Will solar energy…save us? And does COVID-19 increase the likelihood we will be saved by it? I’ll provide answers to these questions below. But before I do so, I can’t help but begin with some cautionary remarks about questions and answers in the midst of our current situation.
The advent of COVID-19 has induced some commentators and theorists to make bold prognostications about the future of sociality, climate change, and, of course, capitalism. Besides the problem of reading tea leaves before they are dry (and they are hard to read even then), this rush to judge a still-unfolding event troubles me. Critical theory, as I understand it, isn’t about forecasting a future still to come, a task that assigns the critic the role of prophet or clairvoyant. Nor is it about taking on the role of Cassandra, sounding an alarm that no one takes up (and employing this very failure to affirm the import of a critical viewpoint). Theory works best as a tool for critical analysis rather than as a crystal ball that endlessly repeats the same message: the current moment is a moment unlike any other.
In the field of energy studies, the most prominent pronouncements of this kind have concluded that this is the moment when fossil fuels will at last be seen to have passed the torch to solar (taking “solar” here as a shorthand for renewable energies of all kinds). This may be the case; it also may not. I am less interested in pondering the implications of COVID-19 for the future of energy than in assessing what isn’t being considered in these pronouncements. To all those eager to announce the coming age of solar, a mechanism that will save us from our own worst tendencies, I can’t help but ask: Why would we want or expect an energy technology to rescue us from anything?
Just what is solar energy? At its core, it contains a double promise: energy without fuel (that is, without matter) and access to an infinite amount of energy. Getting past the need for fuel opens up the possibility of using energy without environmental consequences. No fuel means: no spent fuel rods to bury; no carbon dioxide to manage; no poisoned land to recondition. In the drama of sustainability, solar is the hero that appears in the nick of time to save us from ourselves—much like, I have to say, COVID-19, which has been treated by some as a substitute for what politics couldn’t manage to achieve on its own.
The infinite energy promised by solar can’t help but lead one to speculate about how we might live without energetic limits. Will we imagine different ways of being in relation to one another? Will we stop worrying about accumulation and possession because each of us will become Sun Kings, energy “prosumers” living in households able to generate their own energy and so able to do whatever we want when we want? Infinite energy promises pure freedom, the dream of liberalism and socialism alike, and a freedom that is for the first time without environmental consequences. It’s why solar energy generates excitement beyond its potential to reduce atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. Solar contains within itself potentially revolutionary possibilities, a transformation of infrastructure that underwrites deep social and political change as well.
Energy without fuel; energy as infinite energy. However we might make sense of the social and political ramifications of this possibility, we have to begin from a startling realization. We have always used energy as energy and not as fuel; and we have also always treated energy as if it were infinite. This is as true of history before the discovery of fossil fuels as it has been in the aftermath of their appearance. A graph of energy use after the Second World War mirrors the hockey stick–shaped spikes in COVID-19 cases experienced by every country in the world. Global warming has caused us to think more seriously about the implications of using fuels as if they were infinite. Yet nowhere have we come close to flattening the energy curve—or even having a real interest in doing so; an energy quarantine seems unimaginable to politicians and publics alike. When we think about the possibilities of solar, we need to be alert to its ideological function. By promising infinite, clean energy, solar energy allows us to continue to think of energy as we always have, while conveniently pushing aside the environmental worries troubling us about the use of fossil fuels.
Solar permits fossil-fuelled modernity and the social and political presumptions fuelling it to get away scot-free; by erasing fuel and finitude from the picture of energy use, it powerfully reaffirms our current disastrous assumptions about what energy is for and to what ends we use it. Solar is a quick techno-utopian fix that sidesteps the difficult work that will need to accompany the creation of any solar futures worthy of this title. When it comes to energy transition, COVID-19 is a distraction, a force too-quickly imagined as shaping history for us so that we don’t need to do it ourselves.
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