SOLAR DIVIDENDS

A writer offers a proposal for combating both climate change and economic inequality through solar energy.

Stayton (Power Shift, 2015) presents an aspirational guide to saving the world through the extensive adoption of solar power and other forms of renewable energy combined with automatic dividend payments. The dividends would convert the profits from the sale of energy into an unconditional basic income. The enthusiastic book is divided into two parts. The first section is written from the perspective of a person in the year 2099 explaining how the solar-driven system has transformed the world. The second returns to the present to examine how the strategy could be implemented. The 2099 narrator, who is not named, reveals that “my parents…took the extra step of registering me for my standard solar energy array” at birth. The narrator then explains the mechanics of being entitled to a lifetime of monthly payments from the earnings of a cooperatively managed array. The disbursements make government welfare programs unnecessary; the solar panels spark economic expansion (“Solar acts like a local oil well for generating growth”); everyone is more physically and financially secure; and carbon emissions drop substantially. After exploring the future, the author provides a detailed and comprehensive framework for the political, technological, and practical changes necessary to make the solar regime feasible, from infrared-opaque panels that allow arrays to work on farmland to the cooperatives that manage and maintain the equipment and distribute the dividends. Although the book’s premise is utopian, Stayton supplies a painstaking and largely plausible road map for achieving it. In this plan, the increased costs of fossil fuels make higher-priced solar energy viable. The “solar profit margin” is a panacea, and the author explains how its cyclical impacts become self-sustaining once they have been established. The question of how to attain the structural changes necessary to create a solar energy system (“We can accomplish all this without Draconian laws, massive ‘moonshot’ tax expenditures, political movements, or revolution”) is largely glossed over. (“Step 1: convince government bodies that regulate utility rates to establish a high buy-back price”; “That change requires political will to overcome the resistance from vested interests and conventional economists who insist that energy prices must remain low.”) While this is an understandable omission, it is also the volume’s one substantial weakness. But aside from that, the book is thorough in elucidating both the logic and mechanics of the system, with a substantial and well-researched discussion of basic incomes and a compelling argument in favor of higher energy prices (“Since low energy prices are holding back the transition to clean energy, it’s time to reexamine that conventional wisdom”). In addition, Stayton includes an appendix that dives into the numbers in order to prove that the system is physically possible and economically effective (“If we can get 25% of our energy from wind and hydropower, and if we install about 10 kilowatts of PV panels for each person on the planet, then we can meet all of our adjusted energy needs in the future”).

A thoughtful approach to widespread solar energy that omits some practicalities but delivers a realistic vision of a better world.