ALTERNATIVE ENERGY

The very notion that some sources of energy make up alternative energy demonstrates the way people impute normative values to technologies. For decades, proponents of alternative energy have done more than advocate particular technologies: They maintain that their proposed technologies are socially and morally better. These social and moral claims show that advocates regard alternative energy technologies as different in profound ways from existing conventional energy technologies.

Social Contexts

Alternative energy must be understood against a background of conventional energy. Conventional energy is not conventional just because it is in wide use. It is conventional in that it underlies the functioning and embodies the values of the conventional society. Thus coal, oil, and natural gas are conventional both because they dominate energy production in industrialized countries and, even more, because they make possible a high-consumption society and require large-scale industrial systems to extract, convert, and distribute the energy.

Advocates of alternative energy seek more than simply technological replacements for fossil fuels. They seek technological systems that will reinforce and embody alternative values, such as avoiding the exploitation of nonrenewable resources and people, favoring smaller scale production, and, most importantly, living in a manner more in concert with natural systems, in the early twenty-first century often termed living sustainably.

This normative orientation sets alternative energy advocates apart from people who simply advocate new technologies but have no interest in an alternative society. For example, consider the case of nuclear power. From World War II on, many scientists and others advocated the use of nuclear power plants to replace fossil fuels. They sought a new technology, one that was not then in widespread use. However their purpose was to reinforce, maintain, and enhance the existing social and economic system, with all the values that went with it, including a reliance on large-scale resource extraction and production. They simply thought that nuclear technology would do the job better, more cheaply, and for a longer period of time than fossil fuels. Since the 1990s, proponents of nuclear energy have also argued that it will meet what has become another more or less conventional goal, reduction in carbon emissions.

The alternative label does not necessarily apply to all people and groups who advocate renewable energy technologies, such as solar, wind, and biomass. Since the 1950s, many of those advocating such technologies have simply seen them as ways to preserve the social status quo and its values. For such advocates, photovoltaic panels (often called solar cells) are just another way of producing electricity, and biomass-derived alcohol is just another way of producing liquid fuels for internal combustion automobiles. In contrast, for others photovoltaic panels offer the means to live off the grid.

Alternative energy advocates thus make up a subset of advocates for particular energy technologies. These are advocates who seek not only different technologies but also to promote different social values to go along with them.

The Ethical Dimension

The driving ethical concern that motivates most alternative energy advocates is a particular type of environmental ethics. These people feel that the relationship of industrial society to nature is fundamentally flawed. They come out of the more radical wing of the environmental movement and the broader alternative (or appropriate or intermediate) technology movements. To understand this alternative it is therefore necessary to consider the conventional societal attitudes toward nature.

For an industrial society, nature offers a set of resources to be exploited. Material consumption and the use of natural resources that go with it are good things, ethically desirable, as well as pragmatically important. Even so, people committed to this industrial ethos recognize that resource exploitation causes certain problems. From the late 1960s onward, conventional political groups accepted the need to curb pollution from industrial production, and governments around the world passed numerous environmental laws and established new agencies to carry them out. The oil embargo of 1973 and the resulting shortages and price increases demonstrated clearly the financial and security risks of U.S. dependence on imported oil. But for conventional society, and most political elites, environmental pollution and security risks were no more than manageable problems to be solved. They did not cast doubt on the basic normative commitments to exploiting nature and maximizing material growth.

Alternative energy advocates, however, see the society-nature relationship quite differently. They believe that human beings must understand themselves as parts of ecosystems and that, therefore, human well-being depends on the health of those ecosystems. They want societal values to be more consonant with the way that ecosystems work and to regard ecosystems as things of inherent value, not just resources to be exploited. For these advocates it is not enough to put scrubbers on the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants or to reduce the emissions coming out of automobile exhausts. They seek instead a society that puts much less emphasis on high levels of material consumption, epitomized by the use of individual automobiles. Such a society would be organized very differently, with different values guiding both individual behavior and social and political institutions. These normative commitments lead them to advocate different energy technologies, ones that use renewable resources that could provide the foundation for a different type of society. However these commitments also lead them to make fine distinctions among these technologies, rejecting some, and to carry on vigorous debates about the merits of particular technologies and energy sources.

Alternative Energy Options

Against this background, it is thus possible to consider at least three proposed alternative energies: solar, hydro, and wind.

SOLAR ENERGY. Numerous technologies use sunlight directly to produce either heat or electricity. During the 1970s, ecologically oriented alternative energy advocates pushed for certain of these technologies and opposed others. In general, the more high-tech and large-scale the technology, the less such advocates liked them. They favored solar panels that use sunlight to heat air or water. Such panels consist of little more than a black metal plate, which absorbs sunlight, encased in a box with a glass cover. Air or water flows over or through the plate, heating it up, and then enters the building to supply heat or hot water.

The principles of such technologies are not complicated, although it is not easy to make panels that last a long time and function well. The fact that they are easy to understand, small, and seemingly unrelated to large industrial systems and produce no pollution in their operation appeals to the ecological ethic of alternative energy advocates.

