In All Things, There Comes a Time When the Winner Wins and the Loser Loses

Those of us who subscribe to Dictionary.com’s “Word of the Day” know that some words seem to call out to us to make them part of our working vocabularies, while others are of passing interest, at best. Today, for instance, we learned that “boustrophedon” (boo-struh-FEED-n), is an ancient method of writing in which the lines run alternately from right to left and from left to right.  See the example shown here, but don’t look for another use of that word in the blog here at 2GreenEnergy, because I doubt you’ll find it in a guest post, and I’m quite sure I’ll never use it again after today.

Having said that, think for a second about the boustrophedon phenomenon. Is there any intrinsic reason that it lost out to the way we write today, i.e., left-to-right in most languages, and right-to-left in others? No, it lost merely because, for no good reason, the world simply went in another direction. As in the development of everything in our culture, there came a time at which the winner won and the loser lost.

As time passes and renewable energy technologies continue to be developed and refined, it becomes clear that technologies that showed incredible promise just a decade ago are very unlikely to fill anything more than niche applications by the time the transition away from fossil fuels in complete. When I wrote “Renewable Energy–Facts and Fantasies” in 2010, for instance, I made a big deal about solar thermal, aka concentrated solar power (CSP), as I believed the time that it was more just as likely as solar PV to win the day, and that, a few decades hence, there could be utility-scale solar thermal plants all over the world. Eventually, I thought, there might be huge CSP plants in the Sahara that would power all of Europe.

Almost immediately after the book was published, however, solar PV experienced incredible (and unforeseeable) reductions in costs, the solar thermal now seems that it will be a footnote in the history of clean energy.

The solar thermal people had experienced what the developers of boustrophedron did thousands of years ago.  A legitimate idea that simply didn’t pan out.