Have you thought about investing in solar energy? Perhaps you want to consider solar but just haven’t had the time to sort out your options. Or perhaps you began looking into solar only to face confusing choices and unanswered questions.
You are not alone. Some homes are perfectly suited for solar energy and yet the homeowner hasn’t yet made the switch. Up until now, homeowners felt okay waiting… for “better technology” or “lower prices”, or simply avoided thinking about it at all. But now, with solar panels appearing on one neighbor’s home after another, with neighbors bragging about saving energy and money, and with rumors about the phasing out of tax credits and incentives, they (and you) might wonder: is it too late?
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A solar building at the Earthship Community, outside Taos, New Mexico. Photo by Shel Horowitz
Tragic as it is, the wipeout of Puerto Rico’s fossil-based infrastructure via Hurricane Maria creates a powerful opportunity to do it right the second time. With its vast solar and wind resources, why not make this sunny, breezy island the pilot project to develop 100% renewability in buildings for a populous island—using microgrids to build in resiliency, so if part of the system goes down, the rest still delivers power?
Of course, converting PR to renewables requires the re-invention of funding. We need mechanisms that allow a bankrupt country (technically part of the US) to front-load a huge infrastructure and then repay out of savings even when many pressing needs will be competing for those funds. The private sector won’t step up if they don’t have complete confidence that they’ll get paid back. Eco-economists, this is your moment!
But also, justice demands that a big chunk of financing come from outright grants, from the US government and various foundations and disaster relief agencies—just is occurred in storm recovery after other superstorms like Katrina, Rita, Sandy, and Irene. Even the heartless occupant of the White House, possibly the least compassionate and least competent man ever to hold that office, must not be allowed to marginalize Puerto Rico just because the population is Latina/Latino and the language is Spanish.
And wouldn’t it be cool if someone (Elon Musk perhaps?) stepped forward to fund a switch of the vehicle fleet to non-carbon-emitting sources? If the island had solar on every sunny room, it would be easy enough to supply the vehicles as well.
In some ways, converting the entire island to clean, renewable, resilient energy would actually make rebuilding cheaper and easier. Fossil fuel infrastructure is expensive, complex, and subject to environmental catastrophe. But if the money that would have gone to build tanker ports and refineries went to establishing on-island solar panel factories and training installers and to bringing in the raw materials to make millions of high-efficiency panels to deploy in every neighborhood in the Commonwealth, it’s doable.
I’m not the only and certainly not the first to say this. In addition to Musk, Time Magazine, Renewable Energy World, safe energy activist/author Harvey Wasserman, the deep-story news outlet Democracy Now, to name a few, have all said this is possible and desirable.
After a wonderful week visiting four cities in Portugal, I noticed a lot about the state of green consciousness there. Obviously, visiting only four of hundreds of communities is only a sampler, but certainly enough to share with you.
Renewable Energy
For such a sunny country, Portugal has remarkably empty rooftops. We saw a few dozen photovoltaic arrays, mostly just a two to five panels and maybe two or three larger installations. And hardly any roofs had solar hot water heaters, even though other sunny countries, like Israel, have them on practically every house and they’re far less expensive than PV, with very quick payback.
Large building with rare photovoltaic solar array, Aveiro, Portugal. Photo by Shel Horowitz.
We passed one wind farm, and a few installations with a turbine or two. I didn’t see any hydro or geothermal facilities, but we weren’t in the mountains where they’d be more likely to be built.
Trash sorting stations for metal/plastic, paper/cardboard, glass, and undifferentiated (the world looks a lot like “indifferent”) were very common in Sintra (where they were enormous and hard to miss), and somewhat more sporadically—and in smaller bins—in Lisbon, Porto, and Aveiro.
In places, litter is a problem, especially around the edges of some of the plazas and parks.
Green Food Movement
It was easy to get vegetarian options in every city we visited. All of them also have a small natural foods community with places to get organic, vegan, gluten-free, and other options. In two cities, we stayed with families, and both served us farm-fresh eggs (one from their own chickens). For every vegan cafe, there are hundreds of traditional cafes and restaurants serving almost entirely meat or fish or seafood, but there would usually be one or two vegetarian options such as an omelette or a baguette with cheese. Artisanal cheeses are commonplace (and scrumptious). Choices are much more limited for vegans.
Some of the more artisanal vineyards and port wine cellars use organic grapes—and in fact we’ve enjoyed organic Portuguese wine in the US for several years, particularly the vinho verde, young, “green” wine. In-country, we sampled a number of wines and were especially impressed by some of the reds.
Fruits were often amazingly delicious, and fresh-squeezed orange juice (sumo laranja) is available almost anywhere. Many natural food cafes and smoothie bars will also juice carrots, mangos, and other fruits and vegetables, to order.
Transit
In Lisbon and Porto, it was possible to get most places via metro, bus, antique tram, modern tram, or funicular, and both cities have at least three intercity train stations (including the one across the river from Porto in Vila Nova del Gaia). Transit was inexpensive. Taxis were also inexpensive, and tuk-tuks were available as well. Car-sharing networks exist but don’t seem heavily used.
