A Collection of Solar Futures

A Collection of Solar Futures

Joey Eschrich and Clark A. Miller, Editors
Ruth Wylie and Ed Finn, Project Directors
Joey Eschrich and Clark A. Miller, Editors
Ruth Wylie and Ed Finn, Project Directors
 The Weight of Light:
A Collection of Solar Futures

Edited By
Joey Eschrich and Clark A. Miller

Project Directors
Ruth Wylie and Ed Finn
The Weight of Light: A Collection of Solar Futures.
Copyright © 2018 Arizona State University

ISBN 978-0-9995902-6-3

The copyrights for individual illustrations are owned by their respective creators.

The copyrights for individual short stories and essays are owned by their
respective authors, as follows:

“Designing in Sunlight” by Clark A. Miller, Joshua Loughman, Wesley Herche,

Dwarak Ravikumar, Joey Eschrich, Ruth Wylie, Ed Finn, Christiana Honsberg,
and Stuart Bowden. Copyright © 2018 Clark A. Miller, Joshua Loughman, Wesley
Herche, Dwarak Ravikumar, Joey Eschrich, Ruth Wylie, Ed Finn, Christiana
Honsberg, and Stuart Bowden.

“For the Snake of Power” by Brenda Cooper. Copyright © 2018 Brenda Cooper.

“Lessons from the Snake: Energy and Society” by Joshua Loughman.

Copyright © 2018 Joshua Loughman.

“Drawing from Nature: Designing a Solar Snake” by Esmerelda Parker.

Copyright © 2018 Esmerelda Parker.

“Under the Grid” by Andrew Dana Hudson. Copyright © 2018 Andrew Dana
Hudson.

“All Politics is Glocal” by Lauren Withycombe Keeler. Copyright © 2018 Lauren

Withycombe Keeler.

“Behind the Grid: Science, Technology, and the Creation of PhoTown” by Darshan
M.A. Karwat. Copyright © 2018 Darshan M.A. Karwat.

“Big Rural” by Cat Rambo. Copyright © 2018 Cat Rambo.

“Light and Shadows on the Edge of Nowhere” by Wesley Herche.

Copyright © 2018 Wesley Herche.

“Designing Socially Relevant Solar Photovoltaic Systems” by Dwarak Ravikumar.

Copyright © 2018 Dwarak Ravikumar.

“Building Tierra del Rey: Design Features of Centralized Solar in a Rural

Community” by Samantha Janko. Copyright © 2018 Samantha Janko.

“Divided Light” by Corey S. Pressman. Copyright © 2018 Corey S. Pressman.

“Choices” by Clark A. Miller. Copyright © 2018 Clark A. Miller.

 In memory of Yaron Ezrahi, 1940-2019,
who illuminated the centrality of imagination
and fiction in the project of democracy.
 O you hastening light!
O the sun of the world will ascend, dazzling,
and take his height—and you too will ascend;

O so amazing and so broad! up there resplendent,

darting and burning;

O prophetic! O vision staggered with weight of light!

—Walt Whitman, in “Apostroph,”

Leaves of Grass, 1860
W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES
 Contents

Credits 9
About the Project 11
Designing in Sunlight, by Clark A. Miller et al. 15
Solar Design Choices 37

Big Urban
For the Snake of Power, by Brenda Cooper 43

Lessons from the Snake: Energy and Society,

by Joshua Loughman 51

Drawing from Nature: Designing a Solar Snake,

by Esmerelda Parker 67

Small Urban
Under the Grid, by Andrew Dana Hudson 73

All Politics is Glocal, by Lauren Withycombe Keeler 91

Behind the Grid: Science, Technology,

and the Creation of PhoTown, by Darshan M.A. Karwat 97
8 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

Big Rural
Big Rural, by Cat Rambo 107

Light and Shadows on the Edge of Nowhere,

by Wesley Herche 121

Designing Socially Relevant Solar Photovoltaic Systems,

by Dwarak Ravikumar 127

Building Tierra del Rey: Design Features of Centralized

Solar in a Rural Community, by Samantha Janko 133

Small Rural
Divided Light, by Corey S. Pressman 141

Choices, by Clark A. Miller 157

About the Contributors 167

 9

Credits
Editors
Joey Eschrich
Clark A. Miller
Project Directors
Ed Finn
Ruth Wylie

Cover Design
Nina Miller

Special Thanks
To the staff at Arizona State University’s Quantum Energy and
Sustainable Solar Technologies Engineering Research Center
(QESST) for invaluable assistance with the financial and logistical
aspects of the project; to Bob Beard and Cody Staats, for helping
us plan and pull off the workshop; to Saurabh Biswas and Carlo
Altamirano-Allende, for their participation as project researchers;
and to Brenda Cooper, for helping us round out our roster of talented
fiction authors. We are very grateful for the financial support pro-
vided by QESST to the project

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science

Foundation under Grant No. 1041895. Any opinions, findings, and
conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are
those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the
National Science Foundation.
W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES
 A BOU T T HE PROJECT 11

About the Project

This collection was inspired by a simple question: what would a

world powered entirely by solar energy look like? In part, this ques-
tion is about the materiality of solar energy—about where people
will choose to put all the solar panels needed to power the global
economy. It’s also about how people will rearrange their lives, values,
relationships, markets, and politics around photovoltaic technolo-
gies. The political theorist and historian Timothy Mitchell argues
that our current societies are carbon democracies, societies wrapped
around the technologies, systems, and logics of oil.1 What will it be
like, instead, to live in the photon societies of the future?

To probe these questions, the Center for Science and the

Imagination 2 hosted the Solar Futures Narrative Hackathon on
April 30 and May 1, 2018, in Tempe, Arizona, in collaboration
with the Quantum Energy and Sustainable Solar Technologies
Engineering Research Center 3 and the School for the Future of
Innovation in Society4 . The event brought together science fic-
tion authors, visual artists, experts in fields ranging from public
policy to electrical engineering, and talented student research-
ers to create technically grounded, inspiring visions of a future
12 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

shaped by a transition to clean, plentiful solar energy.

Participants divided into four teams, each focused on a different
scenario for the future of solar energy in terms of two controlling
variables: geography and size. Geography denotes the split between
urban and rural; that is, whether solar infrastructure is integrated
into densely populated areas, where demand is concentrated, or
sited in sparsely populated areas further from major cities. Size dif-
ferentiates between large-scale, centralized facilities for generating
energy and small-scale, decentralized infrastructure spread across
a multitude of sites.

Depending on the group members’ interests and the needs of their

future vision, the teams also selected secondary variables to inte-
grate into their work: aesthetics, efficient vs. abundant deployment,
extraction & supply chains, ownership & governance, storage, and waste
& recycling.

In person during the workshop, and virtually in the weeks following

the gathering, each team produced a short story set in the near future,
a work of visual art that represents a key moment or theme from the
story, and one or more essays that scrutinize the technical, cultural,
and political issues that undergird these visions of the future, consid-
ering how we could get from here to there, and what signposts and
obstacles we might meet along the way.

Narrative Hackathons are intensively collaborative, structured as a

series of short interactive sessions with clear goals and deliverables.
Our teams oscillated between small-group brainstorming, large-
group presentations, cross-group feedback, revisions and refine-
ment, and individual working time throughout the two-day event.
 A BOU T T HE PROJECT 13

In the wake of the event, the teams continued their conversations

and worked with editors to sharpen and finalize their stories, visual
art, and essays.

Our goal for this project is to reveal the richness and diversity
within the arena of futures built upon the promise of clean, plentiful
energy. The transition to solar and other clean renewable sources
isn’t just a light switch that we can flip; it will be messy, and it will
involve consequential decisions about design, structure, democratic
process, the character of the relationship between humans and the
environment, and much more. In this collection, we aim to depict
these multifarious solar futures, and the choices that shape them,
as exciting spaces for imagination, exploration, deliberation, debate,
and even a dash of adventure.

To see full-color versions of the visual art, and to download and read
this collection in different formats, visit https://csi.asu.edu/books/weight.

Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (New
York: Verso), 2011.

2. https://csi.asu.edu/

3. https://www.qesst.org/

4. https://sfis.asu.edu/
14 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES
 15

Designing in Sunlight
By Clark A. Miller, Joshua Loughman,
Wesley Herche, Dwarak Ravikumar, Joey Eschrich, Ruth Wylie,
Ed Finn, Christiana Honsberg, and Stuart Bowden

Sunlight bathes the Earth in enough energy in a day for 10 years of global
energy consumption.

Solar photovoltaics is the fastest-growing and least expensive energy

technology on the planet.

It’s also one of the most flexible. Solar panels are found on satellites, sub-
urban rooftops, Ikea stores, university stadiums, and parking garages,
not to mention giant power plants on retired farmlands or in the desert.

This combination of low cost and high flexibility presents a unique oppor-
tunity—and a profound design challenge.

People who design and build solar systems confront a plethora of design
options for the future of solar energy.

These design options are, in part, technical.

Where do we deploy solar, in what kinds of systems, requiring what kinds

of data and information, posing what kinds of challenges for the electricity
grid, etc.?
16 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

Solar design options are also social, economic, political, and environmental.

Who will own the panels and derive economic benefit? How will their deploy-
ment be governed, and according to what rules? Where will we get the mate-
rials to build them? How will those materials be disposed of when the panels
no longer function? Which kinds of lands or spaces will we use to generate
solar energy?

How do we decide which designs to go with?

Energy choices are often thought of in terms of solar vs. coal or renew-
ables vs. fossil fuels.

In the future, they’re likely to be solar vs. solar.

Solar vs. solar, when all is said and done, isn’t just about which technology to
choose but also what kind of society to build.

Solar design choices are the central focus of this book.

The stories, essays, and artwork in this book explore the future of solar
energy as a problem in the design of future photon-based societies.

They prompt, we hope, a more sustained dialogue about human futures

in the shadow of solar energy.

Solar energy is growing rapidly. The world added more new solar
energy in 2017 than any other source of electricity. In total, in 2017,
humans built 100 Gigawatts (GW) of new solar power plants. For
comparison, the Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Phoenix, Arizona,
one of the world’s largest, is 4 GW. Think about that for a moment.
 17

In one year, people all over the globe installed the equivalent of 25
new, large-scale nuclear power plants’ worth of solar energy.

Looking forward, the growth of solar energy should continue to

accelerate. Saudi Arabia recently announced plans to build 200 GW
of solar power plants by 2030, enough to cover an area the size of
Chicago. In their 2018 Global Energy Perspective, consultants at
McKinsey estimated that 64% of worldwide energy investments over
the next three decades will be in solar energy, for a total of 7.7 TW
by 2050.¹ That’s roughly 2000 new nuclear power plants the size
of Palo Verde, or the equivalent area of 35 cities the size of Chicago.
Global growth in solar energy is being driven by steep, steady,
and persistent price declines. Recent contracts for solar energy in
Mexico and Saudi Arabia set record lows for the price of electricity.
On average, U.S. families pay roughly 10 cents for each unit of elec-
tricity; these new plants generate it at less than 1.8 cents. No other
form of electricity is price-competitive with solar at the moment.
In Arizona and New Mexico, recent contracts have priced solar at
roughly 2.3 cents. By 2030, McKinsey predicts that, in Britain, not
exactly known for its sunshine, it will be cheaper to build new solar
power plants than to operate existing natural gas plants. As a result,
as reported in the 2018 World Energy Investment report from the
International Energy Agency, global investments in new fossil fuel
infrastructure are quickly falling.²
The world is also experiencing a sea change in global policy
responses to climate change and environmental degradation. In
2017, dozens of major world cities committed to meeting their
obligations to the Paris Agreement in order to limit climate change
to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Two U.S. states, Hawaii and California (as
well as numerous cities) have passed legislation requiring their
18 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

states to derive 100% of their electricity from renewable energy

by the middle of this century. Corporate America is moving even
more quickly to green its energy systems. Germany has famously
launched an Energiewende to power the entire country with 60%
renewable power by 2050, and Mexico unveiled a new Ley de
Transición Energética in 2015. These initiatives, combined with
other policy actions to limit carbon emissions, such as countries
setting dates for banning sales of internal-combustion engines,
will put pressure on fossil energy and accelerate solar energy. It’s
entirely conceivable that the buildout of solar energy will be even
faster than McKinsey anticipates.

While these facts make it tempting to adopt a “let’s just sit back and
watch the show” mindset, these transformations in global energy
markets raise a variety of important questions about the design of
solar energy futures. Some of the most obvious include: Where and
how will solar energy systems be deployed, e.g., on buildings or in
the desert? What impacts will they have on those spaces and how
they are used? Will solar energy disrupt or reinforce existing energy
technologies and markets? Will the resulting power plants be ugly
or beautiful? Who will own them? Who will regulate them? What
kinds of jobs will they create, and for whom? How will solar systems
be integrated into broader systems of power, transportation, manu-
facturing, and computing, not to mention food and water systems?
How will they shape global patterns of security, power, and wealth?
The answers to these questions are not foregone conclusions.
They are design choices. The choices we consider, the criteria we
use to evaluate them, and the options we choose will have enormous
 19

implications for our future—as will the design choices we choose

not to reflect on.

Century ago, the people of the United States and other countries
faced very similar questions surrounding the birth of modern elec-
tricity systems. Who would own the production of power? Who
would control or regulate it? What form would energy markets
take? The designs they created, largely organized around central-
ized, monopoly urban electric utilities, served by large, coal-fired
power plants, have dominated the electricity sector ever since. They
have profoundly shaped contemporary ways of living, working, and
playing, enabling the transformation of agricultural societies, bound
to the patterns of day and night, into global, 24/7/365 cultures that
thrive on the hum of industrial and, today, increasingly, digital life.
With new forms of energy, however, come new design options.
Today’s energy design choices will shape the future as much as yes-
terday’s choices shaped the present.

This book is a prompt. We are trying something new. Our goal is not
to predict the future but to open it up as a design space. Our hope is
that these stories, essays, and artwork will stimulate and expand our
imagination about what kinds of choices are possible in designing
the future of solar-powered societies, and why those choices matter.
The works are thus a form of design fiction.³
Through the genre of science fiction, the stories function as a
20 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

form of technology assessment.⁴ They help readers imagine what

it might be like to inhabit different futures. They explore design
alternatives, both for technology and society. They engage what
technologies might do and what they might mean for people across
the planet.
We have chosen not to tell just one story about the future of solar
energy but rather many. Each is set in a rich social milieu in which
solar energy has taken a different path. The stories are science fic-
tion, but we have taken very few liberties with either technologies
or societies. The stories were informed by both engineers and social
scientists, working collaboratively with writers and artists. We have
tried hard not to create either utopias or dystopias. The stories do
not present ideal visions of what solar-powered futures should or
should not look like. Nor are we recommending any of these futures.
They are just speculative possibilities. The actual design of desirable
solar-powered futures is up to our readers, not us.
Our experiment in speculative energy fiction is informed by a
long legacy of scenario analysis: an array of strategies for imagining
multiple plausible futures by exploring the potential pathways along
which futures might unfold. Energy scenarios in particular have a
long and rich history. As early as the 1970s, Shell Oil used formal sce-
nario analysis to explore both possible futures of energy and futures
for the world more broadly that would coexist with them. Today,
scenarios are widely produced and used by energy firms, univer-
sity researchers, nongovernmental organizations such as the World
Energy Council, Greenpeace, and the World Bank, and government
agencies such as the German Federal Ministry for the Environment
and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Remarkably few
of these scenarios, however, have asked more than how much solar
energy the world will deploy and on what timetable.
 21

Our goal, by contrast, is to significantly expand the range of solar

design choices envisioned and considered in energy planning. By
opening up the design imagination, we aim to encourage reflection
on the potential pathways, intended and unintended consequences,
and social outcomes of solar energy development, and hence to allow
judgments about the desirability and undesirability of competing
solar futures.

