inputs—often orders of magnitude less. The energy expended in making a product adds nothing to its transport weight.

With a decentralized, diffuse, intermittent energy source the situation is reversed: gathering this energy in a few central locations is a costly, lossy process. It becomes more efficient to produce and consume products locally, and to transport finished products from the decentralized locations where they are made to relatively local destinations—from local villages to the nearby market town, and back out to the villages. With decentralized energy sources, economic advantage shifts to local production, because it minimizes transport and energy requirements.

Once the advantage shifts to local producers, only those products that cannot be produced on location, for technical reasons, would trade competitively when shipped from a central production facility, simply because there would be no local competition for them. But the range of such hyper-sophisticated products—ones that are truly necessary for survival—is rather small, and although centralized production facilities would have a monopol, their ability to impose monopoly pricing would be hampered by the lack of a dependence relationship. Consequently, the consolidation of such central producers would pose less of a problem than it does in a highly centralized society.

The shift from urbanized, centralized modes of production to local, decentralized ones need not be a matter of engineering or planning; the population will spontaneously maximize its advantages by following the shifts in the energy landscape. Centralized production would still be possible with decentralized energy sources; it would just be less competitive. As the flow of fossil fuels dwindles, artisans outside the cities will find that they can produce products at a lower cost and with greater benefit to themselves and the surrounding community than the workers toiling in large factories in the cities. In turn, these workers will realize that a better lifestyle can be had elsewhere, and gradually diffuse out of the cities. Thus, localized energy production can not only solve the problem of finance—by producing trade goods—but also the problem of recruitment—by drawing workers out of the cities and into the countryside.

The urban myth

One of the central myths of modern society is that the process of urbanization (and slumification—favelas are currently the fastest-growing form of human habitation) is due to city life being “more attractive” and farming becoming “more efficient.” Fewer people want to or need to inhabit the wider landscape, the story goes, and so they are moving to the cities. And this, some say, is simply a good thing. But the real cause of this rapid urbanization is that economic activity is moving to the city—because localized, artisanal production cannot compete with centralized manufacturing. This is a temporary dislocation made possible by burning fossil fuels.

At present, the larger landscape is regarded as little more than a source of raw materials for manufacturing, and food to feed the populations of the cities. Both mining and farming are being carried out using fossil fuel-powered machinery, with minimal labor inputs. But previously food production was just one activity out of many that kept people employed in the village or the small town. Artisans and tradespeople did many other things, and played important roles in the local economy. But even the peasants, many of whom didn’t own any land, did not farm as their primary activity, but had all sorts of other activities, from basket weaving to hunting and fishing to construction.

But as more and more factory-produced products and fossil fuel-driven machinery becomes available, less and less economic activity continues to make sense the countryside, and there are fewer and fewer reasons for a person to reside there. And so people move to the city, because they are unable to find local employment. If they do manage to hang on and get by through subsistence farming, their inability to produce trade goods, which are needed to maintain a reasonable quality of life, forces their children to move to the city instead.

What makes factory products cheaper than products of artisanal labor is not the inherently greater efficiency of factories. Rather, it is their ability to use energy/labor arbitrage: fossil fuel energy can, for now, be used to displace human labor and generate a profit as a result. But once the cost of fossil fuel energy increases beyond a certain point, distribution costs will limit the advantage of centrally produced goods, and it will suddenly become more “efficient” to build a dresser locally, out of locally sourced hardwood, instead of assembling a mass-produced one, made of plastic-veneered fibreboard and held together with plastic thumbscrews. But until that happens, centralized production and distribution remains far more lucrative and attracts more capital than local producers (who also miss out on the advantage of selling a global brand).

Of course, there is a bit more to the story than just the energy/labor arbitrage possibilities opened up by cheap fossil fuels. The history of modern society is full of clever ploys to make conditions favourable to centralized production (subsidies, tariffs, regulation schemes, infrastructure projects) and tactics that make people dependent on centrally produced goods (kicking people off their land, promoting debt, planned obsolescence, throwing up obstacles to growing your own food, or making it straight-up illegal). These ploys and tactics enable vast accumulations of capital in the hands of a few industrial magnates, they drive urbanization and produce large middle-class urban elites that help unify and centralize countries, and they make it possible to build up an industrial base that is necessary for a powerful military-industrial complex that can project force over wide geographic areas. However, these ploys and tactics can succeed only while there is enough to power the centralized system.

The fashionable idea that most people move from the country to the city because they are attracted to the bright lights rings hollow. If we look at the actual history of urbanization, it has always been resisted and deplored by the peasants and the local artisans, who were transformed from self-respecting, creative generalists into worn-out, stressed-out wage slaves. Whereas before they could take care of themselves and, though often poor in terms of money, enjoyed plentiful leisure time and unfettered access to the bounty, beauty and pleasantness of nature, they are now doomed to spending all of their waking time executing repetitive tasks in an oppressive, polluted environment.

A bad plan

From the previous discussion, it follows that:

“Sustainable,” green industrial centralization on the urban model is not feasible

Local, rural production of trade goods will be necessary without fossil fuels

Such local production is unlikely be sustainable if based on burning firewood

If these arguments are sound, then we must ask ourselves one central question:

What is the alternative to wood burning?

Answer: Both thermal and mechanical energy needed for local production can be supplied using solar concentrators.

