Climate, technology and chaos Blog

Much of this writing depends upon observations by my PhD student Priya Pillai in India. This primarily about solar and wind. It does not cover biofuels.

Solar farms

1. Solar panels do not require much labour once they are installed. There are no moving parts, little to be serviced, nothing to be regulated, nothing to be consumed. On the whole, unless one of the electrical components breaks down, which requires skilled labour, there is almost nothing to do.
2. It is extremely unlikely that there would be enough demand to hire a local person to do this generally non-demanding labour, full time, unless it was a huge field.
3. The panels do need washing, which requires labour. However, it is repetitive, boring and often out in the heat unless the panels are designed so that air conditioned cleaning cars can drive between them.. Some sunlight will be reflected by the panels making the air hotter. (This needs checking but it seems plausible). If the panels are high enough for agriculture underneath, then it may require the cleaners to carry ladders in the heat.
4. Theoretically, this labour, if done by car, could be replaced by auto-cleaning systems, with little need for human labour.
5. The amount of labour used in solar farms, compared to the amount of energy released, is small.
6. The main issue is paying back the capital and energy expenditure to build it.
7. Given the low profit margins of solar during the day when it is competing against other solar, it is probable that labour expenses will be cut to make profit.
8. The profit would probably come from stored power, but this is also competing against other stored power.
9. With the potentially low profit margins, it might become hard to persuade corporations to lead the renewable transition. There is no ‘supply’ of materials needed to power the power stations, as there is with fossil fuels, which carry a constant profit. But competition from cheap energy may undermine even that source of revenue.

Wind Farms

1. Wind farms do require skilled labour. They do have moving parts and machinery, and need servicing.
2. They are more prone to breakdown and fires than are solar panels
3. It is possible that this could provide limited skilled labour for locals. But contract and non-union labour is to be expected, with the usual high-stress lower-wages syndromes, unless unions can get involved.
4. The labour is quite dangerous, but probably not much more than in building. [I need to check the accident rate on windfarms.]
5. In Priya’s fieldwork, there are stories of people being injured on the wind turbine job and receiving no insurance cover.

General problems of renewable labour

1. The labour is not intensely social. It may be more so in wind, but the people that workers interact with are limited.
2. This will probably mean the work is not done well.
3. Both wind and solar are outdoor jobs and likely to be subject to increasing heat. A recent International Labour Organization report estimated that 70% of the world’s 3.4 billion workforce will be exposed to excessive heat at some point. The US has no federal standards, even though the Biden administration has requested that the Occupational Safety and Health Association draft standards.
4. When we talked to people working on a solar farm in South Australia, they remarked at the personal loss involved in the transition from a coal fired power station to solar. In the coal station, everything they did was important, and involved detailed collaboration. As supervisors of a solar farm they did very little except stand around, and it felt that nothing really depended on them. Solar work was generally boring, as well as emotionally unsatisfying. In more academic terms the work was meaningless and almost completely alienating.

Side effects

1. In Australia one of the big side effects of renewable energy is that it may set up new or intensified inequalities in towns.
2. Those people renting the land to the farm company get new injections of cash. If they are farmers this may mean that they are still well off in bad farming years. It may also mean that they can, again, afford to send their children away to private schools, further breaking connections with the rest of the community.
3. Companies still tend to conduct their rental negotiations in private, and hold public ‘neoliberal consultations’ in which the result they want is already assumed.
4. This leads to people being resentful and alienated from the setting up and installation process, and often angry that their environment is being altered, without any obvious benefit to them. To solve ecological problems, we want people to be concerned about their environment and then the process of saving it, modifies it with little consultation.
5. Likewise the lack of jobs, and local payments (there is dispute about this, as it appears to depend entirely on the company) does not encourage acceptance. There are few local benefits to compensate for the disruption.
6. The locals may not even get electricity from the local site.
7. It may also be the case that the town receives lots of applications for renewable farms, and there are too many demands to process properly.