In thinking about the future of energy design, it is useful to keep

three simple ideas in mind.
First, the future is open to design. Not infinitely, of course, nor
necessarily easily. Design always operates within limits. People
inhabit complex networks and systems in which worldwide trends
flow from the collective consequences of billions of individual
choices. The design of the future doesn’t always lie, therefore, within
the purview of a single individual or institution. This complexity
does not obviate human responsibility for the future, however.
There is no preordained technological path. Ultimately, the choices
that we all make do matter in shaping the futures we arrive in.
Second, technologies are always the product of our societies.
There are many different ways to make computers—mainframes,
desktops, laptops, smartphones, and more. There are many different
ways to integrate computers into larger digital networks and sys-
tems. And there are many different ways to put those computers to
use to create new futures for people and businesses. So, the design
choices that innovators, consumers, and regulators make matter
for how technology turns out. The evolution of digital technologies
has taken different forms and paths in the United States, Europe,
22 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

China, India, Africa, and elsewhere. Notwithstanding the rhetoric of

Silicon Valley, computers have not flattened the world, and variation
persists in the kinds of digital landscapes that people inhabit around
the globe. The same is likely to be true of solar energy technologies
in the future.
Third, our societies are a product of our technologies. Not in
some deterministic sense: technology does not drive history. People
always drive history. They make and use technologies. Nonetheless,
technologies enable people to think and act in new ways. As people
take advantage of those opportunities, they reshape their values and
behaviors, their relationships to one another, and their institutions.
In the process, they reshape societies.
The future of technology and society are inseparably woven
together. The ways that we choose to design technologies both
shape and get shaped by our choices about how to design societies.
Technological futures both create and respond to distributions of
power and wealth, cultural values, and social inequalities.

Even though we often pretend otherwise, the design of energy

systems is never just about technology; it is always also about the
design of human futures.
This implies that we design society when we design and organize
solar panels.
What are some of the ways that this integration of social and
technological design happens?
One example: when we design solar systems, we design not only
where the panels are built but also who owns and derives revenue
from them.
 23

The same technology—a two-foot by three-foot photovoltaic

(PV) panel—can be deployed in a wide variety of social and
market arrangements. In Arizona alone, we have at least seven
different market configurations for deploying solar panels. We’ve
built giant power plants in the desert, owned by utilities or inde-
pendent power companies. Commercial businesses have put solar
panels on their roofs. Governments have built publicly owned
systems. And we’ve put solar panels on suburban rooftops.
Homeowners own some of these rooftop systems, banks and cor-
porations own others, and still others get leased from Elon Musk.
Which design wins out will have profound social, economic, and
political implications for the future of Arizona.
A typical PV panel today costs about $250. Over its 25-year life-
time, it will generate electricity perhaps worth $1000. That’s not a
bad investment: roughly a 5% annual rate of return. The question of
ownership ultimately boils down to who nets the resulting $750 in
profit.
Historically, energy companies and governments have owned
most energy assets, netting the vast majority of energy profits and
transforming them into some of the world’s largest and richest
organizations. Will that be true in the future? Do we want it to be?
Enabling individuals or communities to own their own power could
upend existing patterns of wealth and inequality in the world.

Another example: the linkage between energy and security.

Humanity has a long and bloody history of fighting global wars over
energy resources. Will the wars of the future be fought over sun-
light? Fortunately, solar power is widespread across the face of the
24 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

planet. As recent attacks make clear, however, energy systems face

significant risks of cyberterrorism, and highly concentrated solar
facilities could become future military targets.⁵

How do we identify the full array of social and technological design

choices available to us as designers of solar energy futures? And how
can we make these choices in a more informed fashion?
We argue for an anticipatory design approach that uses sto-
rytelling and narrative to open up the imagination to questions
about the human dimensions of technological innovation.⁶ The
goal is to explore ahead of time what future design choices
might be available and how those choices might matter for dif-
ferent groups in society.
This kind of anticipatory design approach is, from our perspec-
tive, critical to avoiding the kinds of design flaws that have emerged
in the construction of other recent technologies.
Facebook didn’t have to design a system that enabled Russian
hackers to attack U.S. elections. Apple could have designed iPhones
that didn’t addict us. Artificial intelligence algorithms needn’t repli-
cate human biases. The internet didn’t have to be designed without
built-in cybersecurity. Yet all four have recently occurred in the design
of digital technologies.
We believe that taking an anticipatory design approach to solar
energy technologies will help to improve the societies we build
through solar energy innovation.
 25

At the heart of the anticipatory design fiction work of this book are
three core sets of design questions. The authors and teams that built
the stories considered a number of potential design variables (for a
full list, see the “Solar Design Choices” section of this book, imme-
diately after this essay). Of those, three emerged as particularly
salient for the stories in this collection.
1) World-building and landscapes: What kinds of technolog-
ical worlds and societies and landscapes will we design for our
children via new solar energies? Where will solar power plants be
deployed, what will they look like, how big will they be, who will
live next to them, and what kinds of lives will they experience?
What criteria should we use to decide which aspects of the solar
worlds we design are desirable or undesirable?
2) Work, economy, and inequality: How will solar energy inno-
vation transform the future of work—and of markets and the econ-
omy? How will solar economies distribute or redistribute energy
wealth? Will they reinforce existing inequalities, create new ones,
or contribute to ending global poverty?
3) Power and governance: Who will decide the shape of future
technologies and societies? How might design decisions be made
democratically? How will they feed back into the workings of dem-
ocratic institutions and governance?
The stories, of course, are much richer than can be captured
by these few questions. And the design options deliberated by the
teams during the two days of the workshop were more complex
and nuanced than even the stories capture. Fully considering solar
energy design options will be an ambitious undertaking for any
community. We hope that what we’ve done here inspires people to
do that work.
26 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

Humans have long made their place in the world through the techno-
logical transformation of landscapes: dense-packed city skyscrapers,
sprawling suburbs, mining zones, industrial manufacturing centers,
and vast tracts of rural agricultural production. Lewis Mumford
called this facet of economic development The Machine, and he
lamented the extent to which societies routinely fail to reflect on
the technological environments they create and inhabit.⁷
Solar energy is the next iteration of The Machine. Already, it is
transforming diverse urban and rural spaces.
One of the most powerful elements of science fiction is its ability to
use stories to conjure the visual imagination—to help people “see” the
look and feel of future worlds. This property of science fiction derives
from the way our mind processes visual information. When people
look out at city skylines, snow-capped mountains, or wide-open prai-
ries, they don’t just perceive with their eyes; they also see with their
imagination. They imbue vistas with meaning, value, emotion, and
history—and the imaginative elements of sight inflect how the brain
processes and interprets visual stimuli on the optic nerve. Language
and stories connect the same circuits, using meaning, in turn, to
stimulate the visual imagination.
Solar panels interrupt such vistas, both literally and figuratively.
Just as solar panels collect sunlight, they collect the eye. Whether
amassed by the thousands or dotting individual rooftops, solar
panels draw attention to themselves, changing how people see and
give meaning to urban and rural landscapes. They are new, innova-
tive objects. They represent change. They are cultural and political
symbols for progressives and conservatives alike. Their presence
 27

in viewsheds matters; it means something. As the title of the book

suggests, they have visual weight.
s in “Big Rural,” by Cat Rambo. Trish has been sent to investigate
vandalism at the new solar power plant she manages next door to a
dusty farm town, Tierra del Rey, which is also her hometown. She
stops first at an old vantage over town. So integral to her old home-
town’s identity that it has a name, Ojos de Amistad Lookout is a
place from which Spanish conquerors once looked down on the land,
and now the townspeople come to catch the region’s famous sunsets.
Gazing out across familiar terrain, however, Trish finds herself drawn
to a vast black square: Sol Dominion I, an inky black stain of solar
panels spilling across what used to be farmland outside of town. It
is a blight, she discovers, as the story unfolds, that has penetrated
far more than just her view of the sunset. Her family and friends feel
powerless—lodged in the shadow of the enormous power plant—to
prevent distant cities from transforming the very space they inhabit.
So they seek to destroy the plant. It is a blight she can redeem, but
only if she can persuade town leaders and her bosses at the power
company to envision a different relationship between solar energy and
the town’s agricultural history and future.
Solar sightlines are equally central to “Divided Light,” by Corey
S. Pressman. Borrowing from Romeo and Juliet, the story tells the
tale of two lovers, and two families, bound up in two very different
visions of the future of solar energy. One family rules The Thumb: a
giant solar canopy, visible from distant horizons, imposing its will on
the people and lands it shades, a protector against the stark sunlight
of the desert summer, and a source of almost unimaginable power
for both the city and its vast plantations and water purification sys-
tems. The other family are Ramish artisans: entrepreneurial artists
and engineers who craft light into powerful, personalized artifacts.
28 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

Ramish clans are decentralized, scattered across the desert. Layered

into the skin, in luminescent tattoos, or carried by hand, in reed-
like lanterns and batteries, Ramish devices are designed both for
instrumental value, helping people create the resources necessary
to survive in harsh desert environments ravaged by climate change,
and as a source of profound beauty.
Brenda Cooper’s “For the Snake of Power” offers a third variation
on the new infrastructural realities wrapped up in solar energy. It’s
hard to underestimate just how vast the spatial requirements are to
power the human future. An enormous amount of sunlight shines
on the Earth: many times more in one year than all of the world’s
known fossil fuel reserves. Yet that energy is enormously diffuse.
We will have to collect it where it falls. The theoretical physicist
Freeman Dyson imagined encapsulating an entire star in a sphere
of solar-collecting material in order to create the power necessary
for interstellar civilization. We don’t need that much, at least not
yet, but what we do need will be visible. In this story, the form it
takes is a long snake of panels, winding their way along the canals
that slake Phoenix’s thirst and water its grass. By shading the water,
they decrease evaporation, reducing the energy required to pump
water to Phoenix in the first place. It’s a virtuous cycle—until a dust
storm breaks the snake, then power starts to go missing, and all
kinds of politics heat up. It’s a powerful reminder that human societ-
ies depend deeply on their energy systems—and when those systems
go awry, so too can social order.
Social order of a more intimate form is also at stake in “Under
the Grid,” by Andrew Dana Hudson. The only story not set in the
desert, it unfolds in the midst of vibrant bottom-up community
innovation in Detroit. Drawing on a metaphor of gardening, each
homeowner tends her own little patch of sky, with its individually
 29

designed and owned solar system (and who knows what else, like
nests built for migrating endangered birds), in order to contribute
their required share of solar energy to the city’s power grid. When
Ingrid’s mom breaks her leg, however, and the local boys won’t help
out with system maintenance, the neighbors threaten to have her
evicted, and Ingrid is forced to help out. It’s an intricate story that
highlights the complexity of the intersecting technologies, laws,
and social norms that together make up the modern electricity
grid, and the potential for distributed solar energy systems to fur-
ther entangle that knot.

Alongside the future of technological landscapes—real or virtual—

the future of work is now firmly at the center of discussions of tech-
nological innovation. Typically, the problem of technology and work
is formulated in terms of whether automation will replace human
labor. Will there be fewer jobs in the future, or more? That question
has arisen for solar energy, and there have been various attempts to
answer it—none of which are, to date, entirely satisfactory.
What is clear is that the nature of energy work will change. Coal
miners will be replaced by solar system manufacturers and install-
ers. The geography of those jobs will be different. So will their pay,
their unionization, their working conditions, and their relationships
to worker health.⁸
The stories in this book explore this more nuanced question of
the future organization and character of work within the context
of choices about how to design solar energy systems. The questions
they pose are not about how many people will work in the solar
industry, but who will work, where, and how, what work is required
30 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

by different configurations of solar technologies, and how the

responsibilities of that work will be divided across different groups.
A great variety of work is enmeshed in the diverse solar energy
systems captured in the four stories. And that work is distributed
very differently across the stories’ diverse inhabitants. Workers
create and innovate solar systems. Other workers build, operate,
and maintain them. Still others troubleshoot when they go wrong
or operate the legal institutions that regulate their behavior. Some
work in partnership with artificial intelligence systems.
Both “For the Snake of Power” and “Big Rural” focus on solar
energy professionals working in large bureaucracies to manage enor-
mous power systems that straddle vast distances. It is a role that sets
them at odds with others in the stories who live nearby or rely on the
power generated by their facilities, especially when things go wrong.
“You work for power now?” Inez demands angrily of Rosa in “For
the Snake of Power.” It is also a familiar form of work in existing
energy systems. Energy technologies are some of the world’s largest
systems, in terms of both the geographies they cover and the pop-
ulations they serve, and the organizations responsible for them are
some of the world’s largest, as well.
The large size of energy systems creates and reinforces differ-
entiated economic and cultural geographies, such as centers and
peripheries, with significant disparities between them. Trish’s own
departure, in “Big Rural,” from the small agricultural town Tierra
del Rey to the Sol Dominion energy company headquarters—Are
they located in Phoenix, or perhaps in Beijing?—symbolizes the
cultural distance between energy systems managers and Tierra del
Rey’s former coal-plant and agricultural workers displaced by the
new solar energy facilities. At the same time, Trish’s ability to bridge
that distance in the story’s final moments—by envisioning a hybrid
 31

solar-food system that empowers local agricultural innovators and

workforces—suggests a form of imaginative design work that may
be quite important to the future of the solar energy.
Work is also at the heart of “Under the Grid,” but in a wholly
different way. In a distributed energy paradigm, everyone owns
their own solar systems, but they also have to maintain them. It
is a challenge that has bedeviled efforts to deploy solar energy to
serve rural, isolated communities in developing countries. When
something goes wrong, who fixes it? “Under the Grid” also high-
lights the labor of social coordination required to operate decentral-
ized socio-technological systems. Someone has to permit all of the
diverse individual systems. Someone else has to make sure that all
of the system owners are keeping up with their maintenance. And
when that job inevitably generates conflict, someone else again has
to step in to resolve the disputes.
“Divided Light” focuses less on work, although what it does
suggest is interesting. The Umbra Corporation runs The Thumb,
although it remains largely ancillary to the story. The reader learns
only that Radrian’s mother is a “VP of something-or-other” at the
company. For its residents, The Thumb is less about work than about
lifestyle. It’s a place to live and play in comfort. The Sun Belt has
never been, unlike New York, Chicago, or Silicon Valley, a place or
an idea known for its economy or the forms of work and business
it supports, and Shade City continues this tradition. By contrast,
for the Ramish, the work of making—and of making life possible
in the desert—is central to their culture, and yet it is not modern
work, separate from the daily life of the household. Their daily
labor includes working the land, working the technology, working
the food, the water, the light. Work is ubiquitous, overlapping and
blended with home and life, much as we imagine farm life and farm
32 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

work of earlier eras. The Ramish phrase “step into the light” means
to take responsibility for one’s own survival and thriving, and that
of one’s family and one’s community. It is a deep responsibility that
entails extensive work, but work that is of a piece with and inte-
grated into everything that one does—not the clocking in and out
of the factory laborer.
Solar energy requires work. We know that. Indeed, it requires
intricate varieties of work. Opening up the design of that work raises
interesting possibilities for what the future may bring—a fact that
communities may want to think hard about as they anticipate the
future of solar energy.

Power. Solar power. Since the late nineteenth century, when the
word power first began to be used to refer to electricity, drawing on
earlier notions of the power of machines to accomplish work, it has
been recognized that electrical power is intimately related to political
power.⁹ It’s easy for us, today, to understand the relationship between
(electrical) energy and (political) power. After all, oil, too, is a form
of power. Energy, writ large, is one of the world’s largest industries.
It has concentrated wealth and influence enormously in the hands
of those who control it. Energy, moreover, shapes the constitutional
foundations of modern societies, as the world learned in 2017-18 over
the nine months that much of Puerto Rico was without electricity.
Modern forms of technological life are simply not possible without
modern energy systems to support them. Threats to energy security
are thus threats to social and political order and stability.
It is perhaps not a surprise, therefore, that questions about the
design of solar power futures inevitably also involve the design of
 33

energy politics and governance. Hence the persistence of conflict

across all four stories. Part of the focus on conflict is, of course,
the nature of narrative. Good stories often involve conflict as a tool
for keeping the reader’s attention. More importantly for us, conflict
opens up the conversation about design because it draws compet-
ing alternatives into sharp contrast and comparison. Conflict also
focuses attention on the many different people involved in diverse
aspects of energy systems and why each party cares about the situ-
ation at hand. In conflict, we see both why and how design choices
matter. And a lot of conflict boils down to politics and power.
The conflicts are different, however, across the four stories.
Politics can take many forms. We didn’t design the stories that
way. But it’s reflective of the world all of us live in today. Across the
globe, every form of energy is currently under protest, somewhere,
by someone, including solar energy.
In “Big Rural,” conflict occurs between city and countryside over
where solar energy will be built, whether it will displace other forms
of electricity generation, and who benefits from the Sol Dominion
I and II power plants. In other words, it’s about the distribution of
benefits and burdens among diverse stakeholders.
In “For the Snake of Power,” conflict occurs when the power goes
out. A freak dust storm knocks out the snake, but when the power
doesn’t come back on, and the city faces the prospect of 120-degree
temperatures without air conditioning, unrest begins to spark. And
when it turns out that the blackouts aren’t just a result of the acci-
dent, the staff that manages the snake has to fight the powers that
be to get the electricity turned back on. In the end, it’s a conflict
that’s partly about who benefits from the snake’s power, but just as
much about, in a democracy, how decisions about technologies like
the snake get made.
34 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

In “Divided Light,” conflict flares between two communities,

each of whom has pursued a different model of how to build a pho-
ton-based society. The resulting clash of cultures is no longer just
about control over technology or the wealth that flows from it, but
instead about what counts as a good society. As Radrian explains,

To my Shade-City-believer, die-hard-Umbra parents, the

Ramish vision was anathema. The Ramish wanted power
distributed throughout society, not concentrated in a single
company or an enormous grid. They wanted to make their
own food, via whatever hijacking and hacking of nature was
required, not import organic produce from half a world away.
Perhaps most importantly, the Ramish were evangelists, seek-
ing to graft their vision to the soul of New Phoenix. They were
a cult, stealing away Shade City youth and brainwashing the
world. They didn’t want Shade City to succeed or expand.

