putting renewables on the map

Yesterday Cape Town quietly switched on its first set of solar-powered traffic lights, to avoid traffic chaos during the power outages that are expected to be a regular feature of life in South Africa as electricity supply and demand are balanced on a knife edge. Not that one intersection will make a huge difference, but it's a start.

[Update on 3 Nov 2007: With the number of people who Google the terms solar +traffic +lights or some such combination, this post is one of my most-viewed. So I'm going to give in to the temptation to venture an opinion on this topic, which is simply that I see no reason for municipalities to "solarize" traffic signals - at least, not to set up each intersection as a standalone self-powered set of lights. If the objective is to ensure that they keep working when the main grid is down, then all that is needed is to replace bulbs with LED versions and add batteries and a charger fed from the grid. It's way too clumsy - and expensive - to have solar panels at individual locations. Rather increase the proportion of energy feeding into the grid from renewable energy sources. Or, if you really want to use "pure" renewable energy to run the lights, create a local mini-grid so that a number of intersections can share power from a renewable source that might be located on (or in) a nearby building. Then the batteries or other storage mechanism (hydrogen fuel cell?) can also be located in a vandal-free location. Maybe this should be Cape Town's next stage in this pilot programme.]

[Update on 7 Nov 2007: And now they want to stick solar panels on top of traffic lights all over the place. I still don't see the point, unless it's just an expensive consciousness-raising campaign.]

[Update on 17 Feb 2008: Tokyo puts another spin on renewable power for street lights. Maybe this could start to be meaningful if these fed excess energy back to the grid.]

Meanwhile, Eskom is trying to invest R2 billion in solar water heating for household and business use as part of its R10 billion demand-side management programme. The target is to reduce consumption by 3000 MW by 2012, but there are a couple of challenges. The first is to increase capacity for the manufacturing, installation and maintenance of the technology. The second is to address the administrative aspects of rollout programmes so that suppliers and contractors aren't swamped with red tape, and get paid for the work they do.

What this suggests is that large-scale rollout requires an enabling environment, and I would venture to say that this is the big challenge for most strategies to reduce energy demand or to implement low-carbon technologies. Arguments for nuclear power are mainly based on the idea that renewable energy can't be scaled up to industrial quantities*; but very few countries, if any, have put in place all the pieces needed to reduce energy demand and encourage installation of renewable energy technologies. Legislation, subsidies, building design standards, planning processes and other parts of the puzzle are generally geared for the technologies that have been in place up to now, so they are hardly encouraging adoption of innovative processes, infrastructure or technologies.

Individual efforts around the world have resulted in a wide range of proven and emerging technologies, but we are far from mass adoption of clean energy strategies, partly because very little effort is going into market development. Yesterday I mentioned the Clinton approach to developing markets for new technologies, but we're still just tinkering around the edges of the picture, trying to see how big it is and where the boundaries are.

The Chairman and CEO of General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt, says in this podcast on Energy 2.0 that if he were king for a day, he would try to enact progressive policies to make his corporate work easier. And while he is including nuclear energy in GE's portfolio of energy technologies, he argues for diversity in energy to create innovation and growth.

Forget Energy 2.0, counsels Jeffrey Immelt -- “We never had Energy 1.0.” Unlike the health care business, he says, “we still sell some products in the energy sector that sold 25 years ago.” This relative torpor, Immelt explains, results from a lag between “market signals and time horizons,” as well as the “societal expectation that energy is a God-given right” – which makes reasonable pricing difficult – and the absence of rational energy policies worldwide.

Again, the need for an enabling environment.

*Here's an example of how thinking outside the box can improve the large-scale viability of solar energy.