Kudos to Ken for sharing Alliance's stories

This issue of the La Conner Weekly News will be Ken Stern’s next-to-last issue. The Skagit Valley Clean Energy Alliance, and I personally, would like to thank Ken for this space, and for his encouragement and enthusiasm about this column during the last two years.

The story of energy technology started millions of years ago, when homo erectus learned how to sail. We know this because fossils have been found on islands in modern Indonesia that can’t be reached without a sail or motor. A million years ago, humans learned how to make a fire. About 6,000 years ago, we invented the wheel.

Since then, energy technology developments have been faster, but usually with long periods of stagnation during which people seem to forget that change can happen.

Major sources of energy have included solar energy, wood, running water, wind, coal, whale and plant oils and petroleum. In the late 1870s, the electric light bulb stimulated the development of electric power.

We started to produce electricity by using moving water to run generators at places like Niagara Falls. Subsequent generators have been powered by wood, coal, petroleum, natural gas, uranium and underground heat from volcanoes. Today, we use quantum physics to convert sunlight directly to electricity, via photovoltaic panels.

We can light streets without whale oil. We can cook without wood. We don’t have to store natural ice for refrigeration. Transportation has moved from sailboats, horses and sled dogs, through steam carts, steamboats and giant sailing ships, to internal combustion and electric vehicles; even airplanes. Televisions and computers couldn’t exist without electricity.

The changes from one energy source or use technology to another are called “energy transitions.”

The energy crises of 1973 and 1979 stimulated R&D on energy technologies. The phenomenal progress from that R&D has accelerated energy transitions. In 1972, photovoltaic panels cost $120 a watt. Now, they’re around $0.20 and falling. We’ve created quantum effect-based magnets so powerful that individual windmills can produce 10 megawatts of electricity. Lithium batteries, invented in 1991, originally cost over $1 million per stored kilowatt-hour (kWh). Just 35 years later, they’re approaching $100 per kWh.

Major energy transitions take decades. They always cause fear and controversy. People probably fought against fire when it was new.

King Kalakaua brought electric lights to his palace in Hawaii in 1886. The White House didn’t get electric lights until 1891 because President Harrison feared them. In 1909, Belgian gas lamplighters rioted over the loss of jobs to electric lights.

Fluorescent lights were invented around 1930. The next major change was to LEDs, 70 years later. That transition is ongoing. In 2000, the union representing workers who replace traffic lights in Florida fought the change from incandescent to LED lighting. Longer-lasting LEDs reduced the labor for that job.

Major changes in practically all energy source and use technologies are accelerating. Changes like this haven’t all happened at the same time since the industrial revolution started in the 1770s. Lithium batteries have revitalized electric cars, which stagnated in 1930. We’re shifting from fossil fuels to solar, wind and batteries because we’ve had success with R&D, not because of a conspiracy against fossil fuels.

Fighting against solar power and utility-scale batteries is like fighting against electric lights, or automobiles. People fought both.