Finally, in “Under the Grid,” conflict occurs inside the system, in

the formal and informal governance arrangements that enable the
system to operate. In this case, it’s about whether or not people are
living up to their civic duties, but it could just as easily be about a
fight between two engineering teams over how to most efficiently
operate the snake. Whether they’re centralized or distributed,
energy systems entail complex organizational arrangements that
inevitably create internal tensions and disagreements.

The International Energy Agency estimates that it will cost some-

thing like $70 trillion to decarbonize the world’s energy systems
 35

and build a clean energy future.¹⁰ That’s an enormous investment

in the human future.
For many, the only serious question is how fast we can accomplish
the transition to solar energy. It’s a seductive proposition. Climate
change is dangerously transforming our environment. We don’t have
a lot of time left.
Yet, the design choices we face in constructing solar energy
futures are deeply significant in their own right. We could spend
$70 trillion, create an energy system powered entirely by the sun,
and still fail to deliver electricity to the 1 billion people on Earth who
don’t currently have it. That would be among the most unethical
choices ever made in the design of a new technology, whether by
intention or indifference.
We could also arrive at a world in which we are building 1 TW
(terawatt, a trillion watts) worth of solar energy power plants every
year, each lasting for 25 years. That would entail manufacturing, put-
ting up, taking down and either recycling or disposing of, each year,
an area of solar panels eight times the size of Los Angeles. That’s an
enormous construction enterprise to power the planet.
Working alongside of efforts to rapidly scale solar energy to power
the globe, we need a global conversation about how to design solar
futures. Literally everything is at stake.

1. McKinsey, Global Energy Perspective: Reference Case 2018 (2017), https://gep.

mckinseyenergyinsights.com.

2. International Energy Agency, World Energy Investment 2018 (2018), https://

www.iea.org/wei2018.

3. Julian Bleecker, Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and
36 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

Fiction (2009), https://drbfw5wfjlxon.cloudfront.net/writing/DesignFiction_

WebEdition.pdf.

4. Clark A. Miller and Ira Bennett, “Thinking Longer Term about Technology: Is
There Value in Science-Fiction Inspired Approaches to Constructing Futures,”
Science and Public Policy 35, no. 8 (2008): 597-606.

5. Sophie Tatum, “US accuses Russia of cyberattacks on power grid,” CNN, March 17,
2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/15/politics/dhs-fbi-russia-power-grid/index.html.

6. Clark A. Miller, Jason O’Leary, Elisabeth Graffy, Ellen Stechel, Gary Dirks,
“Narrative Futures and the Governance of Energy Transitions,” Futures 70
(2015): 65-74.

7. Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1967 and 1970).

8. See, e.g., The Blue Green Alliance, Jobs21! Good Jobs for the 21st Century
(2016), https://www.bluegreenalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Jobs21-
Platform-vFINAL.pdf.

9. See the definition of “power” in the Oxford English Dictionary, http://oed.com.

10. International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2017 (2017) https://
www.iea.org/weo2017.[Back]
 37

Solar Design
Choices

Geography: Where will solar energy systems be built?

There are many aspects of this choice, including the urban/rural ques-
tion posed by the stories and essays in this collection. But geography
is also about whether we build in deserts or on farms, everywhere or
just in sunny places, on public lands or private lands, on rooftops, in
parking lots, in parks, or as giant shade structures over entire cities,
and much, much more.

Scale: How big will the solar systems of the future be?
Many people argue that the only financially sensible approach is
to build the cheapest solar plants, which at the moment are also
the largest: utility-scale projects of 10+ MW. But distributed, roof-
top-scale systems of a few kW remain popular with households all
over the globe and have many advantages, despite sometimes being
more expensive. Rooftop systems deliver energy at the point of con-
sumption, reducing losses from transmitting energy long distances
and the costs of building and maintaining transmission lines. And
many others advocate for the benefits of community-scale solar
38 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

projects, in the 1-5 MW scale, that power individual neighborhoods

or small communities.

Ownership: Who will own the solar energy of the future and
benefit financially?
Ownership of and financial benefit from existing energy systems tends
to be highly concentrated. Solar systems are already demonstrating the
viability of very different ownership models that distribute financial
risks and rewards in new and innovative ways. Key questions include
scale and distribution of energy ownership (potentially independent of,
or intertwined with, system size and geography) and questions of public
vs. private ownership.

Governance: Who will make the rules for solar energy futures?
Existing energy systems operate under a huge variety of governance
models, from government-owned-and-operated models to regulated
monopolies to electricity markets to internationally traded com-
modities. Solar could arguably easily fit into all of these options and
perhaps some new ones.

Aesthetics: Can solar energy futures be made beautiful?

It’s a taken-for-granted assumption of modern energy landscapes
that energy infrastructures are industrial monstrosities. Where
they aren’t relegated to out-of-the-way locations, they are visual
blights. Folks like the Land Art Generator Initiative, on the other
hand, are exploring whether the future of solar energy is in tour-
ism. Can energy also be art?

Supply Chains: Where do all those solar panels come from?

The design of the solar energy manufacturing industry, with its
 39

factories and transportation systems, is a critical question with

regard to the future of the solar energy workforce (e.g., where will
the jobs be, and what kind of jobs will they be), and how its financial
benefits and environmental risks are distributed. Given the scale of
construction required, it’s also important to consider what materials
get used in manufacturing solar panels and where and how those
materials are dug up and transformed into the building blocks of
PV systems.

Waste: Where do all the dead solar panels go?

We currently expect that solar panels will last 25 years before need-
ing to be replaced. Longer lifecycles may be possible in the future,
but a century from now, we’ll have had to figure out how to dispose
of four generations of solar panels, in very high volumes. How we set
up the plans to do that will have major implications for society and
the environment.
40 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

Big Urban
 
TEAM MEMBERS

Stuart Bowden
Brenda Cooper
Joshua Loughman
Esmerelda Parker
Laura Wentzel
 

Illustration by
Laura Wentzel
41
42 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES
 BIG URBA N 43

For the Snake

of Power
By Brenda Cooper

Rosa rubbed at her eyes, trying in vain to focus on the map in front of
her. The electronic image of the great—and greatly damaged—solar
snake that covered the canals of Phoenix swam in her vision. The
snake had been bruised, battered, and in a few places, actually broken
by the huge dust storm that had enveloped the city three days ago. A
haboob. Uncountable motes of dust carried in on a scorching wind
and left behind to dim solar panels, catch in the wires that held them
together, and clog the maintenance robots. Such tiny things to have
done such damage. Forty-three deaths. Trees knocked down and signs
ripped from the ground and hundred-year-old saguaros laid flat. But
those weren’t her problem. Power was.
The snake had been overengineered on purpose, built to supply
the future. She’d been working with the snake’s maintenance AI,
HANNA, for two years now, and even with the dust and the damage,
the vast, beautiful array should create enough power.
“HANNA?” Rosa addressed the AI, which listened through a but-
ton-sized speaker on her desk. “Have you figured out why the power
drawdown keeps getting worse?”
Rosa had chosen an old woman’s voice for the AI. It sounded calm
44 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

as it said, “Not yet. I will keep looking.”

A stray thought made Rosa tell it, “Look beyond the engineering.
If you haven’t seen a problem there, then the problem is somewhere
else. Power storage? Legal?”
“Is that permission?” HANNA asked.
Rosa hesitated. But HANNA wouldn’t ask if Rosa couldn’t give it
permission. “Yes.”
“Logged.”
“I’m walking down to the closest break.”
“You have worked 14 hours today.”
The machine wasn’t responsible for maintenance on her. “Maybe
if I see for myself, I’ll understand. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Rosa.”
Rosa left the building, still wearing her blue Salt River Project
work shirt. A hot, dry wind created a small cloud of dust that
tickled her ankles. After half an hour, Rosa spotted the snake’s
glow from a block away. Its pale blue and yellow lights looked
brighter than usual with the streetlights dimmed to half power.
As she stepped under the arch and onto the pathway, she startled
as a maintenance robot scuttled overhead, a tiny broom stuck to one
“arm” and an air puffer clenched in the other. It reminded her of a
fantastical creature from fiction, half squirrel and half Swiss-army
knife.
The path was busy. Two young women wearing roller skates and
pushing children in carriages slowed her. Hoverboards and bicycles
sped in both directions.
Her earpod pinged softly and she touched it. A newsnote, read
in a flat masculine voice. “The Association of Solar Power raised
rates yet again, citing a deficit of power. Brownouts are scheduled
 BIG URBA N 45

to begin at noon tomorrow. Schedules will be posted at 7:00 a.m.”

In summer, brownouts killed. She clenched her fists.
As she neared the break, the walls separating the neighborhoods
from the canal looked haphazard. A bit of chain link, a makeshift
wooden fence, a neat brick section, an adobe segment with the
shards of glass embedded in its top glittering softly in the snake’s
light. Her old home. She had been gone six years. She didn’t recog-
nize the people lounging against the walls, sharing beer and listen-
ing to music. Two young men stared at her, and suddenly she wished
she had changed out of her SRP shirt.
As she passed, conversations lowered or changed tenor, although
no one approached.
She reached the break and stopped under it, staring up. The snake
undulated throughout the city, sometimes only 20 feet above the
canals and sometimes the height of a tall building, the design part
art and all function. The taller loops reached for sun that buildings
or bridges would block. This break was near where a segment began
to rise. Three supports had come down. Solar scales had shattered
on the pathway and, almost certainly, into nearby backyards. A few
still dangled, askew, edges connected to the wire scaffolding that
managed the panel’s tilt.
The breach was serious, but a hundred yards beyond it the snake
continued up toward the top of this curve, lights on, clearly working.
Every two or three poles carried power and optics into underground
conduits. Any break could only affect the area of the break plus two
segments at worst. The snake had lost four segments of power here,
but there were thousands. HANNA reported 153 segments out, which
was less than 10 percent.
Tonight’s low was expected to be 95, and next day’s high 121. The
rich often had their own systems. If not, they had cool places to go,
46 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

and transportation to power if they needed it for oxygen tanks or

powered wheelchairs. The poor wouldn’t even be able to run a fan.
Rosa had held her grandmother’s hand when she died of heat in
the power wars of ‘32. She had been just seven years old, sweating
and miserable, her head afire with heat and dehydration, singing to
her grandmother. She’d felt her grandmother’s hand go limp, had
seen the life fade from her smile, her cheeks, her eyes. Rosa had
cried, hot and miserable, and slept with her head on her dead grand-
mother’s chest until her father found her there an hour later.
She swallowed, able as always to feel the slip of that hand into
death. Some memories burned themselves into your soul.
Steps from behind drew her out of her reverie.
“Rosa. That you? That really you?”
Although she hadn’t heard it for five years, the voice was family.
Home. Rosa turned and smiled. “Inez.”
“You work for power now? For SR f’ing P?”
Rosa took a step back, slightly put off by the sheer press of Inez’s
voice, and of her body, which was bigger than she remembered,
broader and more muscular. The light from the snake and the path
lights combined to paint Inez’s face a dull blue. “Yes.”
“You going to fix this?”
“SRP is doing everything possible to restore power …” The look on
Inez’s face made Rosa hear the corpspeak she was spilling out, and
she stopped. Took a breath. Looked right at Inez. “If I can.”
The two women stood quiet long enough for Rosa to wonder if
Inez was as unsure of what to say as she was, then Inez said, “I knew
you’d do okay. I’m sorry. I just didn’t … expect … I didn’t think you’d
become …”
“The enemy?” Rosa smiled. “I’m not.”
Inez merely stared.
 BIG URBA N 47

They had been good friends once. Done homework together.

Skipped school together. Yet Rosa felt a distance from Inez that
bothered her. “Are you okay?”
“I got two kids. Mom’s sick. Dad died.”
“I’m sorry. About the sickness. Congratulations on the kids.” She
was stuttering. Was Inez married? She didn’t remember. “Sorry
about your dad.”
“He was a bastard.” Inez’s shoulders relaxed a tiny bit and she
smiled. “The kids are great. Lonny’s five and likes to cause trouble.
His little brother, José, he’s small and smart.”
“And your mom? I remember she used to make me chipotle and
chicken soup when I had a cold.” Inez’s mom, Maria, had smiled
whenever Rosa ate her soup, and Rosa had felt better whenever
Maria smiled. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s been wishing to die since dad left us. But I don’t want her
to die.”
“I understand. Remember my grandmother?”
“Yes.” Inez swallowed and shifted her weight. “I came to tell you
to be careful. There’s people who don’t care for SRP here. And you
just raised the rates again.”
“I didn’t. Besides, SRP doesn’t set rates anymore. That’s the gov-
ernor’s Association of Solar Power. The ASP. A committee.”
Inez narrowed her eyes. “People still hate SRP.”
Rosa nodded. After her grandmother died, she’d hated SRP. She’d
hated them until they championed the snake. Then she’d loved them.
The snake was supposed to make power available for everyone, rich
or not, as long as they wanted it. Since the rich had their own sys-
tems, the snake was a public work for the poor. The cheap power and
net connectivity that ran down the snake had helped her compete
in high school, helped her get grants for college, helped her with
48 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

everything for five years. Now all that was threatened, and for no
reason Rosa understood.
“You should go,” Inez said.
Rosa nodded, glancing once more at the destroyed sections of the
solar array. “I’m tired. I’ve been working all day.”
“Killed a boy when that came down. Nine months old.”
Rosa swallowed. “I’m sorry.” That hadn’t been in the regular
news. But she’d be able to find the information if she looked. This
neighborhood had its own news sources that flowed through the
knots of idle poor like water running downhill.
“Come back on a better day,” Inez’s smile was faint, but genuine.
“I want to know how you are.”
Rosa thought about leaning in for a hug, but extended her hand
instead. Inez took it, her grip strong. She repeated her request.
“Come back.”
“Soon.” It felt like an empty promise and she wondered at that,
unhappy with herself. What right did she have to ignore this place
she’d come from?

The next morning, she arrived an hour early for her shift. As she
threw her lunch into the crowded fridge, she said, “HANNA. Good
morning. Anything?”
As always, HANNA was right there. “I found three large con-
tributing factors. We have been working on the tracking system
failures.”
They had. For a year. “And there are still no parts. Go on.”
“Weather.”
Rosa sat down and began turning up her systems. “Like the dust
 BIG URBA N 49

storm from hell.”

“And the one before that? No. It’s an average of three degrees
warmer so far this summer.”

“I know that,” Rosa replied.

“People have used seven percent more air conditioning.”
She hadn’t known that. The SRP staff infoweb loaded up on her
screen.
“And power is leaving the system.”
“I know.” She scanned the web. The brownout schedule would
post in 15 minutes. Call-takers had been pulled in early. The
Emergency Operations Center would stay activated. A hot wind
would come today. No storm. She blinked. “How much power? More
than usual?”
“The usual amount. Twenty percent.”
She frowned. HANNA was feeding her data slowly, making her
think. One of its described duties was staff training, but she’d
thought she was beyond most of that. “So it’s 20 percent of power,
no matter how much we generate?”
HANNA said, “It’s a fixed amount equal to 20 percent of full
capacity.”
Rosa stopped moving. “That amount doesn’t get reduced in an
emergency?”
“No.”
Her screen filled with snippets of contracts. She had interned with
the law department; she could parse the language. As she reviewed
the clauses HANNA sent, a deep revulsion rose in her.
The governor had signed away 20 percent of their power.
The SRP power grid was the snake, and it was meant for Arizona’s
poor and middle classes. Not for the cooler north. She poured a cup
50 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

of coffee, took a deep breath, and went to find her boss.

