January/February 2007

Opinion

Energy Infrastructure and Democratic Space: A Case for Decentralization

By Manu V. Mathai

In the wake of growing concerns over U.S. dependence on foreign oil, nuclear power has again become a central player in discussions about alternative energy sources. In 2006, when Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, reversed his long-held position opposing nuclear energy (See "Going Nuclear: A Green Makes the Case," Washington Post, 16 April 2006, pg. B01), it only added fuel to the debate. I leave it to nuclear engineers or physicists to evaluate Moore's largely technical case; my concerns with nuclear energy are more about its politics.

On this score, my biggest concern is that it is an inherently centralizing energy system. Given the unparalleled potency of the technology, control over the entire infrastructure is very closely guarded, and few opportunities exist for ordinary citizens to be involved. If anything, states and their bureaucracies will only become even more secretive and guarded given the worries that surfaced after 9/11, and general trends in global politics.

So, why does this matter? We just want our electricity, right? Well, it matters because that much more of the energy infrastructure is taken out of the public domain. For a start, decisions about distributing infrastructure costs (from the impacts of mining uranium, to what we do with the spent nuclear fuel and associated waste) are no longer political decisions; instead, they become technical decisions. And the most important criterion for a technical decision is often efficiency (e.g. what is the cheapest way to dispose the waste). On the other hand, the most important criterion for a political decision is usually justice. As in, is it fair? Centralized energy infrastructures (e.g. Nuclear, Large dams, Mega thermal) tend to drift away from this imperative of justice in the sole pursuit of efficiency and that, too, in the limited sense of least cost.

Second, the further entrenchment of centralized infrastructure undercuts the political and economic viability of decentralized and renewable energy technologies. A far cry, one would think, from creating a favorable environment for the penetration of such innovative technologies which, socially speaking, have the potential to be more progressive.

Third, a great benefit of distributed renewable energy technologies is that they can be situated in the context of where the energy is being used. In such a scenario, my electricity ceases to be an abstraction — I actually see and feel where my electricity is coming from, either from the solar panel outside my house, or the wind turbine in the field or the micro-hydro in the forest behind. Consequently, I know the costs and the benefits. On the other hand, a nuclear reactor 100 miles away, fueled by uranium from even farther removed, is not real to me in that sense. I don't have to know all its costs. And I don't have to bother with factoring those costs into the way I use electricity or deliberate and form my values about how much electricity I need to use. It's convenient for me, its efficient for me; but the questions remains: is it fair?

Speaking broadly, we employ two ways of producing energy. One source we mine (e.g. fossil fuels and nuclear). The second source we harvest (e.g. solar energy, wind, geo-thermal, micro-hydro and biomass). Mining allows us to control the rate of extraction and use. Harvesting, by and large (with the exception of bigger harvesters, perhaps) imposes a rate of use on us.

Over the past two hundred odd years, we have relied almost exclusively on mined sources. Technology has enabled us to maximize the rate at which we extract fuels and use them. And we've defined our civilization on this extremely high rate of energy use — with serious consequences.

The oft-advocated response to this and related problems is to use renewable energy. A welcome suggestion, indeed. However, the problem is that renewables are harvested. We cannot ask the Sun to send us its insolation at a faster rate. Within limits we can increase the size of the harvesters, but that, too, will likely be inadequate given the enormity of our energy appetite. So, when we talk about a renewable energy infrastructure, we also need to be talking lowering our rate of energy use. And talking about rates of energy use brings us face-to-face with a seemingly benign phrase: economic development.

Enabling our present rate of energy use to fuel the extant conception and practice of economic development is only feasible if we continue to mine the Earth at the rate that we've been mining it for the past century and more. So, the much-vaunted shift to renewables will only be a lot of hot air (pun intended), if the debate doesn't bring into focus fundamental questions of economic development and the associated rate of energy (and material goods) use. What is development? How much energy and how many materials do we really need to consume to live a good life? Indeed, what is a good life? These are not technical questions; they are political and social ones, about our personal and societal values. And they are messy questions. Nevertheless, we need to figure out some way of dealing with them, discussing them and guiding the rapid change that we find ourselves in the midst of.

This is where the concern about the exclusionary politics of an energy infrastructure, such as nuclear energy, becomes important. A centralized and politically exclusive energy infrastructure squeezes political space and stifles society's ability to deliberate on such messy questions. As Andre Gorz remarked in Ecology as Politics (1980), '[nuclear installations] are a means that predetermines which ends are to be reached and that irrevocably prescribe a particular kind of society, to the exclusion of all others." The choice of direction, in terms of how individuals and communities relate to energy, is thus less strongly embedded within society.

Unusual as it sounds, engineers (energy engineers in the context of this essay) through the work they do, have a responsibility towards fostering democracy. The ends we seek for ourselves and society at large must always remain a human choice — they should never be dictated by the technological infrastructures that we create. Thus, the energy technologies that we engineer must be of a scale amenable to appreciation and control by individuals and communities, and not like nuclear energy, a social abstraction for the most part, which can only be controlled and directed by large and secretive bureaucracies.

Manu V. Mathai is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware Center for Energy and Environmental Policy. Within the context of the environmental crisis, he is interested in the politics of energy infrastructures and its impact on the conception and practice of economic development.

Manu is grateful to his advisor Prof. John Byrne and colleagues at the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy for perspectives and arguments that have helped shape this essay.

Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.