The small communities of Aveiro and Sintra were much less well served. Most of central Aveiro is built along canals, and there are plenty of boats, but more for sightseeing than actually getting someplace. There’s a nice bike path going from town to both halves of the university. Sintra has frequent commuter rail service to Lisbon, Queluz, and several other towns along its one rail line. Sintra had local buses serving the downtown area, hop-on/hop-off service to the palaces and parks from at least three companies, and rather poor service to the outlying areas.
Open Space
Every community we visited had lots of parkland, public plazas, and nearby farms. Sintra is particularly phenomenal, with vast and magnificent nature reserves in and surrounding the town. Three of the four (Lisbon, Aveiro, and Porto) had active waterfronts with good public access, and Aveiro had public salt marshes. High marks on this one.
Several times, when someone realized we were from the US, the other person would bring up the presidential decision a few days before our visit to exit the Paris Climate Accord, signed by 193 countries including the US. This decision is seen as a disaster in Portugal. We did not meet a single person who supported it—and our president is seen as either a madman or a laughingstock. This survey was based only on those who started conversations with us, but it was consistent. Not one person who started these conversations had anything good to say about the new US regime.
Interest in eating organic and natural foods seems to be rising rapidly.
Small cars are still extremely dominant, as was true in most of Europe until about 20 years ago. There are surprisingly few motorscooters and motorcycles, and even fewer bicycles—but you see almost no large cars. I saw two Jeeps (one small, one larger) and one Hummer. Most everything else was no bigger (and often a lot smaller) than a Toyota Corolla. This may be based in economics as much as environmental awareness, or even just a reaction to the narrow streets in all the historic sections—or it may have to do with carbon consciousness. Almost all the cars have manual shifts, which is no longer true in other European cities we’ve visited in the past decade. Of the cars I happened to look into, only one (the big Jeep Wagoneer) had an automatic.
Urban architecture is primarily row houses, which are energy-efficient because they have fewer outside walls. In the few houses we entered, the appliances seemed pretty large. Portugal clearly values historic preservation, though many of the buildings are only 100-130 years old, but look centuries older.
Water-saving dual-mode toilets were very common, though there were still plenty of single-mode ones.
In short, Portugal is moving nicely along with the rest of its European Union neighbors on the full range of green issues, even though it’s one of the poorer countries in the federation.
Office of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1916. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brooklyn_Daily_Eagle2.jpg
We have a kilowatt of solar electric on the roof of our 1743 colonial farmhouse. But a few years ago when the October Blizzard knocked out our power for three days, we couldn’t tap into that solar.
If you’ve read The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, this will make sense right away. If you haven’t read it, you might want to grab a copy. This is the future: bringing technology to the poorest of the poor, not as charity but as a profitable business model that maintains affordability even among customers who have almost nothing.
The world has got to get off coal and oil and gas and biofuels and nuclear, and onto forms of energy that are truly sustainable: they renew themselves, they don’t pollute, they don’t emit greenhouse gases, and they certainly don’t leave a legacy of poison. And the good news is we already have the know-how to do this; now we just need to find the will.
This is a crucial crossroads moment with huge implications for future generations. More specifically, for whether we actually still have a planet to pass on to future generations. We could tip toward sustainability…or continue on the path to desolation.
What does that mean? For starters, polar melting will raise sea levels up to 1.9 meters (6 feet, three inches) by2100, causing widespread inundation of coastal cities around the world. Some entire countries, especially those on islands, will simply disappear under the waves.
Increased heat in the tropics will increase desertification and have a severe impact on food production, leading to famines, which in turn will make wars and ethnic violence a whole lot more likely.
Polar melting will also change the salt ratio of the oceans, because the ice caps are freshwater. This in turn could interfere with the Gulf Stream, making Europe a lot less habitable.
I’m old enough to remember the early 1960s: There was a lot less plastic. Most households had a maximum of one car, one television, and one telephone. There was a whole lot less traffic, and therefore a lot fewer cars spewing greenhouse cases while idling in that traffic. Air conditioning was rare. Suburban sprawl was a relatively new phenomenon, and vast acreage remained as forest or farmland that has since turned into housing and shopping and office parks. Individuals did not own computers. An 800-square-foot apartment or a 1200-square-foot house could comfortably fit a family of four or five. With all these major lifestyle shifts, it’s not surprising that humans have an impact on our planet. And I’m not suggesting that we roll back the clock on “progress.” But I am suggesting that if we want this lifestyle, we need to consume fewer resources to maintain it.
Have you perhaps noticed that major earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, and even winter storms (allowed to move out of the polar regions because global warming breaks down the natural barriers that kept them polar before) have been much more severe in the last decade or so? Our Planet Earth is apparently beginning its rebellion.
We have to move forward, and we have to do it quickly.