Susannah Smith was in her office, drumming her fine, thin fingers
on the table. Her usually curled hair hung around her shoulders, still
damp, and she looked as tired as Rosa felt. Nevertheless, she glanced
up and smiled as Rosa entered. “Did you sleep last night?”
“Not well.”
“Is everything OK?” Susannah turned her attention back to her
computer. “The lists just posted. I hope you brought a lunch. We may
not get out today.”
“I have a question.”
“Ask away.”
“The governor sold our power. Did you know that?”
Susannah turned back around. “We’ve always sold off our excess
power.”
“This isn’t excess. Chicago and Salt Lake have first dibs. That’s
new.”
For a brief moment, surprise flashed across Susannah’s face, and
her lips opened to speak, but she clamped them into a frown. She
shrugged. “This is not our problem. We support maintenance, not
contracts.”
“But surely in an emergency …”
Susannah’s glare was uncompromising. “We can’t fix it.”
Why did Susannah look so angry? “Why not?”
“Not you and I. And not today.” Susannah stood up, which made
her a few inches taller than Rosa. “Can I help you prioritize your
work?”
Rosa wasn’t ready to give up. “Who can change it?”
“The ASP.” Susannah took a step toward her, not menacing, but
pressing. “Go on. We’ve all got full plates today, and long days.”
True enough. “I can’t—”
 BIG URBA N 51

“Go.”
Susannah had never used that tone of voice with her. Rosa went,
angry tears stinging the corners of her eyes and nails digging into
her palm.
Back in her office, HANNA swept her into work and she spent the
morning cataloguing the missing solar panels, checking HANNA’s
designs, and approving orders for materials and for the maintenance
bots. At least they didn’t need to worry about the price of replace-
ment panels. The governor had managed to get an emergency decla-
ration and FEMA would pay.
Every way she could think of to fix this was constrained by the
governor’s bad contract, or slowed to idiocy by the multitudes of
safety mechanisms that threaded throughout SRP—half of them rel-
ics from the days when power ran on high-voltage lines and touching
it killed.
Right before lunch, Rosa sent a note to Callie, who had been her
formal mentor when she started this job, and who had continued to
help her. Callie could get anything through the stifling bureaucracy.
She agreed to meet in Rosa’s office for lunch.
Callie plunked her huge frame in the chair and threw her head
back, almost dislodging the big, messy bun of gray hair that crowned
her head. “Are you as tired as I am? The phones are crazed, and
there’s three old women with protest signs out front. Hard to spin
this.”
Rosa told Callie what she’d learned, and shared her conversation
with Susannah.
Callie frowned. “That’s way upstream. There’s nothing we can
do.”
The word we gave Rosa hope. “Are you sure?” She glanced at her
computer. “It’s 118 degrees already.” Her voice rose. “People will die,
52 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

to give power to Chicago, where’s it’s only 92 degrees. There’s noth-

ing fair about that!”
Callie shook her head and popped open a coffee bulb. “No. But
you and I can’t change it. Policy. I can get stuff done, but only to
support SRP or the workers.” She sipped her coffee, brows furrowed.
“You mess with this, you might get fired.”
“I told Susannah. She was surprised. I could see that in her eyes.
But she sent me away.”
“Susannah’s been here long enough to know what’s what. Some
things.” Callie rolled her eyes and held out a coffee bulb. “Have one
of these.”
So Callie wasn’t going to help her either? Rosa took the coffee, and
drank so fast she burned her tongue.
During her next break, she used her personal phone to try calling
the governor. The lines were busy.
Every little thing she did to help fix the snake felt like pulling
a single needle out of a ball of cactus. This shouldn’t be an emer-
gency, and they shouldn’t be using workarounds and running bots
past their maintenance cycles. They should have time to be careful.
She ran into Callie on the way out of the door. “This is still
wrong,” she told her. “Three people died already. Old people. In one
day of brownouts. It will get worse.”
“The city is opening cooling shelters.”
“For how many people?”
The look on Callie’s face told her it wasn’t enough, and she didn’t
even answer the question. She just said, “You’re doing your best.”
“It’s not good enough.”
“All you can do is your best.”
Rosa stared into Callie’s eyes. “Maybe I can do better.”
It was already bedtime when she finished wading through the
 BIG URBA N 53

heat to her one-room apartment. Someone had posted the brown-

out schedule on her door, and a list of power conservation tips.
She glanced at it, realized she had two more hours of cooling, and
passed out on the bed in her uniform.

When she woke near dawn, her limbs were heavy with a dark anger
she couldn’t put any images to. Sweat beaded her brow and clung
to her hair. As she stared out the window at the whitening sky, the
anger pushed her out of bed and into a clean uniform. She ate a
handful of berries and two pieces of toast, then plaited her hair into
long braids that would be cool.
She stepped outside and started toward work, then she stopped. If
she went in this morning, the anger would consume her. She had felt
pride in her work until yesterday. Not now. She worked for the power
company, and she knew what it was to die from lack of power. Her
hands shook, so she clenched her fists. She turned and walked fast
back toward her old home. She could lose her dream, her job. But if
she could save a grandmother somewhere …
Usually, the long canal soothed her. But this morning, the whole
thing—the wide canal, the arching snake of power, the graffiti on one
wall, the elegant natural art on the bridges—all of it felt like separation.
Inez was easy to find; her mother and sister still lived in the
same old, faded green house. While the sister told Rosa where to
find Inez, she kept glancing warily toward the SRP logo on her
shirt. But she asked no questions.
Inez sat on the front stoop of a pop-up brick house, small and
square and exactly like the three next to it except for a mural of
a donkey on the side wall. Inez’s children were both slender and
54 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

dark-haired and shy. After introductions, Rosa asked, “Who matters

here now? Who tells the neighborhood things?”
Inez stood, the boys behind her, the taller one peering out and
the shorter one hiding behind Inez’s ample right thigh. “What news
do you have?”
Rosa told her about the contracts.
Inez looked more angry than surprised. After a few moments,
she asked, “Do you remember Penélope López? She was two years
behind us in school.”
“Maybe.” She imagined a thin girl with short dark curls who liked
high-heeled boots, even in summer.
“She’s got a local show. Regular dissenter, that one. A good girl.”
Inez picked both boys up, balancing one on each hip. She pounded
on her neighbor’s door and shoved the boys inside, then led Rosa to
Penélope, who still wore high-heeled boots, but was taller now, and
angry. Rosa told her story and Penélope wrote.
As she talked, Rosa’s stomach burned. She was an hour late to
work, and she was wearing an SRP uniform and telling tales on the
most powerful public company in Phoenix.
Next, Inez took her to Jack, a tall black man in dreads with a soft
smile. He had read Penélope’s post. “I love what you said. Truth to
Power.” His smile widened. “May I? It will be live. It will be now.”
Rosa swallowed. “Who will see it?”
“Everybody.”
Rose hesitated.
Inez watched her.
Jack smiled, full of patience.
Rosa nodded.
Jack handed Inez a camera so small Rosa kept losing sight of it.
She was careful only to say what she knew, to use facts, and Jack
 BIG URBA N 55

asked her hard questions. When she refused to answer some, he said,
“That’s okay. You can refuse. That tells us as much as an answer.”
That made her stop and breathe, and worry, but she kept going.
She was saving a grandmother.
Jack held out a hand, leaned in, and hugged her, smelling faintly
of smoke and apples. “You’re brave,” he whispered. He led her to
the canal, and they stood near the break where the hanging wires
showed. He asked her some of the same questions again while Inez
zoomed in on her shirt and her brown face and long braids.
Rosa leaned into her words. It was hers now, her choice, her
story, her anger.
An old woman who carried herself like a turtle came up and
hugged her. She turned to Jack, who interviewed the old woman
while she called for everyone to come and protest, to stand under
the shade of the snake and be heard.
Penélope called Inez, and said she, too, would call for a protest.
Over the next hour, the paths under the snake began to fill. People
brought water and food, chairs and signs. They also brought anger,
children, dogs, and music.
Rosa did three more interviews.
By the time the Phoenix news channels showed up, the paths were
full, and rumors that other neighborhoods had joined reached her.
Even middle-class neighborhoods, ones that had their own power. A
news program let her read their signs, which had been crafted with
glue and glitter and fancier markers than the ones near Rosa. But they
said the same things.

POWER TO PHOENIX
THE SNAKE IS OURS
POWER FOR ALL
56 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

As the day wore on, the signs grew angrier and more clever.

THE SNAKE FEEDS US ALL

GET THE SNAKE OUT OF OFFICE
FOR THE SNAKE OF POWER

A college-age couple resting on a bench shaped like a rock with

thornless cactus arms recognized Rosa and stood up together, ges-
turing for her to sit. She blinked at them for a moment, but when the
woman inclined her head and quietly said, “Thank you,” Inez sat and
pulled Rosa down next to her and the couple melted into the crowd.
Despite the snake’s shade over the bench and the water flowing
five feet from them, the heat punished. Protestors clumped together
under the solar panels, and Rosa swiped sweat from her brow. Young
men worked the crowd, selling metered pours of water from great
sacs they rolled in front of them on red wagons. Newscams hovered
in the air, some clearly violating the rules about proximity to people.
Felipe, who Rosa had burned for in eighth grade, came and shook
her hand. His warm, sweaty touch drew a nervous smile and Rosa
momentarily felt like her younger self even though Felipe dangled a
girl of three or four on his hip.
An international news channel came by and interviewed her in
horrible Spanish, and she managed not to laugh while she repeated
her simple litany of facts. The reporter’s camera zoomed in on the
logo on her shirt. “You are a whistleblower?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I love my job, and SRP. But people had to
know about the contracts. Three people died from heat already today.
More will.”
Voices rose. A water seller who had stopped near them after sell-
ing out climbed up on his wagon and called out, “Police!” He turned
 BIG URBA N 57

and faced Rosa. “They come for you! Go.”

Rosa stood, confused. People bunched in front of her, some chant-
ing Save the Snake! or Power to the People!
Inez climbed up on the back of the bench. Her eyes widened. “Riot
gear.”
In spite of the wilting heat, of a hot wind, of the sun now high
overhead and unrelenting, in spite of all that, the crowd continued
to bunch. Inez said, “They’re blocking the police.”
The water seller, peering back and forth like a crow from his van-
tage a foot or two higher than her, said, “Not for long.”
A hand fell hard on Rosa’s shoulder. “There you are.”
Rosa turned to find Callie staring at her. She’d stripped off her
uniform and wore a hat that might hide her face in such a large
crowd. “Susannah locked you out of the building.”
It didn’t surprise Rosa, but it hurt.
Callie offered an unexpected smile and said, “I told this to the
Arizona Republic.” She looked like she had just won the lottery, her
eyes glittering with energy.
Rosa stuttered. “You … you did? Couldn’t you get fired, too?”
“No. I retired before I talked to the paper. I came because of you.
What you said to me, that we had to care, you made me ashamed.”
“So you’re safe?”
“Yes. I think so. But you’re not.”
“I don’t mind.” Rosa leaned in to hug Callie. “Thank you.”
“I came to thank you. For saying you could do better. I decided
I could, too.”
Rosa smiled.
The water seller called, “Something’s happening!”
Rosa glanced at him, but Callie said, “Wait.”
When Rosa turned back, Callie told her, “HANNA and I did
58 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

something before I lost access.”

Inez, still balancing on the back of the bench, called out, “They’re
coming closer. We can move faster than they can. We should go.”
Callie shook her head. “No need. HANNA helped me turn off the
transmission.”
Rosa blinked. “What transmission?
“The lines going to Chicago. I know someone with a backdoor to
HANNA, and he helped me. It’s enough. Just the protests might have
done it. But you made me want to help. The governor will announce
soon.”
Rosa stared at her mentor, blinking back tears and sweat. Callie
had always loved her job, always defended it. She had hated much
of the process, but never the real work. And now she had been this
insubordinate? “Will they arrest you?”
Callie was still grinning. “And admit their own AI helped?” She
shook her head. “There will be a press conference. The governor will
say she was going to use the money to repair the snake.”
“Was she?” Rosa asked.
Callie shrugged. “Who cares? We win. People don’t die.”
The water seller said, “You should go.”
Rosa looked at Callie. “Other money can pay for repairs.”
Callie glanced at her watch. “It might already be over.”
A roar from the crowd was hard to interpret, a wave of tired
whoops and louder calls, a few whistles. The water seller said it first.
“The brownouts are cancelled.”
Rosa and Callie shared a long smile. In spite of the heat, Callie
folded Rosa in her arms. She whispered, “I’ll find you.”
Rosa turned to help Inez down. By the time she looked for Callie
again, she was gone.
“You did this,” Inez said.
 BIG URBA N 59

“I had help.”
“This wouldn’t have happened without you.”
The water seller hopped off of his wagon. “The police are almost
here.” He began to move away, and Inez pulled Rosa after him, and
in a moment the crowds had enfolded them both, pushing them
down the river of people under the snake.
She had done better. She would find a way to bear the price. It felt
good to be home.
60 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES
 BIG URBA N 61

Lessons from the Snake:

Energy and Society
By Joshua Loughman

As a scholar who focuses on the intersection of technology and soci-

ety, I’m struck by the seamless interweaving of the two in Brenda
Cooper’s story “For the Snake of Power.” The story captures both
a compelling struggle between characters and the complex unin-
tended consequences stemming from emerging technology.
A major framework for thinking about the future of energy and
society is the energy trilemma. This framework considers three
important dimensions that are in tension: energy security, energy
equity, and environmental integrity.
Ensuring energy security in electricity and fuels is costly, as it
entails maintaining redundant systems to cover an array of possi-
bilities and requires resiliency in the face of threats ranging from
natural disasters, terrorism, and aging systems to fluctuations in
commodity prices and international trade. Investments are made
decades in advance, which means that decisions are made with
significant uncertainty. Striving for security means the most
demanding cases have to be planned for. Trying to optimize for
energy affordability and access can reduce the capital needed for
62 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

investments in new technology and maintenance of multiple infra-

structures. But cheap and abundant energy, produced primarily by
fossil fuels, leads to greater emissions, making performance in the
third leg—environmental integrity—difficult.
The story navigates these tensions overtly in some places and
subtly in others. Energy security is in part a result of having resil-
ient systems. As the snake succumbs, in part, to natural disaster,
we witness the logic of energy security and the need for redundant,
overlapping systems, which are lacking in this case. The story’s
focus on an unfolding crisis also highlights the technical points
of failure (the damage due to the storm) and the social and polit-
ical points of failure (the failure of energy security due to social
arrangements—in this case, a public-private energy contract). The
story is timely, as there are clear parallels with the ongoing chal-
lenges faced by Puerto Rico concerning the failure of their energy
system in the long aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Energy equity
turns on the issue of access. The central conflict in the story is the
lack of access, for the local community, due to the esoteric contrac-
tual commitments between the Salt River Project utility and other
cities outside of Arizona. Lack of access due to brownouts is not
all, though. As prices rise, the cost of access is equally important.
Some in the community can afford to be off-grid with their own
solar systems, while large segments of the community are left in
the dark in the event of a crisis. As for environmental integrity,
the third leg of the energy trilemma, the story addresses this more
subtly. There are a few reminders that the future will be hotter,
although it’s already scorching in Phoenix during most of the year.
Even with substantial changes in energy systems to reduce emis-
sions, significant warming is locked in. The global phenomenon of
climate change will have local effects on land use and water use, as
 BIG URBA N 63

well as changes in ecosystems.

