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“I’m not saying renewables are rubbish,” said Dan Quiggin, 31. “I’m just saying they need to sit behind the main priority, which is demand reduction. Like most things in capitalist society, ours is predominantly a consumption problem.” Outside the Methodist church in Cowley Road, Oxford, the group Demand Energy Equality are teaching walk-ups how to make DIY solar panels.
“It’s free,” Max Wakefield, Quiggin’s colleague and friend, calls to passersby. It’s obvious that it’s free: no workshop with this many beards ever charges anybody. There’s never an empty space, though – who doesn’t, given the chance, want a go with a soldering iron?
I’m surprised how easy it is: a plate of polycarbonate, a sheet of EVA, 36 cells (30p each from the solar-cells seconds suppliers, like broken biscuits, a market you never knew existed till you needed it), some tabbing wire, a flux pen. I could make you a solar panel now, if you wanted. I wouldn’t know how to plug it in to your phone, but then, I didn’t stay for the afternoon.
Solar is having its, ahem, moment in the sun. It’s price per watt has fallen 99% over 25 years; it has reached grid parity across the OECD (not in Britain, but we lag on everything. Apart from lofts where we don’t lag nearly enough). But Quiggin’s point is that it isn’t that easy, and to prove it, he has a panel he’s made earlier, plugged into an iPod and a little amp. It’s 36 cells, which is 18 volts: and it cuts in and out with the power of the sun. It took me a while to notice that, because they were playing trance music, which often gets louder and falls quiet for creative reasons.
Quiggin recently finished a PhD on energy systems, supply and demand in Britain. “Whilst energy is abstract and intangible, it’s very difficult to reduce demand. You have to make it tangible. You have to get your hands dirty to really know what energy is.”
Jade Neville, 25, is about to start a job at the Real Farming Trust. “The issue we have with energy is the same as the issue we have with farming: people are disconnected from what they’re using. We don’t have a connection with nature, we don’t have a connection with the amount of energy that goes into the products that we use.”
Inside the church, Rena Melendez runs SESI, a food and household refill business where people reuse old packaging, which she estimates has saved 20,000 plastic bottles from going in to recycling, in the eight years they’ve been running.
The priorities for energy, in ascending order, are renewables, efficiency, demand reduction. The truism is that they get less sexy as they get more important, and it is almost impossible to enthuse anybody about demand reduction. But what’s so sexy about landfill anyway? What’s so enjoyable and modern about binning plastics? I wonder whether the appeal of the status quo has been overstated.
It’s possible for renewable energy to meet this country’s energy needs. The effect solar has on usage has been shown already by the solar schools project, which reduced energy consumption way beyond the schools themselves, in parents’ and even neighbours’ houses, energy becoming tangible by osmosis.
“I wish people would stop using the phrase climate change,” Wakefield said. “It’s a climate crisis.” I see what he means: “climate change” has started to sound like “puberty”, a seismic but nevertheless inevitable thing that sensible people will navigate without making a fuss. Yet isn’t it a fine line, between articulating the seriousness, and making it sound so serious that it’s hopeless?
Lilia Patterson is a green campaigner who has worked in the Middle East, researching how solar power could be implemented. Her father was an engineer, working on solar from a technical point of view.
“How do you balance your national grid? In Wales, they have electric mountain, they’re using a lake to balance the voltage. It’s dammed, so it goes up and down according to demand. Do you know how these things work?” Nope. But I know how to make a solar panel. In a few months, if I were so minded, I could go to Bristol and see the panel on a solar tree, a Demand Energy Equality art project in Millennium Square. And if the sun were shining, I could charge my phone. Electricity storage and what I’d do if it were night, we’ll have to discuss another time.
Anyone interested in building a solar charger of their own can visit one of the regular Demand Energy Equality workshops in Bristol or London.
