Review of Solar Revolution: The Economic Transformation of the Global Energy Industry (Hardcover)

This is a clearly written short book with good news about photovoltaics by someone familiar with economics and business.Although its title is Solar Revolution, there are many aspects of solar energy in which he shows little interest and this makes the prospects for his revolution depressing. Here are the basics of the solar revolution as he sees it.

The revolution's goal is to overthrow the use of fossil fuels and nuclear power, but all without returning to any of the traditional uses of solar energy that supported mankind through history.We abandoned Mother Nature's solar teat to suckle on giant bottles of fossil fuels.Now the bottles are going dry and we want to return to solar, but it's got to come in bottles, be electric, be synthetic. Bradford's concern is the preservation and continued growth of our use of electricity.When you stop to consider that electricity is a means to an end and not an end in itself - as, for example, water or food - this is a puzzle.

Our appetites expressed through the market place are too slack for Bradford, the revolutionary.Although he claims to wish an end to subsidies, it is hard to believe him.He greatly admires Japan and Germany for their fanatical government-directed drive for photovoltaics.On September 1, 2006 Sharp electronics, a company singled out for special praise by Bradford, ran full page color picture ads in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.They boasted that their Kameyama plant "features the world's largest solar energy system".

A glance at their building shows they use no skylights.They cover every inch of roof with PV panels.The walls have few if any windows.The building looks like a giant sealed-off, above ground termite nest.

The Japanese and Bradford are confused. Skylights and windows are much better at providing light than PV panels wired to light bulbs indoors. Bradford drives on saying (page 175) that "R&D funding by industrialized countries' governments for renewable energy is crucial for market growth because it helps resolve a commonly observed market failure in economics - that is, that businesses collectively underinvest in R&D and basic science compared to what a socially optimal level would be."How does he know? Who is to decide what is socially optimal?

If you look at the fate of daylight, foot travel, bicycles, clotheslines and other traditional solar powered ways, you see that we are giving up genuine, tested effective uses of the sun at the same time as we are urged to adopt synthetic hi-tech solar energy.

Bradford gives only lip service to passive solar, about 1 page out of 200..On page 187 he writes the ominous sentence, "solar power will be increasingly big business because it will be increasingly good business". Yet traditional and passive uses of solar energy are the most cost effective

As this reader has come to expect from the MIT Press, there are a number of typos and confused mistakes such as on page 200, "1 kWh equals 3.4 Btu" and on page 187, "in 2003 some 10% of new electric generation capacity installed worldwide was non-hydro renewable".

I found the sun, but no clouds in Bradford's book.PV panels can supply megawatts of power one minute and when clouds arrive, almost nothing a few minutes later.How do utilities fill in?He glosses over this.

Bradford's study is part of a spell we have fallen under where we confuse consumption of electricity with success.

Steve Baer
Zomeworks Corporation
Albuquerque, New Mexico USA




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