Beyond the energy trilemma, “For the Snake of Power” high-
lights a more fundamental concern about energy configurations. By
depicting a large-scale plant that resides in an urban environment
(as opposed to, say, a highly distributed solar scheme with panels
on rooftops, in yards, etc.), the story makes it clear that there are
many alternatives when thinking about energy futures, even when
we limit the technology to a single kind of energy collection process
like solar. When thinking about the rapid growth of renewables it’s
easy to fall into the habit of thinking that our choices are between
fossil fuels on one hand and clean-energy alternatives on the other.
But even within the category of solar energy, it’s clear from this story
that we need to question that binary assumption and appreciate the
different ways these systems can be configured.
Among energy scholars, there is also debate about the degree
to which technologies should be centralized or decentralized. For
decades, solar has been hailed as a tool for democratizing energy
production and consumption by being distributed and easily con-
figured as a personal energy production tool, akin to a household
appliance (think a small cluster of solar panels on every rooftop). In
the context of this debate, “For the Snake of Power” is provocative
in two ways. First, the wealthy are the first to take advantage of
advances in personal solar technology, which exacerbates inequal-
ity issues. This is a trend that we’re already seeing today: Some
studies have shown that, given the way residential solar systems
are financed, only wealthier households are able to install them.¹
This puts pressure on utilities to raise prices on middle-class and
working-class customers. In reaction to this escalating inequality,
the Arizona state government and the public utility, Salt River
Project, create the snake. The snake is a community good—public
64 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

artwork, community space, symbol of cooperation and equity, and

critical infrastructure for equalizing access to electricity. Protests
begin when the snake’s status as an asset for the whole community
is compromised by the governor’s out-of-state contracts. Second, the
key element of solar’s democratizing power is usually understood as
its ability to be distributed, allowing for greater individual and local
control over energy generation. This story offers an alternative nar-
rative, suggesting that even when solar power is concentrated it can
be used to widespread benefit if the political will is there—although
that beneficence may need to be defended from time to time.
“For the Snake of Power” has special significance for me because
I study how different ways of configuring renewable energy affect
social and political systems. Energy systems are critical parts of how
we live in the world and are interconnected with the broader sweep of
technology, infrastructure, and markets, as well as cultures, lifestyles,
politics, and the environment. Despite these inextricable connections,
most decision-making about energy systems only takes into account
narrow technological and economic factors. The tools that policymak-
ers and energy companies use to inform these considerations are usu-
ally quantitative models of one kind or another. These models could
be cost-benefit analyses, extrapolation of current trends, or statistical
interpretations of economic data—each with their own strengths and
limitations. In my research, I explore how a holistic appreciation of
social and environmental factors can be integrated into decision tools
and the policies that are made with those tools. One of the main ways
I do this is by drawing on narratives such as speculative fiction and
scenario analysis—a method used to systematically explore uncertain
futures through dynamic combination of change factors. I look for
patterns and dynamics within these stories that aren’t well-repre-
sented in quantitative models. In “For the Snake of Power,” two gems
 BIG URBA N 65

have inspired some new thinking along these lines.

The first is how the story provides a concrete example of the ways
that legal and contractual elements can have perverse unintended
consequences. How can we infuse the uncertain effects of policy,
law, bureaucratic action, organizational structure, and other similar
variables into a quantitative analysis? At a minimum, recognizing
that these features are embedded in energy systems will help remind
us to question the assumptions of traditional methods built on sta-
tistical models.
Second, many analyses of energy systems look at energy pro-
duction in terms of technical use data, kilowatt-hours, and the like.
These measures express the amount of electricity consumed by an
end-user, which is often a smooth continuum of data. But in reality,
electricity use goes up and down; sometimes communities have an
abundance, and other times they have shortfalls. These changes in
demand, in traditional energy models, modulate electricity prices
in smooth and predictable ways. However, at the intersection of
changes in system performance (perhaps due to environmental
damage) and extreme weather (heat, in the case of the story’s future
vision of Phoenix), there are nonlinear results that are extreme and
consequential. In “For the Snake of Power,” those nonlinear ele-
ments are deaths and civil disobedience. As a city or community
follows a certain lifestyle and energy use pattern for a long period
of time, a path dependency can occur. In Phoenix, most buildings
have air conditioning, and this shapes people’s behavior. For much
of the year, people avoid outdoor activities and opt to stay at home,
or shuttle from air-conditioned cars to the mall or the movie theater.
Families budget for significant spikes in cooling costs as the weather
turns hot, and people of means flee the Phoenix area in large num-
bers for cooler climes. The hottest summer months in Phoenix can
66 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

be as insular as cold winters in other regions—in both cases, people

adjust their behaviors and lifestyles to avoid being outdoors. When
the AC goes out, that can be a major adjustment and disruption.
Some social norms and patterns will lead to improved adaptability
and others could result in great vulnerability. For example, as we
experience more frequent and intense heat waves, cities that have
adapted to living with heat, such as Phoenix, might be able to cope
more readily. On the other hand, as communities rely more on the
energy infrastructures that provide these services, the more vulner-
able they are to system failure. Exploring this idea further will be
a great challenge for understanding the intersection of speculative
fiction and quantitative energy futures.
Quietly, “For the Snake of Power” is a story about decision-making:
which factors and people we choose to emphasize, and which ones are
excluded or unnoticed. HANNA, the helpful AI agent and co-protago-
nist, is a reminder of how decision technologies can be interactive and
encourage empathy and critical thinking. The sources of information
that decision-makers often rely on, like statistical models and compu-
tational tools, can often seem abstract, slavish to objective measures,
inhuman. HANNA reminds us that while information is critical for
working through the tough problems that crop up with complex sys-
tems like energy, we must look beyond markets and technical perfor-
mance and consider the cultures, conflicts, politics, and messy daily
lives of the people who depend on those systems.

1. See, for example, Clark A. Miller, Jennifer Richter, and Jason O’Leary, “Socio-
Energy Systems Design: A policy Framework for Energy Transitions,” Energy
Research & Social Science 6 (2015): 29-40.
 BIG URBA N 67

Drawing from Nature:

Designing a Solar Snake
By Esmerelda Parker

The design features that guided our group’s work on “For the Snake
of Power” were large-scale urban solar installations with a particu-
lar focus on aesthetics. We set our story in a more populous future
version of Phoenix—a city which had undertaken an aggressive
solar infrastructure project in an effort to reduce energy inequal-
ity. This left our group with the challenge of figuring out where we
could incorporate a large, continuous installation of solar panels
in a densely populated urban environment. Looking at maps of the
city, it occurred to us that the canal system twists and turns its
way throughout the present-day greater Phoenix area. Projecting
that these canals would continue to exist in our future society, we
decided that our solar system would run everywhere above them.
The placement of the structure would serve two additional pur-
poses: providing shade on the paths running alongside the canal
and reducing the amount of canal water lost to evaporation.
The winding nature of these canals reminded us of the curves of
a snake as it slithers across the ground. This became the basis for
our focus on aesthetics. The snake, as we named our installation,
68 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

stretches for miles, looming above the canals as it winds its way
through the city. Its panels look like scales, glistening and swaying
slightly with the breeze. It is made up of hundreds of miles of small,
individual, scale-shaped panels linked together by a series of wires.
The design allows enough light to filter through the otherwise over-
whelming structure to give a sense of openness to the area under-
neath, but it does little to distract from its enormity. The vision here
was to create a beautiful power generation and delivery system, in
contrast to the cruder design of wires strung between utility poles.
The wires running through the snake and into the buildings powered
by it are concealed in its supportive structures and underground.
All that is visible are the snake’s scales and supportive structures,
integrated seamlessly and artistically.
Throughout the story, we played on imagery associated with
snakes. In certain areas of the city, the snake is surrounded by scenes
of carnage. The haboob that devastates the snake before the start of
our narrative had left panels strewn all over the ground and in peo-
ple’s backyards. Instead of looking like a snake which had shed its
scales, the bare skeleton protrudes from the ground like a decaying
corpse in areas damaged by the storm. Although only a few days pass
without repairs beginning, hopelessness washes over Phoenix’s resi-
dents because of the dangerously hot weather. This quickly turns to
anger at their public utility, Salt River Project. The snake which had
once brought cheap power to their homes now seems to strangle their
neighborhoods.
This juxtaposition highlights our story’s focus on energy inequal-
ity. The morning after Rosa confronts her boss Susannah, she finds
herself thinking that “the wide canal, the arching snake of power,
the graffiti on one wall, the elegant natural art on the bridges, all
of it felt like separation.” The scale of the snake makes it nearly
 BIG URBA N 69

impossible to miss, but the damage done by the storm exposes the
hidden parts of the snake: wires hanging in tattered messes from
the normally seamless array. It’s only when the structure has been
damaged that the inner workings of the system are exposed—just
as the crisis caused by the haboob reveals the legal and political
machinery that is siphoning power away from the Phoenicians who
depend on it. This narrative runs parallel to Rosa working to expose
the other secret part of the snake: where its power is going. This
second narrative thread is where we chose to incorporate concepts
of governance and ownership. Who should decide where the power
from the snake goes and who gets to use it? Driven by her past expe-
riences and dismay at the loss of life from the haboob and the sub-
sequent brownouts, Rosa puts her career in jeopardy to ensure that
this power is kept for use by the most vulnerable people in Phoenix.
To tie all of the design considerations together, we wanted to
emphasize the fact that the snake is designed to do more than just
produce energy. The snake is the largest public works project under-
taken in the lifetime of Phoenix’s residents. It was constructed to
create areas of shade along the banks of the canal, allowing rec-
reational activities to flourish in the otherwise scorching desert.
This is especially important in areas of Phoenix that had too often
been overlooked for improvements by the city’s government. These
areas are the ones Rosa is fighting for. She can’t stand to see their
inhabitants left to suffer in heat that proves fatal for some and over-
whelming for many more. To Rosa, the snake and its power belong
to these people—not Phoenix, and not SRP. This is why she and her
fellow protestors use the snake to gather support, calling on people
“to stand under the shade of the snake and be heard” to oppose
the selling of power outside of the state. In this moment, the snake
reclaims its original purpose: protecting those who need it most.
70 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

Small Urban
 
TEAM MEMBERS

Michael Duah
Zoe Elison
Andrew Dana Hudson
Darshan M.A. Karwat
Lauren Withycombe Keeler
 
 
Illustration by
Michael Duah
71
72 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES
 SMALL URBAN 73

Under the Grid

By Andrew Dana Hudson

“I have a theory that we could measure cultural sophistication by

the occurrence rate of puns,” Trevor texted. “The more concepts
and connections in a time-place, the more linguistic opportunities
for people to make bad jokes.”
“Uh huh.” Ingrid only half watched the noties, focusing instead on
swiping through paperwork: HOA waiver tickets to resolve, memos
about algorithmic tweaks in the approval pipeline, timesheets to jus-
tify her existence to the Emergency Government and their Chinese/
European backers. “Guess that ‘PhoTown’ branding really is an indi-
cator of successful urban renewal then.”
“Mayhap one day we’ll be so complex that every possible combi-
nation of words will constitute a pun,” Trevor continued. “This is
my singularity.”
Ingrid snorted. “Preach!” she tapped.
Three dates in was usually the sweet spot for banter. Seeing each
other naked lowered the conversational stakes. Suddenly people
let you in on what was actually going on in their heads. But it was
Tuesday, and she had two afternoon site visits in Grosse Pointe to
prep for.
She had to spend a disproportionate amount of her time inspect-
ing such neighborhoods. First, because rich enclaves resented
74 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

Emergency’s suspension of municipal governance, so they were

more likely to use homeowner association agreements to claw back
some of their autonomy. Second, because white people had to be
handled with kid gloves if she wanted to avoid hours of “let me talk
to your manager” appeals.
Trevor’s texts kept coming. “All of which is just a setup for the
following: has anyone ever told you …”
“Don’t say it!”
“… It’s pretty ironic that you work on the Grid instead of, pause
for effect, in the Grid?”
“Never, actually,” Ingrid replied. “The rapture must be at hand.”
“baby … broke my leg ”
That wasn’t Trevor. She picked up her phone.
“Mama, where are you?”
Her mother texted, “ ”
Ingrid chewed her lip. She looked out her office window, counted
the Grid squares below, west to where her childhood home would
be, if she could see through the thicket of vertical farms and the
patchwork of silvery-black squares. The solar rolled in fractal waves,
arranged to maximize sun collection while letting through light and
wind—a delicate balance of homeowner investment and computa-
tional decree that Ingrid helped manage. And above it all, the Grid: a
carbon-fiber scaffolding, white-gray, preposterously massive, cutting
Detroit into uneven squares and trapezoids.
Every day she touched the Grid—who didn’t?—but she’d suc-
cessfully avoided that house under it for years. She spent holidays
with boyfriends and coworkers, saw her mother only remotely or at
church.
She typed three letters, sent: “On my way!”
 SMALL URBAN 75

Ingrid took the monorail out to Springwells—end of the line. This

train was a recent addition to the Grid, so it only went a bit outside
the tall city core. Extending it further would require negotiating
with countless HOAs and individual homeowners to clear a path
through their skyspace. It was a mess she wasn’t looking forward to
seeing farmed out to her department.
She jogged down spiral stairs to street level. From down there,
Detroit was a jungle of contradictions. Skinny, single-lot towers
stood beside century-old two-storys. The skyspace of these houses
crowded with leafy trellises and tubes of aeroponic crops, dangling
from the crisscross Grid 100 meters above. The Grid was supported
by redwood-thick struts pushing out of the street. These always
seemed a bit alien to Ingrid, with uncanny curves drawn by powerful
math instead of human hands. They were colossal, yet made mun-
dane by the rows of concert posters that covered the first few meters
and the riot of graffiti that snaked up the rest. Bikes wheeled in the
roundabouts the Grid had created in this once car-dominated city.
Her mother Krystal’s house was little more than a cottage,
tucked between two 10-high modular stacks of container apart-
ments. Ingrid paused on the lawn, looked up, sighed. Her mother’s
skyspace was filled not with an orderly vertical garden or racks of
slanted solar panels, but with clusters of boxes and baskets. Dozens
of birds—maybe hundreds—sat on and in these houses, or swooped
from feeder to feeder. They were of every size and color, and at least
half weren’t native to North America: parrots squawked at singing
robins. They were loud this morning. The cottage roof was white
with droppings.
76 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

“Mama, did I see chickens up there? They can’t fly!” Ingrid said
when she pushed into the house. The floor was covered in piles of
computer junk, stacks of books. She edged a narrow path into the
kitchen.
“Marsha down the block has chickens,” Krystal said. “Why should
she get all the eggs?”
Ingrid’s mother sat in her creaky, Techni-brand recliner, left leg
elevated in a gelatinous cast.
“Mrs. Frick’s coop is in her backyard. What happens if one of your
chickens falls? They aren’t agile creatures.”
“They got wings. They can flap down. Then my dronies lift them
back up.” Krystal shook her control board. Ingrid sighed.
“Mama, what happened? How’re you feeling?”
“Had to unclog that watering pipe. Drone couldn’t do it, and
boys across the street stopped helping me. So, went up myself. Felt
something buzz me, and …” Krystal waved at her leg. “Nurses just
left. I’ve got meds. I’ll be fine.”
She didn’t look fine. Though spry for 70, Krystal was thinner than
usual and seemed drained of blood, woozy and jittery from the med-
ication. Her close-buzzed scalp had new splotches.
In recent years, Ingrid had watched her mother become uneven.
She wasn’t senile, exactly, and with robotic assistance she couldn’t
be called infirm. But manic compulsions set in. Krystal changed her
mind often, or was insanely stubborn, each at unexpected times. The
hoarding had gotten worse, and now there were the birds. For years
Krystal had lived across from Zug Island, exposed to lead pollution
and, eventually, the grating “Windsor Hum.” Ingrid had followed
the studies about long-term effects of this low-frequency industrial
noise: anxiety, irritability, spells of illucid thought.
So Ingrid reluctantly stayed the afternoon, puttering around,
 SMALL URBAN 77

clearing space for the drones that would bring her mother food, help-
ing her hop to the toilet on crutches. She moved a pile of magazines,
and a stack of unopened mail fell to the floor.
“Mama, have you read this?” Ingrid held up one of the offi-
cial-looking letters. “Your block voted to associate, put in new rules.
Mama, they used the word ‘eviction.’”
“Oh, I know it!” Krystal said. “Busybodies think they can get all
those Chinese at the PV lab to move over here if they get everyone
to spit-shine their lawns. Well, I got deals with everyone next door,
so they can’t do nada.”
“Mama, that’s not how that works,” Ingrid said, exasperated. “If
their waiver goes through, this new HOA can homogenize skyspace
use.”
“That’s what you’re here for, baby! That’s your job, right? I told
them you’d reject that waiver.”
Ingrid was aghast. “Mama, no, that’s not up to me. This is serious.
If your birds aren’t in compliance, they can seize the house.”
Krystal just turned back to her screen. Ingrid dialed the link on
the letter. She got ahold of the new HOA’s general manager, David.
“Look, this has been in the works a while,” David said. “I’m sym-
pathetic, but your mother had every chance to come to the meetings,
help us build a policy that works for everyone.”
“She doesn’t like to leave the house. Just—what’s she out of
compliance on?”
“Ms. Hall’s skyspace, as lovely as it is, barely met regional gen-
eration standards last year. Five months ago the new requirements
cycled in, and my guess would be she’s now behind. She’s lucky
Emergency hasn’t audited her block lately.”
“That’s it? We can get better panels.”
“Well, there’s the matter of the birds. Some neighbors think
78 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

they’re a nuisance. They dirty solar panels, rip up crops, disrupt

repair and delivery drones.”
“The algorithm has dispensations for biodiversity.”
“Yes, for native species,” David said, filling his voice with exag-
gerated patience. “Your mother is basically running an avian ref-
ugee camp. Birds migrating with the climate shifts, escaped pets.
Emergency calls those pests.”
“What should we do?” Ingrid said. “You can’t evict her. She’s lived
here for decades!”
“We’re just following the rules. Get the skyspace in order, talk to
Ms. Hall about the birds. Then we’ll see.”
Ingrid sighed. She’d have to stay.

