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The report of the Warburton inquiry, commissioned by Australia’s government as a hatchet job on the renewable electricity industry, has unintentionally demonstrated that renewables pose a real alternative to coal-fired electricity and are undermining the viability of incumbent generators.
But can renewable energy provide a solution to the problem of decarbonising the economy? To understand the problems and the process, it is worth thinking about the “paperless office”.
The paperless office started out as a visionary idea. In turn, it became a marketing slogan and a target of derision. Now, after four decades, it is finally becoming a reality.
The development of minicomputers and word processors in the 1970s led some farsighted thinkers to realise that computers would eventually have the same impact on office work, based on text, as they had already had on numerical tasks like payroll calculation. The phrase “the paperless office” came to prominence in a 1975 Businessweek article, The Office of the Future.
Twenty years later as personal computers became ubiquitous, the cost of storage plummeted, and email became generally available, it seemed that the time was right.
But supporters of paper started to push back, with arguments that are now familiar. Paper has marvellous properties that can’t be reproduced by any computer system. It is light, accessible anywhere, and (at least in its acid-free archival form) lasts forever. It can be read in any light, and annotated with ease. Improved technology, it was claimed, would lead to more paper, not less.
And for quite a while the critics were right. Paper consumption rose steadily, fuelled in part by glossy reports on the office of the future. The computer on every desk turned out to have a printer attached.
The key point in the reaction was the publication of The Myth of the Paperless Office by Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper, which crystallised the perception that the paperless office had failed. One wit suggested that “the paperless toilet will arrive before the paperless office”.
As it turned out, however, by the time The Myth of the Paperless Office was published, paper consumption had already plateaued. With improved monitors and better software, people become more comfortable with reading on screen and office processes adapted to electronic communication.
The latest data, for 2011, shows that paper consumption per person has fallen to the lowest level on record, going back to 1965. There is every reason to expect further declines.
Renewable energy has followed a similar trajectory, though a little more slowly. Like the paperless office, the vision of a renewable energy system first emerged in the 1970s, amid environmental concerns raised by the oil shock of the 1970s.
The dream soon faded as oil prices fell and coal re-emerged as a preferred fuel. Even with rapid technological progress, alternatives like wind power and solar photovoltaics weren’t remotely competitive with existing technology.
In the last few years, however, the cost of solar cells has fallen below the $1/watt price widely considered to represent “grid parity”, and wind power is also cost-competitive. As with the paperless office, however, new objections have emerged.
The Breakthrough Institute has focused on so-called “soft costs”, such as marketing and permitting, which now account for the majority of installation costs in the US. Other critics have focused on the intermittent nature of renewable energy, comparing it to the steady flow of power from “baseload” sources such as coal and nuclear. Electricity distributors have complained about the problems arising when households with solar panels are net generators of electricity rather than consumers.
As with the paperless office, these complaints reflect the fact that a shift to renewables is not simply a matter of unplugging coal-fired power plants and replacing them with renewables. Existing electricity supply systems and pricing structures are designed for existing sources.
Most notably, the constant supply “baseload” characteristic of coal and nuclear is, in economic terms, a disadvantage, since just as much power is generated late at night when it is not needed as during the peak hours of demand. Pricing structures such as off-peak rates have been designed to sell this unwanted power cheaply. Very different pricing structures are needed for a system relying largely on renewables, and these structures are still evolving.
There are significant problems still to be resolved, most notably technological and financial challenges regarding energy storage. But, as with the paper-based office, fossil-fuel based energy systems are facing extinction. In the end, if we are to stabilise the global climate we have no choice.
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