At the other extreme are proposals for solar power satellites (SPS). The idea is to launch a satellite into a stationary earth orbit and to attach to it many acres of photovoltaic panels, semiconductor solar cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity. The satellite could produce electricity almost twenty-four hours per day and beam it back to a receiving station on earth. This is the ultimate high-tech solar technology. Alternative energy advocates are hostile to the SPS system because it both requires and supports the conventional industrial system. As a system that could produce large quantities of electricity around the clock, SPS could substitute in a straightforward way for conventional power plants, making it just another conventional technology, albeit a solar, nonpolluting one. Due mostly to cost considerations, no one has yet put such a satellite into orbit.

HYDROPOWER. Controversies over hydropower again demonstrate conflicts over values. Many environmental groups opposed the hydropower dams the federal government sponsored in the 1950s and 1960s. While their operation produced no emissions, as would a coal plant, the dams flooded large areas and dramatically changed the ecosystems in which they were located. Besides the scientifically measurable damage they did, for many environmental advocates the dams represented a problematic relationship, of dominance and exploitation, to nature.

Therefore alternative energy advocates in the 1970s talked favorably about hydropower only when referring to low-head hydro (very small dams) or what was called run-of-the-river hydro. This latter technology consists of power-generating turbines that are put directly into rivers, without any dam at all. These technologies have the virtue of being smaller in size, more modest in environmental disruption, and less like large-scale industrial production.

Assessing Values

In the 1970s advocates of alternative energy did so in the hopes of moving toward a different society. They sought energy-producing technologies that were smaller in scale and simpler to understand, promoted local self-reliance instead of global dependence, and embraced an ecocentric environmental ethic. They thought that such technologies would provide the means to live in a society that was not only environmentally more sustainable but also more socially harmonious and cooperative, with less domination, hierarchy, and inequality. The ecocentric environmental ethic was particularly important to this view. Advocates thought that human domination of nature got reproduced in the domination of people. The energy crisis of the 1970s raised public awareness of the importance of energy to every social and economic function. For this reason, alternative energy advocates regarded changes in energy technologies as central to realizing their social vision. A final argument often made for alternative energy is that it supported projects in the developing world.

Were they correct? For the most part, no. The alternative energy advocate's vision of a new society based on a new energy source embraces the notion of technological determinism: Build the right technology, and one can get the desired society. Numerous studies show that this theory is false. Society does not simply evolve from technological choices. Many different societies can come out of similar technological choices.

However one should not entirely discount the advocates' ideas about energy. Technological choices do have profound effects on society, which in turn affects future technological choices. Moreover those choices are often not easy to change. If a society invests trillions of dollars in an energy system, as the industrial countries have done, they are reluctant to make rapid changes, a phenomenon historians call path dependence or technological momentum. So energy choices are heavily value-laden, long-term choices. It is difficult, however, to know just how those choices will interact with complex societies.

The case of wind energy illustrates this. Alternative energy advocates embraced wind energy in the 1970s, believing that wind turbines could produce electricity on a small scale and enable homes or communities to be less dependent on central-station power plants and the massive electrical grid that distributes the electricity. Those advocates were critical of federal research programs on wind turbines because such programs sought to build large wind turbines that the utility industry could use instead of smaller, off-the-grid turbines. These large turbines eventually achieved economies of scale that reduced the price of wind-generated electricity toward price-competitiveness. In the early-twenty-first century the wind industry is growing rapidly, with ever-larger turbines coming online as part of the large-scale electric utility industry. This technology is certainly cleaner than coal-fired power plants, but other than that, it bears no resemblance to the social vision held by alternative energy advocates of the mid-1970s.

The history of wind energy emphasizes another point about normative values and energy. Alternative energy advocates in the 1970s thought that society was in deep crisis and that its core values were debatable. The signs seemed to be everywhere. The economy was in a long decline during the 1970s after dramatic growth and prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s. Along with economic stagnation came social problems such as rising crime rates and declines in urban fiscal health, symbolized by the fiscal crisis in New York City. The oil embargo, along with the end of the Vietnam War and other problems abroad, seemed to indicate a loss of international influence for the United States. Faced with these realities, alternative energy advocates thought they were in a position to push for a society based on radically different values.

But they clearly miscalculated. In particular, the value of economic efficiency, an important ethical norm for conventional society, one that valorizes markets, has been an important, though not the only, driver of energy technology. In the early-twenty-first century virtually all advocates of renewable energy seek ways in which such technologies can succeed in competitive markets. Alternative energy advocates of the 1970s pushed a social vision that was greatly divergent from existing society. They never produced a narrative compelling enough to lead to widespread acceptance of their normative values and consequently to their technological system. Their values rather than their technologies kept them marginalized.

FRANK N. LAIRD

SEE ALSO Alternative Technology;Automobiles;Environmental Ethics;Sierra Club.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Laird, Frank N. (2001). Solar Energy, Technology Policy, and Institutional Values. New York: Cambridge University Press. Studies federal government policy for renewable energy from 1945–1981, with an emphasis on the ways in which values drove policy debates.

Laird, Frank N. (2003). "Constructing the Future by Advocating Energy Technologies." Technology and Culture 44
(1): 27–49. Examines the values that alternative energy advocates used in their works from World War II through the energy crisis, with a heavy emphasis on the 1970s.