Trevor worked in HR, so he smoothed out her leave of absence. He

even agreed to feed her cat.
“Thank you!!!!!!” she wrote. “I’ll make it up to you ;)”
“Now, now,” Trevor texted. “Here at Grid HR we are all about
Guiding Responsible Interactions Diligently.”
“Are acronym puns your new thing? Can I veto that?”
“Not if you want to keep Getting Really Interesting”
“Diatribes?”
“I was going to say Dates.”
“Sure you were.”
Ingrid moved onto her mother’s couch—just for the week, she
hoped. She had to clear off dozens of misprinted birdhouses, and
used this as an excuse to purge a good chunk of her mother’s hoard.
Krystal, pacified by painkillers, didn’t make a scene.
Next Ingrid rented a safety harness from an HOA-approved
 SMALL URBAN 79

vendor and ascended the nearby Grid pillar. Halfway up she clipped
in and moved along a horizontal support beam to the subscaffolding
that made it possible to use the 300 vertical feet of airspace Krystal
legally owned above her house. Ingrid’s stomach fluttered at the light
feel of the carbon fiber under her, but she knew that the Grid was
impossibly strong.
From a generation perspective, Krystal’s property was a mess.
Ingrid didn’t need an algorithm to see that the single solar panel on
top was poorly aligned, partly shaded by the newer array above the
neighboring tower. A few yoga mats of flexible PV dangled vertically,
wobbling beneath the birdhouses, catching only a few random rays
that trickled through the patchwork sky.
Detroit wasn’t Phoenix. They got less sun, and the heat island
here was not so profound as to warrant a full-city roof, even under
Emergency’s generous interpretation of its mission. So, in the spirit
of assisted bootstrap-pulling, Detroit had instead gotten a half-in-
frastructure: a frame, planted by giant Chinese construction bots,
into which individuals could plug the means of meeting their land-
owner watt-and-calorie contribution quotas. Quotas her mother was
behind on.
Ingrid inched into the skyspace. It was windy. A pigeon banked
by her head, and she flailed. She trusted the harness, but a fall could
still wrench her shoulder. Spooked, she crouched on the catwalk.
“Mama, can you keep these things off me?” Ingrid sent. “No won-
der you took a spill.”
“ ” Krystal replied, but a pair of quadcopters zipped up to escort
her.
A ladder went up one side of the mass of birdhouses. Ingrid clipped
and climbed. They were beautiful, in a way, an Escher jumble of
painted boxes, half-eaten seed cones, plastic watering flowers, sacks
80 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

of thistle only finches could land on. Hummingbirds inspected her

furtively. The cooing was loud and rhythmic, vibrating her organs.
At the top, Ingrid examined the underside of the solar panel.
There was a simple servo to track the sun, but pigeons had nested in
the crook of the hinge. Pigeon waste was like cement when it dried,
so the mechanism was frozen by a sticky mess of rust, poop, and
feathers.
“Don’t you touch that!” Her mother’s voice came from the buzz-
ing quadcopter’s tinny speaker. “We’re waiting on chickies.”
There were speckled blue eggs in the nest. Ingrid pulled herself up
to get a better look. The quadcopter poked her in the rump.
“Hey!” She swatted at the drone, and her fingers got smacked by
the spinning plastic blades. Smarting, she climbed down.
“Ugh this is why I got an office job!” she texted Trevor.
“Isn’t this your wheelhouse? Inspecting skyspace for compliance?”
“Not while fighting off storks and my crazy mother’s drones!”
“Jared in legal told me about some dude in North End who trained
a falcon to swivel his neighbor’s panels out of the way,” Trevor wrote.
“Can you believe that? A falcon!”
Ingrid could believe it. Sun was money. While algorithms did
the heavy lifting maximizing where and how to collect solar energy
within the Grid, legal precedents ensured there was a lot of play for
property owners to customize and, at times, get an edge by under-
cutting their neighborhood competition. This illicit jockeying was
a big reason why HOAs were popping up, but these came with their
own compliance concerns. Compliance drift for a single house was
hardly a blip, but for 40 houses, it mattered a great deal.
It occurred to Ingrid that even if the neighborhood’s waiver didn’t
roll through her desk—and the automated conflict of interest system
ensured it wouldn’t—she could still review it. If she found something
 SMALL URBAN 81

off, she could Append Recommendations. She chewed her lip.

The next few days Ingrid alternated between fixing up her mother’s
skyspace and poring over the new HOA’s paperwork. The repairs
were tough but satisfying work. Waving at neighbors tending
window boxes, she felt a new appreciation for the effort that went
into living under the Grid. She lived in a downtown apartment,
spent most of her workday in spreadsheets. Site visits were about
confirming reported numbers, not getting her hands on the phys-
ical machinery that fed the Grid. Now she raised, expanded, and
replaced her mother’s PV apparatus to catch better sun. Climbing
ladders, using heavy tools at awkward angles, balancing on nar-
row Grid branches—these left her sore in muscles her Pilates app
missed.
The paperwork was less satisfying. She couldn’t find a digit out
of place. David was a well-paid professional who handled multiple
HOAs. He had clean templates and had been in business long enough
to know which way the algorithmic winds were blowing. The new
rules contained nothing that hadn’t already been approved else-
where a dozen times.
Then there was her mother. Krystal spent most of her time in
her chair, occasionally hollering for Ingrid to take her to the bath-
room. Or to clear away the piles of wrappers that accumulated as she
munched down greasy drone delivery from a rotating cast of local
home cooks. She watched videos in her panorama helmet and sent
spider-like camerabots crawling up the Grid to photograph the birds
her skyspace attracted. She printed these out big and glossy, and had
Ingrid pin them to the walls around the house.
82 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

“Ohhh, look at this pretty fella!” Krystal said, zooming in on one.

“So plump!”
“It’s very, uh, red,” Ingrid offered. Her mother always joked that
she’d take up birding “soon as this egg leaves the nest.” Surprising
everyone, she followed through.
“Scarlet tanager, breeding male. Never seen one with this much
orange in the plumage. Isn’t he gorgeous?”
It was, Ingrid had to admit. Looking at the high-def stills and
elegant gifs, she could see the appeal of getting to see these little
nuggets of color and life.
“Mama, why do you gotta bring them here? The Grid’s not good for
them. There are birding groups for seniors. They’d take you out to the
country.”
“I don’t ‘bring them here,’ baby. Times have forced them out. We
built over their homes or made it too hot. Now we’re saying, ‘move
along, this spot ain’t for you.’ Where have I heard that before?”
Ingrid thought about this as she made her way back to the core.
The nurses were visiting to iterate Krystal’s cast, so Ingrid had
cleared out to meet Trevor for date number four. Over falafel on the
Riverwalk, she recounted the conversation.
“She’s right, actually,” Trevor said. “Native versus invasive is
a totally arbitrary distinction. Kind of a holdover from when the
Endangered Species Act was the best tool the environmental lobby
had, I think.”
“Uh, I’m going to guess that’s a gross oversimplification.”
“Okay, maybe. But these days we can’t assume that any ecosystem
will support a particular species indefinitely. So instead we could
just try to support as many lifeways as we can.” He tossed his last
bit of falafel at a nearby squirrel. “Do you always do that when you’re
making a decision?”
 SMALL URBAN 83

“Do what?”
“Chew your lip.”

David the HOA manager didn’t live in the neighborhood. Ingrid

trucked out to the address on his email signature, in Sherwood
Forest. She’d expected an office park, but instead found a big brick
house with pretentious round chimneys.
David answered the door holding a baby. For a second, racial anx-
iety flashed over his face. She saw him suppress the thought that
this strange black lady might accost him on his porch. Then David
smiled, waved her into his annoyingly tasteful study.
“Had to move my office home when my wife got a fellowship in
South Greenland,” David explained. “What can I do for Emergency,
Miss Hall?”
“There’s a new body of Brazilian law that uses bio-difference
and bio-density metrics to meet the International Emergency
Accord quotas,” Ingrid said. “They call them ‘multispecies cities.’
It’s all very hip, very ‘next nature,’ ‘Anthropocene as birth canal’
kinda stuff. Springwells Village could pioneer something similar
in Detroit.”
The baby stirred, and David produced a bottle. “These Brazilians
wouldn’t have anything to say about bird habitats, would they?”
“Everyone can win here. My mother can stay. The birds can
stay. You get to not evict a sweet old lady. We can probably even
find some grant money to pilot this.”
David did his exaggerated patient sigh. “Miss Hall, I’m suc-
cessful because I help communities meet the only metrics that
really matter: energy and peace. You have enough of those,
84 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

you can do pretty much anything else. Like contribute to the

Swerve, so my daughter here can grow up without having to
be afraid of the sky. So when your mother’s birds increase the
maintenance burden of the whole block, and get aggressive
enough that neighbors are reluctant to climb up and improve
their skyspaces … it’s hard to feel like everyone’s winning.”
“I don’t see any Grid panels over your house,” Ingrid said. She
knew it was a crap deflection, but she decided to power through. “If
you really thought kicking my mother out was going to move the
needle on your daughter’s future, you’d be out there hand-cranking
a sequestration tree instead of talking to me.”
“Okay,” David said. He pointedly checked his watch. “Look,
you’re right. This is small potatoes to me. Have Krystal submit an
amendment to the HOA rules. We’ll vote on it at the meeting next
week. If it doesn’t pass, she’ll have to either lose the birds or lose
the house.”
Ingrid fumed. She almost said spoken like every gentrifier, ever.
Instead she said, “Fine.”

Ingrid wasn’t an organizer. She’d dabbled in college politics, but

that had been dominated by the confused rage people felt when
Emergency was declared. You heard about a protest and just showed
up, hoping it was about something you agreed with.
Still, she thought she understood the basics: talk to lots of people,
explain your side of the debate, ask for their support and their help
talking to others. She blitzed through app courses on local-politics
best practices as she zigzagged from door to door.
Neighbors who knew Krystal were sympathetic. Many had known
 SMALL URBAN 85

her for decades, had seen her grow infirm and eccentric, and relished
the chance to support her in a concrete way.
“It’s a good thing you’re doing, dear,” Marsha Frick said, feeding
her chickens. “They’re just little birds! This ain’t a Hitchcock movie,
and we ain’t trying to live in some sterile bubble. ‘Course we should
let her be.”
Harder were the younger folks who’d moved into the apartment
stacks flanking the cottage. Amid their highly mediated lives, the
material and social reality of a crazy bird lady next door was foreign
and anxiety-provoking. They hedged, and Ingrid spent more time
than she’d planned cajoling them from the fire escape.
“We all give up stuff to live in a community,” one white twen-
ty-something said, nervously braiding his beard. “Like taxes and
stuff, right?”
“Sure, yes,” Ingrid said, trying not to get frustrated. “But are we
really a community if we can’t care for our most vulnerable neigh-
bors? And that means both Ms. Hall and the birds. Plus, under this
new rule, you’ll get splash credit for the biodiversity your space
accommodates.”
All this was draining. She could only have a few conversations per
hour, if she was lucky, and the HOA was bigger than she’d thought.
On the weekend, Trevor came down and helped her cover more
ground.
“These two dudes laid into me about some drones that got downed
by a goose,” Ingrid texted him as they worked opposite sides of the
street. “They’re the guys who wouldn’t help mama with her watering
pipe. They’re for sure voting against us. Honestly half-suspect they
were the ones who buzzed her on that ladder.”
“Ugh, that’s awful honey :(”
“You’re calling me honey now?” In all the urgency, they had totally
86 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

breezed through the Meet-My-Mother stage of the relationship. Who

could say where they stood now.
“Yeah but pronounced more like hun-nay and spelled HONAE.”
“Fine, I’ll bite. What’s that stand for?”
“Helping Organize Neighbors Against Evictions!!!” Trevor said,
in text that sparkled ridiculously. “It’s the name of our new pollina-
tor-themed housing justice org!”
Ingrid laughed, but then sobered. She actually had reached out to
local tenants-rights groups, but her strategy was too odd, the case
too murky without an evil landlord to defy. She’d shrugged it off, but
now she was appreciating just how much help help would be. There
was just no time—which David had made sure of.
Krystal texted her then: “we winning the baby”
Ingrid couldn’t tell if it was a statement or question. Question,
probably. She bit her cheek, texted back: “Yes!!”
“ ”
There wasn’t much else to say.

The HOA met in the old Patton rec center, right at the edge of the
Grid. The multipurpose rooms smelled like yoga sweat, the hall-
ways like chlorine. They arrived early to glad-hand, Trevor pushing
Krystal in her wheelchair. It was crowded.
“Who are all these people?” Ingrid hissed. She’d canvassed non-
stop, but still only recognized half the attendees. Must be all the
folks who didn’t answer their doors.
Modern HOAs weren’t the developer-captured half-democracies
they had evolved from. Rather, within the strict algorithmic confines
laid down by Emergency, HOAs emulated the role of the abolished
 SMALL URBAN 87

municipalities they had sprung up to replace—often with a kernel

of radical democratic culture fizzling in their heart.
Springwells meetings ran on Robert & Regina’s Rules of Order,
where a Progressive Stack system that forwarded marginal voices
governed open discussions, which set the stage for formal debate.
This allowed new people and ideas to join the conversation, with-
out derailing the work that those in the know had done staking out
coherent positions. Ingrid had done her best to “stack the stack” with
“well-leading” questions from supporters, which sounded innocent
but had answers that boosted their reasoning. But she still had the
tricky task of arguing for the Brazilian Amendment in a way that won
over people invested in the policy question, without confusing the
people that just wanted Krystal to keep her house.
The meeting dragged. More strangers shuffled in, regulars who
knew the pace of the agenda. After the first hour, she started getting
apologetic looks from supporters as they slipped out, late to pick up
kids or hit their shifts on the East Asian cam markets.
Still, when the amendment came up and Ingrid gave her speech,
she felt like she really moved the room. People clapped. There was a
solid amount of nodding. Everyone seemed to feel a deep empathy
for the odd old woman whose daughter had come to plead her case.
“Okay, someone want to call the question?” David said. Marsha
Frick did so, and hands went up to vote. Eyeballing things, it did
seem close.

Later, after she’d finally gotten Krystal to sleep and gone through
the motions setting drones to fill the bird feeders overnight, Ingrid
walked with Trevor under the claustrophobic sky.
88 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

“Where did we go wrong?” she asked.

Trevor shrugged, somehow made it look compassionate. “Politics
is hard. Some people voted online without knowing what the amend-
ment was really about. Maybe we didn’t have enough time to reach
them, or maybe this was just always a long shot we weren’t going to
win.”
They passed a strut, and Ingrid ran her hands over its weird, pla-
sticky bulk. Above, solar panels were uncanny squares of darkness,
blotting out the stars.
“Where are they going to go?” she said.
“Who?”
“The birds.”
“I don’t know. North, probably. Canada is doing a lot of rewilding.
They’ll land somewhere.”

Move-out day sucked. Krystal alternated between terrorizing the

movers with her drones and bouts of depressive sobbing. She wailed
at seeing her horde purged, her bird habitat dismantled. All this made
Ingrid a mess too. Her hands shook and she chewed her lip bloody. She
kept excusing herself to the bathroom to run a four-minute-medita-
tion app, which didn’t work.
Their car followed the moving van half an hour out to Southfield,
miles past the edge of the Grid. The neighborhood was old ranch-
style houses, set back from the street, once-grassy yards given over
to bulk solar, rolled out flat on the lawn. The elder compound was
a set of three modular apartment stacks, buzzing with delivery
drones. When they pulled up, management was lowering Krystal’s
new rooms into place atop the stack—a Tetris L block descending
 SMALL URBAN 89

by crane.
The facility had an elevator and nursing staff on site, physical
therapy accessible by bus. Apartments had window box gardens; a
farmers market brought fresh produce on Tuesdays. There was good
bandwidth for Krystal’s games and shows.
Ingrid wheeled her mother around the block to the little nature
preserve the forums said was an up-and-coming birder spot. A well-
kept boardwalk wove through the trees, to a bench looking out on the
muddy lake. The water was gray, and so was the sky. Krystal sat in her
chair sullenly.
They waited there a while, Ingrid trying to decide what to say. She’d
avoided Krystal for years, but she never thought she’d be the kind of
daughter to ship her mother to an old folks’ home. She put her head
in her hands.
When she looked up, Krystal’s eyes were sharp, trained on the
lake.
“Look there,” Krystal said. “Three egrets. Never seen more than
one at a time before.”
The white birds had landed in the shallows. They stretched their
long necks, dipped beaks into the water.
Ingrid and Krystal spent an hour there, watching warblers and
chickadees land and take off again. Like planes at the airport, Ingrid
thought.

