Mark Burger steps onto the roof of his office building just as the clouds blow away. “Perfect timing,” he says, tiny suns now glittering on his shades.
Solar power has long been touted as the energy of the future. Our ultimate furnace is available 12 hours a day on average, and all its energy is free to anyone who wants to buy or build a collector. Burger’s mission is to get those facts through the heads of power-company executives and auto engineers who’d like to keep burning fossil fuels until they’ve incinerated the last lump of coal and the last drop of oil. He once berated a Detroit auto executive for refusing to build hybrid electric-gasoline cars (Burger drives a hybrid, a Toyota Prius). He can’t stand the attitude that it’s macho to drive a big-ass American car, and he smoldered when the Senate recently voted down higher fuel-efficiency standards. “They just can’t conceive of a postpetroleum, postnuke world,” he says. “They know abstractly it’s going to happen, but they just can’t fathom it. Mostly they just think [solar power] is laughable. It reminds me of generals and admirals laughing at what airplanes can do against battleships. This is airplanes.”
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At its greediest Chicago uses 23,000 megawatts of electricity (a megawatt is a million watts). To generate that much power using photovoltaics you’d have to cover 86 square miles–over a third of the city–with solar panels laid out like floor tile. Which might not be as unrealistic as it sounds; when Burger flies over the city he sees “acres and acres of flat roofs on all these warehouses and apartment buildings” and imagines them covered with solar panels. For now, he has a more modest plan in the works: a solar array on ten acres near Lake Calumet that would produce about two and a half megawatts, enough to power between 400 and 500 houses. The mayor is said to want the biggest sun catcher in the world, but that project is several years away.
Someday people may also value the intangible benefits of solar more. Using it can reduce the amount of pollution we emit into the atmosphere, slow global warming, and help wean us away from fossil fuels. And the sun doesn’t boycott nations or gouge them for its light. It was these virtues that persuaded Mayor Daley to start buying solar panels for the city’s public buildings.
