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| Solar panels: Permitted, even though they're not permitted. |
By Linda Felaco
Living in a coastal town, and in particular one in New England, which is predicted not only to be the U.S. region hardest hit by more frequent and severe storms in the future but also to see higher sea-level rise than
other areas, you’d expect Charlestown residents to be concerned about global
climate change and interested in weaning themselves off of fossil fuel and
switching to renewable energy.
Indeed, a poll
several years ago by the Charlestown Citizens Alliance showed broad support for
wind energy. Then came Whalerock, and Charlestown effectively
banned wind power.
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| Geothermal energy: Permitted even though it's not permitted. |
Geothermal energy presumably is also legal seeing
as how the new Charlestown
Wine and Spirits has been using it—though strangely enough, I can’t seem to
find any mention of geothermal energy anywhere in the town’s ordinances, which would
seem to be a violation of the Platner Principle.
Though the town did go to the trouble
of banning outdoor wood furnaces outright in 2010 instead of simply applying
the Platner Principle. Since an outdoor furnace means building a new structure
outside the dwelling, the zoning use table should have been enough, under the
PP, to ban them, but the Council wrote a specific ordinance instead. Go figure.
Unfortunately, the town has banned the green energy
technologies that are cheaper and simpler to use. Wood furnaces rely on simple
combustion and wind turbines rely on simple mechanical energy, but turning
sunlight into electricity involves complex chemical reactions and catalysts
that often require rare, hard-to-find, and/or expensive elements.
And both sun and wind produce energy in the form of
electricity, which has a major downside: It’s difficult and
costly to store, meaning it has to be used as it’s generated, making it
difficult to obtain a steady power supply from intermittent sources such as sun
and wind. Indeed, ideally, people could use both wind and solar power, since
when it’s more windy it tends to be less sunny and vice versa—except that here
in Charlestown wind energy is all but verboten.
Not only is electricity difficult and costly to store but it
can’t be used as a transportation fuel in traditional combustion engines, which
still make up the vast majority of the vehicles on the road. Biofuels are an
environmentally friendly and renewable replacement for fossil fuel—but the
CCA had former town administrator Bill DiLibero fired for merely suggesting building a biofuel plant here
in town, even after the grant
proposal he’d written was turned down.
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| Wind power: Bad, very bad. |
But what if the energy in sunlight could be used to generate
energy-rich chemical fuels, such as hydrogen gas, methane, and gasoline, that
could be burned anytime or anywhere? Researchers have demonstrated the possibility,
although the means for creating such so-called solar fuels have been
inefficient and expensive.
Recent
advances may put us closer to reaching this goal, however. Last year,
researchers reported creating
an “artificial leaf” that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen in a
similar manner to the way plants carry out the first step in photosynthesis. The
leaf is composed of cheap, abundant materials, and the reaction produces no
waste products.
In other work, last year scientists came up with a more
energy-efficient way to convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, the
first step toward making a hydrocarbon fuel. They used a type of solvent called
an ionic liquid that reduces the voltage required to carry out the reaction by
about 90%, a significant advance.
A simpler version of the technology, however, is also being
developed: a solar array that can convert wood waste and other forms of biomass
into carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas, known as synthesis gas, or syngas, which
can be converted into gasoline.
Research on solar fuels is still in the early stages, and much
work remains to be done before we can start filling our tanks with it. But given
that in Charlestown, everything is prohibited unless permitted, will the CCA
cabal permit any of these promising new renewable energy technologies to be
used here?