You want hope? I got hope for you right here, baby!

I was speaking about green technology with a technically savvy friend the other day and he made a comment that gets right to the bottom line, "Electricity is so cheap that I just don't understand how green technologies will get going. Because they are so expensive to buy, it really isn't cheaper to install and use most of these technologies in your house or business." (paraphrased)

This is where we are now. Fossil fuels are very cheap and green technologies are expensive to install. How do we get to sustainability from here? There are two dynamics that offer the hope we need.

Reason for Hope #1
First, you need to understand the idea of economies of scale. Imagine building a car from near scratch in your garage -- you have to cut and shape metal and install and assemble and whatever else to build the car you will drive. Imagine the machinery and tools you will need. Imagine that you'll have to find a store that sells you the materials to make one engine, one transmission, etc. Now think of good old Henry Ford who showed us why its a good idea to make 1000 at a time instead one just one. That's economies of scale -- as systems are built to produce large quantities of a good, it get's cheaper and cheaper to produce them.

The way things are now, economies of scale have been hard at work making the use of fossil fuels cheaper for centuries. Business has invested uncountable tons of cash in learning how to get every penny it can out of fossil fuel which is part of why they are cheaper than green.

Green engineers and business people talk about the need to get "up to scale" on green technologies, which means we need to get to a point where we are making and using green technology at the scale necessary to get the costs down to comparable levels with the fossil fuels. That has been a hard row to hoe mainly because few with lots of money have wanted to invest it in technology that competes with higher value investments. (Food for thought: if you had invested billions in oil, would you want a green revolution before you got your payback on your investment?)

Now, with the economy faltering and the political cost of our addiction to oil is starting to be recognized and with our recent price shock of $4.00+ gasoline, we have some reason to hope that this is the time when the will exists to invest sufficiently in green technology.

Reason for Hope #2
The second dynamic that gives me hope is that wind & sunlight are free and they always will be. Free. As humans, we kind of act like things are free -- if we live near a forest we get the wood, if near a river we get the water -- but they really aren't. From the you-don't-know-what-you-got-til-its-gone file: it is when those resources get used up that we start to realize they actually had value. (Scary thought: Imagine how expensive water will be in 50 years. Imagine countries at war over access to water. It will happen.)

The world is going to run out of oil some day -- most experts think we are about half way through all of the oil on the planet -- and since oil will become increasingly expensive until its gone, renewable energy will become increasingly relatively cheap.

The magic of sustainability is that these things make good economic AND environmental sense. That is where we can find hope.


p.s. If you want to make a pretty small investment in green technology in a way that can really save your family or business money, install solar powered hot water heaters to supplement or replace your electrical unit. My tech savvy friend tells me that this is one application that truly pays for itself in less than 5 years.