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    By François Ploye
    Libération

    Friday 20 August 2005

We must do justice to the essential role already played by this kind of resource.

    In the month of August, many French people bask on the beaches. Alongside the swimmers, wind surfboards with their multi-colored sails pass one another. A hundred meters away, on the road that overhangs the sea, a group of sweaty vacationers dismount from their bicycles to enjoy a salad of local fruits. This vacation ambiance has a little of the feel of an ad for the post-oil world in which renewable energies will hold sway: sail boats pushed by the wind, fruits jam-packed with sunlight - unbelievable miniature factories running on solar energy - and even animal traction provided by ... the stout-hearted bicyclists.

    Nonetheless, every day, serious men assert that the production of renewable energy in France (apart from hydro-electricity) is marginal, at a little less than 7% of total production. A situation likely to continue for a long time, given the scant eagerness the French demonstrate for equipping their picturesque villages with windmills and solar panels. And yet, the progress has been dazzling. At the beginning of the 1970s, renewable energies' contribution to the economy was zero, according to official statistics. Although if our Sun were to go out, every trace of life would disappear from the Earth in a few weeks: what ingratitude! It seems that we use renewable energy, as Monsieur Jourdain used prose, without knowing it. For if the wind surfboarder converted to water skis, the bicyclist to a 4x4 and apricots were grown in artificial light, then those activities would be counted among the nation's energy "needs." And the best experts of the nation would meet to guarantee sufficiently cheap energy supplies (nuclear, if possible) to assure that these indispensable activities would not be threatened. Our growth and our jobs depend upon it.

    Decidedly, the technicians don't much go in for what is free and complicated to measure. All the more so as, in their scenarios, all energy must be converted to its equivalent in tons of oil. Here, two conceptions of the world clash: between the wind surfboard, extremely light and aerodynamic, which goes relatively slowly and the outboard motor, noisy and fast, but capable of drawing a skier as well as its driver. If the pleasure is (nearly) comparable between the two sports, returned to tons of oil equivalency, the wind energy necessary to move the wind surfboard is negligible, hence neglected. And yet, windsurfing is an extremely popular sport in France.

    In a more general manner, we know that the car is mostly used by private people to cover short distances. In a certain number of cases, the errand is to get a loaf of bread, a pack of cigarettes, or to go pick up children at school, children who have the benefit of young functional legs. Cleaner and more durable means of transport than the gas-run car, like walking, roller skates, or the bicycles, would be sufficient. From the perspective of the number of kilometers covered and the service rendered, the two solutions are virtually identical. Yet it is also clear that the equivalence in energy terms leads us to neglect the role of walking. The walker is not going to entertain himself by moving (in addition to his loaf of bread) the 600kg of metal and plastic the car represents - over a ton even in the case of a 4x4. When cheap gas has disappeared, the landscape of our cities will change profoundly: cars will be slower, smaller, and much lighter. The 4x4 is the dinosaur of our era.

    Another good example is habitat. A large part of the year, houses and buildings are heated by sunlight only. There also, the production of solar energy is only counted in the official statistics if it is what is called active, either thermal, for hot water production, or photovoltaic for electricity production. The solar called passive, which is directly imported untaxed from the sky and has been used intelligently for millennia, is absent from statistics. Yet, the design of habitations allows us to use this natural radiance in highly variable relationships, following the building's general form and orientation, the presence of a double shell, the choice of materials and ventilation. Traditional techniques, improved with the aid of modern engineering, are, by the way, the object of a very active area of study, bioclimatic architecture. It is possible to reduce our recourse to non-solar energies, for air conditioning as well as for heating, economizing a fraction of what is consumed in a classic building. Without looking for these new techniques, which are more prized among our Danish and Italian neighbors than in France, the displacement of the French population, which is deserting the North and the East to move to the South, naturally induces a modification in the modes of energy consumption. The share of solar energy in heating and lighting buildings is much higher in the South than in the North. A gain there that, once again, is not transcribed in the official statistics. On the contrary, people despair that the Paca region uses so little renewable energy, while, by its very nature, it's the region most advanced in the consumption of solar energy!

    Giving just due to the essential role of renewable energies, including in our societies that are so very dependent on fossil energies, is long overdue. The stakes are not only symbolic: at issue is learning to better exploit a sizable resource pool. Thus, researchers have realized that lighting was natural before it was electric (aha!) and have just perfected a system by which sunlight is focused, and then transmitted by fiber optic cables for several meters' distance. The idea is to light rooms without exterior windows during the day, by sunlight only. The reality of human survival on the earth has gone along with constant daily use of solar energy and of its off-shoots, wind and hydraulic energies. Fossil energies, which have been squandered over two centuries, are only an exception - certainly remarkable, but an exception, in the very long history of human societies.

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