Have we got the energy?

The recent news from the Central Statistics Office that prices have fallen yet again elicits only the grimmest of smiles and the dimmest of welcomes. Where'd we be without sales? But the bad news is that petrol and diesel are among the reasons – apparently they're cheaper. Does this include the carbon tax? And anyway, it ain't gonna last.

We're all completely dependent on oil and gas and since world population and energy demands are both increasing exponentially, there's no way we're ever going back to cheap energy. If everyone in the world had a laptop and an iPhone…
But even before the market pushes up the price there's the not-inconsiderable problem of the clean-up in the Gulf of Mexico. Anyone who thinks the cost of this won't be passed on to consumers in one way or another is living in cloud cuckoo land.
They're probably the same kind of people who think we won't be paying through the nose for generations for the mess made by bankers and developers.
It's yet another reason to keep pushing towards new energy sources and new ways of securing energy supplies. The one positive thing that seems to be coming out of the Deepwater Horizon disaster is the renewed interest in 21st century energy technologies.
But where will we Irish be in this?
Well, there's no shortage of technologies and proposals. The most recent one is a low-cost solar cell, called the Grätzel cell, invented by Michael Grätzel, director of the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces in Lausanne, Switzerland.
It's sufficiently brilliant and has enough real potential to be awarded the 2010 Millennium Technology Prize, which also brings €800,000 in development funds. When you remember that the 2004 winner was Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, you'll realise that the Grätzel cell may truly change the world around us.
It won't be tomorrow, of course. It'll take time. But what's great about it is that it will be a lot cheaper than existing technologies which depend on very pure silicone and very rare cadmium and tellurium.
Shouldn't the Irish Government, or at least the National Pensions Fund, be taking shares in this? The Norwegians would. They've invested all their oil riches in a wide range of future technologies so they won't be poor in the future when their oil runs dry…
Solar farms are mooted as being as important for the future as oil is now. And the sun, unlike oil, isn't confined to lands that are ruled by despots or fundamentalists.
We don't have enough sun, and that's a problem – and unlike our cousins in Iceland we can't harness unlimited levels of geothermal energy. But we have the sea and the wind.
In the last few months, the case has been made that floating windfarms are better, more flexible and less intrusive than those situated on land. We could do it.
And only weeks ago, the British and Irish Council heard that Scotland hopes to become ‘the Saudi Arabia of marine energy'.
Jaysus, all these initiatives sound okay to me. But to get there, you need policies and planning and investment and when you think about that you immediately see the terrible damage that has been done to us. The chief executive of Anglo Irish Bank told a Dáil committee that the lion's share of the €22 billion in taxpayers' money that has gone into Anglo Irish Bank will, as he put it, never be seen again.
Just imagine what that money could do towards building a 21st century energy industry here, one that would have us selling huge amounts of electricity to countries less fortunate than ourselves in terms of wind and sea resources…
Oh sure, we're not short of politicians and commentators telling us what we could do and should do. But what will we do? Now that's a much more telling question.
Not much, methinks. We can't invest because we blew the boom. At this rate we won't be the Saudi Arabia of marine energy, we'll be the Iraq of wind energy. We can't even harness the hot air that we produce in such abundance.
The simple thing is to smile sadly and blame the financial crisis. But the rot runs way, way deeper than that. To understand how fucked we are you have to compare Ireland, a country where prosperity was and is expressed in property and speculation and bling, with Germany, a country that built prosperity on planning, invention, enterprise and very hard work.
What's valued here? The central role in planning for a very different future falls to the State. It includes promoting science and design and creative thinking. Instead we have reductiveness, diversions and reliance on the market to deliver us from evil.
And now it's raining outside. Even the summer's gone.