Her first day back at work, Ingrid tapped listlessly through her inbox.
Waivers, algorithm tweaks, HR memos. Considerate Trevor had
asked what frequency of texting she preferred while she caught up.
“I can do anywhere from torrent to drought,” he’d joked as she left
90 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

his place that morning. “But be warned, you’re damming a mighty

river here. The chats must flow!”
She’d asked for radio silence to focus, but now she caught herself
staring out the window at the sprawling Grid. For once she wasn’t
looking at the placement of panels or the hanging gardens, but at the
little specks flitting in between.
She texted Trevor, asked where HR put job postings. She found
the database, keyed in “multispecies.” Half a dozen openings at mul-
tispecies pilot projects popped up. It’d be a pay cut, but Ingrid didn’t
mind. She closed her other tasks and started on the paperwork.
 SMALL URBAN 91

All Politics is Glocal

By Lauren Withycombe Keeler

I’m a bit of a reluctant futurist. I frequently encounter depictions

of the future, from pop culture to strategic planning, that hinge
on innovations in science and technology which revolutionize the
human experience. But I just don’t think that’s how it works. “Under
the Grid” is different. It’s a future that’s achievable with very little
modification to 2018 technologies. It really isn’t scientific innova-
tion that gets us to Detroit Solar City, aka Pho-Town, in the 2040s;
rather, it’s changes in governance—in the way people and institu-
tions come together at very different scales and change the physical
world around them. That’s the kind of future I want to talk about.
But innovations in governance are hard to bring about—as the liter-
ary critic and theorist Frederic Jameson once observed, it’s easier to
envision the end of the world than an end to capitalism.¹ “Under the
Grid” is a story about the triumph of complexity and the illusion of
control and how two scales of governance, local and global, converge
to transform how energy is produced, electrifying a struggling city
in a struggling country. Make no mistake, the changes in governance
that appear in this story are significant and plausible. I find them
fascinating.
The story subtly toggles between global and local governance.
Chinese and European “backers” financially and literally prop up
92 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

the Grid, alluding to a shift in the international order that creates a

backdrop for the narrative. As of June 2018, the Chinese government
held $1.18 trillion in U.S. debt², making it the nation’s largest banker.
So, the proposition that a not-too-distant future has China wielding
this leverage to influence domestic infrastructure development and
energy production seems quite plausible to me. It’s also fairly consis-
tent with how states and international organizations have conducted
themselves in the postcolonial era. Today, it is considered copacetic,
if not laudable, for “developed” countries to provide aid to “devel-
oping” countries, so that they can, in turn, hire developed-country
contractors to build dams, roads, and utilities, thereby pumping
the money back into their own economies. In “Under the Grid,” the
United States becomes the focus of such international development
work, a new frontier for the global-development-industrial complex.
The U.S. is sick; addicted to fossil fuels, automobiles, and single-fam-
ily homes. Many of our international brethren were addicted too,
but they’re kicking the habit, getting clean (energy). But we’re dug
in, letting our infrastructure crumble, an underclass develop. Any
halting, let alone reversal, of climate change impacts will require
transformation in the United States’s energy and transportation
systems, but we’re not budging. International foundations and other
funding bodies are already turning their sights on the U.S., pumping
money into research that can crack the American carbon quagmire.
In “Under the Grid,” the global family has staged an intervention,
and we see the United States in recovery under the watchful eye of
Emergency, trying to reassemble American life and American infra-
structure for a new age.
What is this “Emergency?” How is it that a fiercely democratic
society lets itself be run by an unelected body, let alone a maligned
federal agency? Here’s how: Imagine for a moment that the extreme
 SMALL URBAN 93

weather of the 2010s continues into the 2020s without proper

investment in infrastructure (U.S. infrastructure received a D+³
grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2017) and
response capacity. The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA) is required again and again to respond to hurricanes, floods,
and tornadoes of increasing intensity. Meanwhile, income inequality
continues to balloon. Those who can afford it insulate themselves
from the worst effects of climate change, while a growing underclass
contends with disaster after disaster. Consider this: in 2017, the U.S.
experienced 16 natural disasters costing over $1 billion each; and
billion-dollar storms are on the rise⁴. Recurrent damage to cities and
the cost of emergency response and recovery are a drag on the U.S.
economy.⁶ By the 2030s, the international community can’t ignore
the situation. They are dealing with climate change themselves and,
perhaps, also with climate refugees from the United States who can’t
afford to rebuild and can’t get help from their own government. Is it
so hard to imagine concerted “development” efforts 20 years from
now, initiated by concerned but ultimately self-interested allies in
Europe and Asia? A balkanized political environment and an angry,
resentful public are fertile ground for international investors to
create cheaper renewable energy and sell it back to the American
people along with the promise of the American Dream restored.
FEMA, after all its practice cleaning up natural disasters, might be a
welcome presence in cities, helping municipal governments manage
for emergencies before they happen. Emergency becomes a trusted
and effective player in local governance, supported by international
friends concerned with their own wellbeing and anxious to make
good in the land of opportunity.
Enter Detroit, PhoTown 2040. Here we see this modified inter-
national order connecting with the most local of U.S. governance
94 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

mechanisms, the homeowner association (HOA), where the once

peevish, catty, and at times vitriolic HOA is recast as the hero of
America’s new energy future. It’s poetic and it makes a weird kind
of sense. HOAs are known for utilizing local democratic governance
to squelch diversity, impose impractical aesthetic standards, and
punish nonconformity, all in the name of preserving home values.
Homeowners in suburban Houston, for example, were welcomed
back from forced evacuations during Hurricane Harvey by notices
from their HOA that their grass had grown too long⁷, no doubt from
all that rain. In “Under the Grid,” HOAs are used to create seamless
and efficient community energy systems within a physical struc-
ture (the Grid) built by the local branch of FEMA, with funding
from Chinese and European backers. Neighbors band together
and radically revise their Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions
(CC&Rs)—the rules HOAs use to ensure Camel and Brazilian
Sand, but not Butternut Squash, are the accent colors allowed to
adorn residents’ homes. Newly rewritten CC&Rs allow HOAs for
neighborhoods under the Grid to coordinate the local production of
energy and food from solar panels and gardens neatly arranged in
the skyspace above each home. The organization of the panels and
accompanying features within the skyspace redefine communities
and give them unique character. Sweaty, self-important little HOA
boards seize the chance to extend their power, up, up, up into the air;
well, at least up to 500 feet, less if you’re close to an airport.
Not to be completely outdone by communities and cooperatives,
Emergency deploys UN-sanctioned algorithms to guide HOAs and
even individual residents in the efficient development of their sky-
space. Local, national, and international government agencies and
coordinated technology systems converge to maximize energy pro-
duction, capture rainwater, ensure structural integrity, and preserve
 SMALL URBAN 95

biodiversity. The dance between local action and global influence is

where much of the intrigue lies in this story.
Like Malka Older’s 2016 science fiction novel Infomocracy, “Under
the Grid” takes the quagmire of twenty-first century global gover-
nance seriously, challenging readers to consider what a renewable
energy future might look like if it was built on current social and
political structures. Perhaps HOAs could catalyze a transition to
distributed solar power generation that makes money for commu-
nities. Perhaps the airspace above our homes, which is an extension
of our private property, could be joined with those of our neighbors
to generate utility-scale power above neighborhoods. In places like
Phoenix, this could provide much-needed shade, while in wet, tem-
perate cities like Portland, Oregon, it could help control rainwater
and provide more space for urban farming. Bizarre, maybe, but
there’s no tabula rasa for the future … it will be built, in part, with
what we’ve got right now. Democracies, even broken ones, have a
tendency to take good ideas, chew them up, and spit them out in
almost unrecognizable forms. “Under the Grid” shows us how, in
the future, all politics is glocal—an inextricable fusion of global and
local—and that might not be so bad for some well-masticated solar
solutions.

1. Jameson writes this in “Future City,” (https://newleftreview.org/issues/II21/

articles/fredric-jameson-future-city) an essay published in New Left Review
in 2003, but he attributes it to an unnamed third party.

2. https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-debt-to-china-how-much-does-it-own-3306355

3. https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org
96 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

5. https://www.climate.gov

6. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has an ongo-

ing project on the economic cost of natural disasters. According to NOAA the
U.S. “has sustained 233 weather and climate disasters since 1980.” The total cost
of those disasters is estimated to exceed $1.5 trillion. You can find the project at
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions.

7. https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/article/Houston-s-most-ridiculous-
HOA-rules-12803240.php
 SMALL URBAN 97

Behind the Grid: Science,

Technology, and the
Creation of PhoTown
By Darshan M.A. Karwat

The Paris Agreement¹ didn’t get the world all the way to limiting
global warming to two degrees Celsius above preindustrial times.
The world blew past that threshold in the mid-2030s; pockets of
methane locked away in the tundra and released because of perma-
frost thaw² significantly accelerated the warming process. Global
weirding³ is what it felt like: unpredictable severe weather events
abounded, and climate refugees⁴ were as common as refugees dis-
placed because of armed conflict.
In this turbulent global political climate, nation-states (yes,
they still existed in the 2040s!) banded together to create the
International Emergency Accord, which doubled down on the
energy transition that began in the 2000s but also prioritized peace,
which was significantly under threat given the instability caused by
the climate refugee crisis. In stark contrast to the Paris Agreement,
the International Emergency Accord had teeth to it—just like in
decades prior when the World Trade Organization flexed its com-
pliance muscles⁵ through arbitration, adjudication, sanctions, and
98 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

penalties. The International Emergency Accord Court established

by the Accord levied harsh sanctions on countries that failed to meet
their mandated energy contributions.
When the United States failed to meet its obligations, the Court
imposed its harshest ruling yet, creating Emergency. In many ways,
Emergency was like any other environmentally and technologically
oriented regulatory agency (like the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency), staffed by federal and contracted bureaucrats, managers,
scientists, and engineers, and doing the same state-federal political
dance that all regulatory agencies in U.S. had done. But Emergency
was also the first U.S. agency accountable not only to the American
public, but also to the Accord, which evaluated its successes and fail-
ures. The U.S. had five years to get each of its major cities to deploy
enough solar energy to supply a significant percentage of the city’s
total energy consumption (think residential, commercial, buildings,
heating, cooling, transportation, urban farming, any way you slice
it). For Detroit, or PhoTown as the urban rebranding effort dictated,
Emergency said that fraction needed to be 45%.
Over the preceding years, the revamped U.S. Department
of Energy ⁶ had worked with the National Renewable Energy
Laboratory⁷ to develop a renewable energy deployment algorithm—
based in large part on the Lab’s Renewable Electricity Futures
study⁸ from the 2010s—that Emergency managers could use to
help (coerce?) cities to develop their renewable energy plans and
execution strategies. In the case of Detroit, planners relied over-
whelmingly on solar energy to meet their energy target.
Algorithms had a tortured past⁹ in big business and public policy,
replete with well-documented racist¹⁰, sexist¹¹, and colonizing ten-
dencies, but there they were again, at the heart of important, long-
term decision-making. Fortunately, the National Renewable Energy
 SMALL URBAN 99

Laboratory had created an oversight committee of social scientists,

urban planners, and historians to provide strategic guidance on how
its algorithm could limit, rather than exacerbate, social inequity and
injustice.
Another leap in algorithm development—and an unexpected out-
come of the National Science Foundation’s Dynamics of Coupled
Natural and Human Systems program¹²—enabled the renewable
energy deployment algorithm to center biological diversity in energy
transitions. While it didn’t seem possible in the second decade of the
twenty-first century, accumulations of scientific and technological
prowess in the U.S. found their way into social policy in the third
decade. The algorithm’s inputs included:

• Urban infrastructure shapefiles¹³ from each major city’s

planning commission for existing electricity, telecommunica-
tions, and water infrastructure

• Three-dimensional maps at sub-meter resolution of urban

elevation, updated daily through SkySat¹⁴ technology (because
each city’s skyspace changes constantly)

• Solar insolation¹⁵ maps, climatological histories, and cloud

cover data¹⁶ from the National Weather Service

• Demographics at city-block scale and data about how the

demographics have changed over time, from each major city’s
planning commission

• Details on local governance structures for each county in the

U.S., based on political science and group dynamic predictive
theories developed by researchers at Arizona State University
and Wayne State University
100 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

• Biodifference and biodiversity¹⁷ metrics, including ones

related specifically to native and non-native birds, regardless of
whether they were migratory or not (these were a product of a
fruitful alliance between the National Audubon Society and
the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Resources
Conservation Service¹⁸)

And the algorithm outputs included:

• Renewable energy output of solar panels of different capac-
ities as a function of height (up to 150 meters)

• Costs and payback periods of installing different solar pan-

els as a function of height (up to 150 meters)

• Recommended support and scaffolding infrastructures in

steel honeycomb, carbon fiber, and hybrid metal-fiber materials

• Minimum depth and width for the scaffolding foundation to

safely support the minimum required solar energy installation
and withstand changing weather patterns, as well as options
to deploy more than the minimum required amount of solar
energy, the electrical energy from which could be injected and
sold into the grid

• Possible social, political, and governance ramifications of

individual and community-level renewable energy installations

The algorithm guided how the Grid was designed, built, and
maintained. Detroit in 2045—PhoTown—is the physical manifes-
tation of that algorithm’s insights. A 100-meter-tall superstructure
supporting rapid energy transitions? Golly.
At the turn of the twentieth century, when the median hub height
of wind turbines stood barely above 60 meters¹⁹, no one could have
 SMALL URBAN 101

predicted the proliferation of stable superstructures covering a

major American city. Marvelous advances in engineering trans-
formed the if and for loops, the ones and zeroes, the numbers on
a screen—the guts and outputs of an algorithm, mere possibility—
into physical reality. Biomimicry did its part, and innovations from
the wind energy industry did theirs. Inspiration from palm trees,
those impossibly thin and tall ones that line the streets of Silver
Lake in Los Angeles or the Ceroxylon quindiuense²⁰ from Colombia,
coupled with new and low-cost carbon fiber “welding” capabilities
developed for mega-scale wind technologies, helped PhoTown build
the superstructure scaffolding for the Grid. The “welding” supports
vertical structures, and is strong enough to create joints that allow
for horizontal cross-beams to stay put.
Throughout its history, the U.S. had oscillated between bouts of
intense protectionist nationalism and spells of promoting interna-
tional liberalism, but the nation had never seen international polit-
ical forces so deeply shape how it governed itself. PhoTown exem-
plifies how American ingenuity blossomed in this new world order
shaped by climate crisis, with inventive thinking and creativity that
blended imagination, design, and technology.

1. https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/
the-paris-agreement

2. https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/frozenground/methane.html

3. http://globalweirding.is/here

4. http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/climate-change-and-disasters.html

5. https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/dispu_e.htm
102 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

6. https://www.energy.gov

7. https://www.nrel.gov

8. https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/re-futures.html

9. https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780553418835

10. https://newrepublic.com/article/144644/turns-algorithms-racist

11. https://nyupress.org/9781479837243/

12. https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=13681

13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapefile

14. https://www.satimagingcorp.com/satellite-sensors/skysat-1/

15. https://www.nrel.gov/gis/solar.html

16. https://www.weather.gov/forecastmaps

17. https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/nrcseprd591406.pdf

18. https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/site/national/home/

19. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read how-big-can-wind-

turbines-get-pretty-damn-big

20. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceroxylon_quindiuense
SMALL URBAN 103
104 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

Big Rural
 
TEAM MEMBERS

Wesley Herche
Samantha Janko
Brian Miller
Cat Rambo
Dwarak Ravikumar
 
 
Illustration by
Brian Miller
105
106 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES
 BIG RUR AL 107

Big Rural
By Cat Rambo

Trish almost didn’t take the turnoff from Interstate 8. She was tired
and anxious and it was easy to miss, particularly in the evening blast
of last-gasp sunlight. A headache was building in the back of her
neck, ratcheted up by lack of sleep. Should have picked a self-driving
car rather than this one.
But when she glimpsed it, the decision to swing down the
unnamed pebble-and-dust road that led to Ojos de Amistad
Lookout seemed so natural that it was almost automatic, happen-
ing between one breath and the next. She switched off the AC and
thumbed all four windows open. Almost as though she were back
in high school, she and Jeff Garcia out driving his ancient Jeep in
the early evening, when the blue ebbed from the Arizona sky and a
faint scent of creosote rode the cooling wind.
If she got to the lookout point before the sun began to dip below
the horizon, she’d see one of the best things about the valley.
Because of the coal plant, Tierra del Rey had beautiful sunsets, and
she wanted her return home to start with that image.
The road was barely car-width, even for her small rental. The car
bounced and jittered along the road, sending pale dust and peb-
bles flying amid scruffs of agave and prickly pear. Tires crunching
over rocks, the rumble outside battling the tinny sound from the
108 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

dashboard radio as the DJ segued into yet another country song.