These can, in theory, be manufactured centrally and distributed locally on a massive scale, but there are quite a few problems with this plan:

It depends on the global transportation system, which runs on oil

It would be capital-intensive and deployment would be impossible in areas that don’t have access to capital and are not subsidized by the rich countries

The unpredictable curve of oil depletion may disrupt the global economy at any moment, disrupting supply chains and making it impossible to continue the project

Once the supply chains are disrupted, the flow of centrally manufactured spare parts needed to maintain centrally manufactured installations will stop, putting all of the solar concentrators out of commission over time

This is not to say that such industrially manufactured solar concentrators are completely useless. But they are unlikely to succeed in the time frame we need, and will be susceptible to disruption for all the same reasons as the other industrial green technologies.

A good plan

A much better plan is to provide the plans and the know-how to build and maintain solar concentrators out of locally sourced materials, with the energy supplied by these same solar concentrators, training local people to build and maintain solar concentrators in the process. The question then becomes one of bootstrapping a solar concentrator self-replicating process, standing back and watching it run.

Before getting into the details of how this can be done, let us briefly look at the impacts and knock-on effects of this technology. Solar concentrators can be used to:

Recycle a majority of metals, aluminium in particular

Safely incinerate plastics

Fire pottery, bricks and tile (such as the reflective tiles used to build more solar concentrators)

Provide heat for food processing and preservation

Make glass

Make charcoal, for energy and for building soil

Provide hot water for baths and laundries

Heat buildings, greenhouses and fish ponds

Provide electricity for illumination, communications and power tools

Power bakeries, breweries, distilleries, machine shops, etc.

Recycled aluminium is a key material, since it can be used to make aluminium/glass mirrors with relatively little processing. Thus, given scrap aluminium and sand, solar concentrators can make more solar concentrators. This requires a relatively unsophisticated technological base—orders of magnitude less sophisticated than the present set of industrial green technologies, many of which require rare earth minerals, composite materials, clean-room techniques, computer control and so on.

Computer control is a bit of a green-tech fetish, but no electronics is needed to run a solar concentrator. Manual operation takes far less labor than tending a wood stove. Yes, pushing a button to turn on automatic sun tracking may be somewhat more convenient than paying a local boy to sit there and periodically turn a handle—but only until the electronic unit gets zapped by lightning and the nearest replacement turns out to be months away by sea.

Systemic effects

Here are some basic implications of this plan:

This system would be highly resilient. It can be constructed and maintained using locally sourced materials and scrap. If superior materials can be imported then that’s fine, but the point is that it doesn’t have to depend on global supply chains or global transport.

This system could arrive and reproduce itself in a region that is severed from the global economy. In turn, this means that such a system can be developed globally with few limiting factors. It can spread virally, without international government coordination and the inevitable bureaucratic foot-dragging and special interest boondoggling. A critical mass of awareness and know-how is all that is needed.

Let’s face it, firewood will still be used as a fuel source. But solar concentrators create a counterweight, a negative feed back loop, to deforestation. Without access to cheap transportation fuels, the costs of gathering firewood beyond a certain radius exceed the costs of switching to solar. That is, if both solar and firewood are available initially, there comes a time when it becomes less costly to just wait for the sun, and that time comes before each and every tree has been cut down and burned.

Solar concentrators can provide a highly resilient base, on top of which all sorts of globally interconnected, fragile and impermanent technologies can be built. Here’s a good example: a solar concentrator can power an Internet café with a satellite uplink. If the satellites fail and the Internet goes dark, the same solar concentrator can power shortwave radios and old 1200-baud modems to send text messages around the planet. But the point is that here fragile technologies are built on top of a resilient one. Normally it’s the other way around: if there is no fuel (fragile) for the pick-up truck then the firewood (resilient) can’t be delivered and you freeze. If the electric grid (fragile) fails, then you well-water (resilient) can’t be pumped. This is a crucial difference.

When one of our huge, complicated, sophisticated systems goes down today, (as it is prone to do) people can’t function. People can die as a result of even a short disruption in the energy supply. Prolonged disruptions, which are made increasingly likely by depleting fossil fuel reserves, would trigger problems with food, water and sanitation. Clearly, dependence on sophisticated, fragile systems is a huge systemic risk and in such times the few that have some other means to provide for themselves, whether by design or by chance, would be counted among the fortunate few.

Access to local solar thermal energy would considerably reduce systemic risk, both economic and ecological, by providing energy with very little ecological impact, and by fostering local energy independence. Such a technological system would also serve as a primary tool for preventing deforestation, as well as for dealing with the effects of climate change that may already be locked in. First, solar energy does not generate CO₂ and, in absence of fossil fuels, becomes competitive with the only remaining energy source that does (firewood). Second, when environmental change makes a certain location uninhabitable, be it by parching it or by putting it underwater, solar concentrators can be set up in new locations that are decoupled from the global infrastructure of roads, pipelines and electric transmission lines.

This system of self-replicating solar concentrators does not yet exist in a mature form, but there is at present no impediment to its rapid development. Solar concentrators that provide high heat at low material cost already exist. The bulk of a solar concentrator, the structure itself, which comprises the majority of the total material, can be made of bamboo or wood if metal is scarce or expensive relative to labor, making it possible to literally “grow” it on site. The knowledge to locally source the materials to make more solar concentrators already exists.

The entire technological system need not exist in order for us to begin. As long as global supply chains exist, they can be used to source high quality manufactured components. What’s important is that if global supply chains collapse, erode, or simply become too expensive for some economies, the project can continue with only locally sourced materials. Dependence is not the same as use: we can make use of global supply chains, but we only come to depend on them if we leave ourselves without any options in case they fail.

The process has already started. At GoSol.org, a variety of demonstration projects and initiatives have already shown the effectiveness of this approach. The work is ongoing, and as our technology improves and our installed base expands, a time will come when every sustainable community will feature a solar concentrator as its centrepiece.