Grand Technologies for Grand Energy Challenges: A Futuristic Scenario for Solar Energy in the Age of Information

Vahid Moosavi (svm@arch.ethz.ch) Abstract Instead of getting involved in either extremes of dispute around climate change as one of our grand challenges, we opened the space of potential policy responses from a systemic view and showed why current climate change mitigation policies are not successful as planned. Further, as a potential futuristic scenario, neither a projection nor a prediction, we showed how solar based energy systems are different than other current energy systems and how we can conceive of them as grand technologies which dissolve the whole landscape of energy management in the age of information.
Introduction
When, humankind learned how to release the stored sun-energy in woods into the fire and light, it was a great achievement for human society, but no one could imagine about deforestation at that time. Or when, people started using whale oil for lighting, no one could think of overfishing and the scarcity of the whales, but the economic force was more powerful than natural ecology of whales. The outcome was unimaginable. “…Whaling was the fifth-largest industry in the United States; in 1853 alone, 8,000 whales were slaughtered for whale oil shipped to light lamps around the world1” But thanks to human intellect, steam engine coupled by coal and oil, changed the whole story and it opened up a new era of industrialization, urbanization and mobilization. However, when genius Edison illuminated the New York City with a soft and continuous light, produced without gas or flame just by transmitting electricity and light bulbs, no one could imagine what unintended consequences of this new technology are as we see these days as ever-growing demand of electricity, generated mainly by fossil fuels (Figure 1).

1 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/nyregion/03towns.html?_r=0

Figure 1- Electricity generation by different fuels (IEA 2009) So, the point is that during the history, always successful technologies come with a grand proposal to dissolve the grand challenges, but later it turns out that they had some side effects, which is unknown in advance. However, it seems so far human society has been improving its conditions and every time a new technology arrives, it is better than its predecessor. Just as a big picture figure 2 shows how different indicators such as life expectancy, GDP per capita and population size have been increasing during the age of industrialization.

Figure 2- World population (P), GDP per capita (A), life expectancy (LE), and CO2 emissions from fossil fuels in the Age of Industrialization2. But nevertheless as we can see alongside these desirable trends, there are some undesirable consequences. As figure 2 shows there is a very strong correlation between CO2 emissions with other desirable indicators. For sure, we should say these are all the results of industrialization, good and bad. Therefore, we are again facing a new challenge and the right question is how to deal with this problem in an appropriate way.

2 Image from : http://www.masterresource.org/2010/04/population-consumption-carbon-emissions-and-human-well- being-in-the-age-of-industrialization-part-ii-a-reality-check-of-the-neo-malthusian-worldview/ Before discussing the main grand challenge of our days, climate change and global warming, it is worth to remind ourselves about the issue of “natural resource depletion” which took us for 25 years to realize that actually those kinds of pessimistic concerns about 2YK did not happen as for example it was predicted by “limits to growth” (Meadows, et al. 1972). Thanks to advancements in recent technologies such as “shale gas” and “fracturing”, or possibilities in biofuels (Huber & Dale, 2009), it turned out that the issue of limited resources is not a purely geological limit, but more depending on the demand and the price of energy (McCabe 1998) as well as other possible technologies for energy production. In other words, it was a technological problem and in fact, it is our intellectual capabilities that define the limit of our technologies (Hovestadt et. al., forthcoming and Simon, 1998).
However, this time the challenge of global warming and climate change seems to be a serious issue. In fact, despite remarkable achievements, industrial age has had a serious unintended consequence, which is mainly due to over use of fossil-based energy systems. During the process of energy conversion (fuel combustion), fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas emit CO2 and other greenhouse gases which in principle are necessary part of our environment, but after certain level of atmospheric concentration of these gases, the whole eco-system will change and it causes an increase of the temperature in earth, w

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