Ecological and Land problems

1. One type of land problem for solar, is that the panels can be installed very close to the ground, altering or even destroying plant growth, or overtly removing the ground from farm or public use.
2. These low panels with shade and ease of hiding may encourage nuisance animals
3. In India, it seems common for land to be ‘stolen’ from people by fake contracts or contracts which people have not had explained to them, to be used for solar or wind farms. Obviously this practice leaves people in a worse place than previously.
4. People who have sold their land, have cash, but no continuous source of income, making them vulnerable in the long term.
5. The land taken can become private property and is fenced off. This is a problem because people have previously used the land as commons, to graze animals on.
6. The Dalit (lowest level caste) frequently have no, to little, land. This removal of common land from the area, affects their ability to survive locally. They may not be able to graze animals, or to supervise grazing for others.
7. Dalits often work the land of bigger land owners for wages or food. If the land is fenced off for renewable farms, there is less work available for them, and hence life becomes more precarious.
8. There is little work on the renewable farms especially for women. Many jobs are security guards to police the borders and keep people from damaging the panels or turbines
9. People may have to walk to nearby villages, in the heat, and compete with other locals for work rather than rely on traditional bonds.
10. This also produces alienated labour in that people are not working for people they have long standing connections and ties to. This also renders them more vulnerable in times of stress, as mere employers will feel less responsibility.
11. It is generally considered that women walking long distances by themselves are vulnerable to attack, or scandal. So it affects women more than men.
12. Panels still need cleaning. This requires water. And may mean extra demands on underground aquifers. This may make water more expensive for ordinary people. There is some evidence to suggest that some companies engage in water theft, or that the water table is declining given the extra demand. Shortages may be increased due to climate change.

Climate Change

1. Weather and ecologies will change. This is largely unpredictable in a changing complex system.
2. Because of extra water and shade new plants can develop, with new animal life. Creatures can chew cables etc., or spread into neighboring fields.
3. Solar farms do not want trees, or other shade plants. So they can be cut down. This might change local temperatures for labour
4. Theoretically nothing stops farms using high solar panels, or windfarms, from grazing, or perhaps other agriculture.
5. New flooding might be a problem, requiring labour to fix, but probably this would involve imported labour.
6. Wind might decline or increase too much.

Community Energy

Most of these problems arise because the farms are being run by distant corporate organisations, which have few local ties beyond cash transaction. In a way they are perhaps more difficult to deal with than fossil fuel companies, who are bound to place in a way these renewable companies are not, as yet. Fossil fuel companies generally provide reasonable amounts of labour, and invest in the town, and local media (through advertisements). So at the moment, fossil fuel activity may even be more popular than renewable.

However, if people opt for, and can deliver community energy, despite all the regulatory obstacles then some of these problems may be solved.

1. As a local organisation they will be interested in using local labour, possibly to build, and probably to maintain.
2. They are likely to be aware of, and concerned with, heat problems for labour.
3. The labour is slightly less likely to be alienated as people know each other from the town, and if the energy supplies the town is likely to be considered valuable.
4. They are able to choose land that most people are happy with using.
5. Knowing local climate and flood patterns might help local farms survive.
6. They are more likely to consider the issues of land use, and allow alternate land use, such as grazing, if it seems possible or necessary.
7. They are perhaps less likely to destroy common land, if it is still being used by people.
8. The money locals pay for electricity is likely to stay in the town rather than be exported to the corporations, cities or overseas, and contribute to more local labour and investment.

Energy and Labour

Labour turns food into directable energy, often produces organisation of production and produces waste (at least excretion, and dispersed heat or entropy). The steam engine provided new energy, greater quantities of waste, ways of organising labour, and diminishing the capacity of labour to be self-supporting (in Marx’s terms, labourers no longer owned the means of production, or held the means of production in common, or by tradition).

As a source of energy, labour can be replaced by other energy, with other forms of waste generation and pollution. The intelligent and directional part of labour can be replaced by computer, or design, programs. Sometimes this change can end up providing more and better jobs, but that is tied up with power relations. Capitalists tend to design tech to get rid of costs (labour is a cost) and to get rid of their dependency on human skills. Hence the chances are high the technology design can be about disempowering laboutr Steam engines did not bring quality jobs, working or living conditions. They helped displace people from the land, greater concentration of people in cities to give greater competition for wages, and adding inhuman control over workers.

It is conceivable that with cheap renewables, cheap (possibly almost free) energy, storage, and AI, that human labour could diminish, leading to general poverty, without a new way of distributing income.

Energy tends to end up being involved in social power. Those people with social power have access to energy, whether it is human labour, the potential labour stored in money, machines, control over weaponry, and so on. As said previously in this blog, the energy and riches elite has so far been a polluter elite. Cutting pollution has been strongly resisted, and cutting energy and distributing it more equitably may also be resisted. We might even describe a more universal ‘class war’ as a struggle between the owners and controllers of energy (who want to maintain that control, power and security), and those who labour or use energy.