It was the third time she’d heard this one since pulling the rental
away from the airport, a few hours ago.

You city people fill your lives with chatter,

Thinking that us country folk don’t matter …

The road narrowed and dwindled before widening out into four
cars’ worth of parking, unoccupied. She pulled the parking brake
and reached to the radio.

But listen out here in the big rural, the big land,
Something’s echoing here, maybe you can understand …

She clicked the music off and grabbed her purse and water
bottle before taking the footpath up to the point. The path had
once been set off with railroad ties, which still bordered the
sunbaked mountainside, but the cedar chips were gone now,
not even crumbles left. Every step was a memory jabbing at her.
How many times had she walked up this way, angry at some-
thing, someone, usually the town itself, full of resolution to get
out, no matter what?
The sign at the fork was sun-faded into unintelligibility, but she
knew what it said. Marcos de Niza, Spanish conqueror, had paused
here, looked out, and claimed the valley in the name of his king. Also:
no trash, no alcohol, no fires.
By the time she reached the ledge overlooking the valley, sweat
covered her, and the evening breeze flickering across her skin was
welcome, even if it was barely cooler. She went to the gym three
times a week, but she wasn’t in anything like the shape she’d been in
 BIG RUR AL 109

as a teen, when she was running track, knowing it the best chance
she had for a scholarship. Running her way out of Tierra del Rey and
into a better life.

One that had led her straight back here. Anxiety and guilt flared at
that. What sort of welcome would she get? She hadn’t thought she’d
ever be back. Hadn’t bothered to maintain ties. More efficient that
way. More effective that way.
And easier. So much easier.
She gulped down the last of the water and stuck the bottle into
her purse. The tomato-red sun rolled on the horizon, sending long
black shadows walking across the land, towards the enormous black
square that was Phase I of the Sol Dominion power plant, glittering
in the last of the sunlight. You could barely see the storage struc-
tures scattered among the solar panels like enormous alien flowers,
many-petalled and made of dark carbonized plastic with an oily
undersheen of cobalt and purple.
Arms folded, she looked towards the town bordering that square
to the east, where lights were flickering alive. She could name most
of them. The gas station. The diner. The tiny grocery/hardware/
drugstore locals just called “the store.” The two-block strip that was
Main Street, the grade school on one end, the high school on the
other, linked by shared sports fields: baseball, soccer. Still no football
stadium. The coal plant, unlit now.
When you came home again, even to “the big rural,” as the song
called it, things were supposed to have changed. Here the only
change was that black square. Between the town lights and the scat-
tered but symmetrical lights surrounding the plant, a dark strip,
perhaps a mile wide, stretched, unlit. As though town and plant had
turned their backs on each other.
110 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

Not all of them, though, given the vandalism she’d been called
to investigate.
A mourning dove called, a lonesome whirra-hu-hu somewhere
to her left where the cliff face stretched upward. She and Jeff had
climbed further up dozens of times, but this spot had been their
favorite.
She ran her thumb between her shoulder and the purse strap,
feeling the leather cling to her sweaty skin. East Coast life’s made
me soft. She turned back to the trail and descended in the half-
light while the dove called behind her. Halfway down, another dove
answered it, and their solemn call-and-response accompanied her
all the way back to the car.
By the time she was halfway back to the highway, full dark had
descended. She switched on her brights, pressing the confirm button
at the car’s query. There were no other cars on the road, and she
didn’t bother to dim the lights until she hit the outskirts of town.
Two cars in the parking lot of the store. She didn’t expect to recog-
nize them, and didn’t. The bell jingled the way it had a thousand times
before as she stepped into the store’s sallow fluorescent lights. Two
customers talking to the clerk up front, one of those lazy shoot-the-shit
conversations. Their backs turned. But then one shifted and the light
hit his shoulder as he shrugged, showed the muscles along the back of
his neck and she froze. Jeff.
She could have kept moving, but the customers looked around
at the sound of the bell. Jeff recognized her immediately, she could
read that in the way his expression shifted: surprise welcome then
hardening into anger and a more defensive stance. Beside him, Aaron
Paulsen. Of course, who else would I least want to see the night I arrived?
Aaron flippin’ Paulsen.
Behind the counter, a sleepy-eyed girl, high school age,
 BIG RUR AL 111

unimpressed and bored by all of them, stared down at her phone.

Her name tag read Zoe Z, tilted at a careless 30-degree angle on the
blue nylon uniform shirt. Trish remembered how scratchy that fab-
ric was, how it seemed to gather heat in all the most uncomfortable
places.
Jeff and Trish locked eyes. Aaron was the first to speak. “Beatrice!”
he exclaimed, a little too hearty, a little too smiling.
She forced an answering smile, looking away from Jeff’s accusing
eyes to meet Aaron’s chilly blue gaze. “Aaron. Jeff.” Hefting a plastic
basket from the pile slumped near the door, she stepped towards the
back cooler cases. She was tired, and she was hungry. Get in, get the
food, get out.
She expected them to say something more, but they were silent.
Trying to rattle me, that’s Paulsen’s style. She felt that they must be
watching, but when she swung around with her armload of milk,
thaw-dinners, and a sleeve of eggs, Aaron was sliding money across
the counter to the clerk and taking two packs of cigarettes along
with a red, white, and blue striped lighter while Jeff stared at the
lottery ticket display.
Aaron scooped up his change as she came up behind them. Turning,
he said, “So, come back to check out what your company’s been doing
here?”
Of course they know who I work for, she thought. Small towns, every-
one knows what everyone else does.
“Troubleshooting,” she said briefly. She looked him in the eyes,
watching his body language. “There’s been vandalism. More than
petty stuff.” Jeff looked up at that, his face a careful blank.
Was that guilt flickering in the watery depths of the smile Aaron
showed her?
“Yeah, I heard about that. People don’t like the power plant. They
112 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

don’t know what to expect. They know my family’s coal plant built
this town.”
“They’re saying a lot, seems like,” she said.
He shrugged. “Small town, word gets around.”
“Word of who’s been doing it too, maybe?”
He shrugged. Behind him, Jeff’s face still blank as an unlit screen.
They stood there in silence while she paid for her groceries and
gathered up the bag.
“See you, Beatrice,” Aaron said to her back as she left.
“I go by Trish now.” On the door as she swung it open, a poster
from Sol Dominion. The alien flowers dark and ominous against
the blue and yellow of Sol Dominion, golden words above it: Sol
Dominion Phase II Coming Soon. Underneath the picture in a more
sober, shadowy blue: Building Today For a Brighter Tomorrow.
The bells jingled again as the door closed behind her.

She kept the windows open to the cooler night air as she headed to
the solar plant. On its eastern side was the housing for the workers
that had built it, mostly empty now but kept ready for the workforce
that would return in three months for Phase II.
The moonlight washed out Sol Dominion’s trademark sunshine
yellow and sky blue, leached them of life until the trailers formed a
symmetrical, boxy plastic ghost town. Their blank faces flickered
past as she drove to the gate, a glass box, lit from the inside, housing
a sleepy-looking woman nursing a coffee cup, reading a paperback.
She glanced up as Trish rolled to a stop. Booted heels crunched over
gravel; Trish turned off the car and proffered her ID. “Evening, Anita,”
she said.
 BIG RUR AL 113

Anita Luz, who had babysat Beatrice Soledad from the ages of
three to seven, didn’t acknowledge the greeting. She studied the
plastic card before flipping it back towards Trish. “Any trailer’s open
except the first three in Row G.” She made her way back to the booth
and pushed a button. The chain-link gate shuddered open.
“Nice to see you too,” Trish muttered under her breath.
Close up, the trailers in their identical rows seemed even spookier.
They were all yellow with blue trim, the number beside each doorway
the same color. She opted for Row F—one over but still close to the
plant’s other occupants, a skeleton crew of gate guards and techni-
cians, totaling eight.
She settled in, unpacking her groceries. The trailer smelled of
staleness and disuse and she opened all the windows, letting the
desert breeze wash in and sweeten the air. There were no bed linens.
She unfolded a t-shirt and dressed the foam pillow in it, then laid
down on the crackling plastic film that covered the bed, listening.
She could hear two owls hunting, calling to each other huhu huhu
in a stuttering rhythm that overlapped then died away into silence
then started again.
Quiet here. One of those nights when the wind sang in the
telephone wires. Outside, the field of solar panels was silent and
unmoving even as electricity flowed out of it, feeding needs far
beyond Tierra del Rey. Sol Dominion’s model project. Almost ready
for Phase II. Whoever helped make that happen would be lavished
with glory and bonuses and, most importantly, allowed a leap two or
three rungs up the corporate ladder.
And if you leaped and fell? There were plenty of other young
MBAs with gleaming degrees from Wharton and Harvard, ready to
fall into line and begin their own journeys upward.
She fell asleep dreaming of ladders, reaching up out of dark water.
114 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

When she woke, the day was already starting to heat up. As she filled
the coffee maker with water, she glanced out the window, then froze.
One of the enormous solar storage devices was askew, canted at an
impossible angle that threatened the arrays of black tempered glass
beneath its long shadow.
One of the most important parts of the plant, the batteries stored
the gigawatts then sent them out to power businesses and homes, so
many lives dependent on that invisible flow.
Water ran over her hand as the carafe overfilled. She set it down,
turned off the tap, and went out to investigate. The tower was one
of the ones furthest from the worker housing and it took her a while
to walk there. This close to the panels, she could see weeds growing
in the shadows and spiny lizards lying in the sun, soaking up heat.
Machinery, hacked apart, the base of the alien flower chopped
as though it were a tree. Beneath it, dropped as though the attacker
had been scared away mid-swing, a long-handled axe. She knelt to
examine it.
Most of the red paint had peeled away from the head, and some-
one had wrapped the handle first in string, then black electrical tape,
so it could be gripped away. The pattern reminded her of how Jeff
and the other boys had wrapped their baseball bats, emulating one
of the older kids that year.
The security cameras yielded nothing; black hoods cloaked the
faces of the three intruders, who registered only as collections of
jerky motion in the infrared system. They’d disabled the lights
beforehand; Anita had left a note saying she hadn’t heard anything.
Hadn’t even bothered to wait to talk to Trish.
 BIG RUR AL 115

Bill Larson had been sheriff of Tierra del Rey for as long as Trish
could remember. Stolid to the point of dourness, the lanky, bald-
ing man oversaw a single deputy, the pair based in a cinderblock
construction on the main road into town. It was a tradition for the
schoolchildren to paint murals on it. The current one was fresh,
showing town buildings on one side, the solar plant on the other.
They met around the central door, where the alien flowers shrunk,
brightened, became marigolds, poppies, and roses.
She took a breath, squared her shoulders, and opened the door.
The air inside was crisply cold, hitting her bare skin the minute
she stepped through. Lawson sat at his desk, facing the door, leaning
back with his boots on the desk, coffee in hand as he studied some
form. He scowled at the sight of her.
She shoved down all the feelings he roused in her of having done
wrong. A fatherless teen with a mother working too many hours to
watch over her children, she’d had her share of run-ins. Now she was
here as Sol Dominion’s representative; she stepped forward with the
assurance that having a multinational corporation behind her in the
face of a small-town sheriff gave her.
“There’s been more vandalism, one of the storage towers,”
she said. “I need to see the other reports on it when you come to
investigate.”
Larson returned his attention to the form he’d been studying. “No
reports. Company property, not town.”
“You’re supposed to oversee the whole valley!”
“Except for Sol Dominion holdings,” he said flatly. “A pleasure to
see you, Miss Soledad. Enjoy your stay here in Tierra del Rey.”
116 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

Her head churned as she drove away. Aaron must be the ringleader.
No one was more upset about the coal plant being shut down than
the family that owned it, that had commanded a special spot in
Tierra del Rey society as a result. She’d found plenty of Aaron’s type
in college and then Sol Dominion: born into wealth and unused to
losing. They would do anything to avoid it, thinking themselves
more deserving of victory than lesser souls.
She stopped at the store to pick up more water. The clerk didn’t
even look at her, too intent on her phone to care about any customer.
On the way out, Trish saw the poster again. Someone had taken
black felt-tip and scribbled all over it, tangles of dark ink, like weeds
around the flower bases: “get the fuck out Sol we love coal” and
“where’s our water?”
Aaron, behind her again.
I forget that about small-town-in-the-big-rural. Every time you turn
around, you’re seeing someone you don’t want to. His smirk, angled
down at her as though to remind her of the height discrepancy.
“Come back to see what your company’s done?” he asked, knife
sharp. “Or to scavenge the corpse?”
“Corpse is an odd choice of word,” she said, neutral. “The proj-
ect’s brought in jobs and money, with more on the way. What’s dead,
precisely?”
“Take your pick.” Black felt-tip pen riding in his front shirt pocket,
she noted. “Maybe the town. Maybe your friendships. Jeff every-
thing you thought he’d be?”
He was, she thought, thinking of that expressionless face when
he’d seen her. Still familiar, same stance.
 BIG RUR AL 117

She tried to steer them back to something closer to friendship.

“Did he become a volunteer firefighter like he’d always said?” The
firefighters had denied him as a teen because of asthma difficulties;
nowadays with gene therapy she didn’t think that would be such an
issue, but who knew?
Aaron froze as though he was trying to figure out what she meant
by the question, eyes narrowing. Finally he spat, “What do you
care?” Pushed past and was gone.
She followed him though, at a distance. Trailed him back to the
lookout. He’d lead her to the other vandals, sooner or later.
An unfamiliar car. She ghosted along, activating her net link—if
she was discovered, she’d be broadcasting whatever happened, in
livetime, deterrent enough for most criminals. And if not? Something
to think about when and if.
She paused on the bend under the lookout to listen.
Aaron’s voice, and Jeff’s.
“Like a black hole,” Jeff said. “Remember that from sixth grade
science? That one always stuck with me, I don’t know why. Big black
hole, sucking up everything. Welcome to Sol Dominion.”
She could see what he was talking about: the great glittering black
puddle that was the project, the distant alien blooms, one of them
askew. Inhuman. Swallowing life and giving nothing, a trickle at
best, back to the town clinging to its edge.
But it was realization, not the vista, that froze her. Aaron’s not the
leader.
She thought of the long-handled axe. The sort a volunteer fire-
fighter might carry.
Jeff is.
118 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

Walking back and forth that night, trying to figure out what to do.
Every time she went near the guard shack, she could hear the radio.
That big rural song again, twice.

You city people fill your lives with chatter,

Thinking that us country folk don’t matter …

To Sol Dominion, the townsfolk hadn’t mattered. She remembered

the presentation, the way they’d worded it. Out in the middle of nowhere.
And her looking at the map, seeing the crossroads and realizing. Tierra
del Rey.
Images flickered through her head as she paced. The poster, the
angry black scrawls across it. The glittering black sea of the panels—
there’d be so many more of them in Phase II.

But listen out here in the big rural, the big land,
Something’s echoing here, maybe you can understand …

The children’s mural outside the sheriff’s office.

The air chilled as she walked and the tears on her cheeks glittered
as she paced.

She’d made a lot of calls by the time she invited Jeff to walk with
her up to the lookout point. Cashed in all her social capital, maybe
overdrawn some of it. That remained to be seen.
Jeff’s expression was wary. He didn’t say much as they walked side
by side up the trail.
“Beatrice,” he started once.
 BIG RUR AL 119

“That’s not who I am. I call myself Trish now.”

“That’s not who I fell in love with.”
After that, silence until they reached the point. Still a little cool,
but sweat rode her forehead when they arrived.
She could smell dust and creosote bush on the wind. A red-tailed
hawk swung far above in lazy spirals, getting an early morning jump
on rodents and sluggish reptiles.
Jeff said, “I guess you know.”
“I guess I do.” She took out a bottle of water, took a swig, passed
it over to him.
He drank and wiped his lips on the back of his arm before passing
the bottle back. There were fine lines in the corners of his eyes now,
years of sun she’d avoided. “So, what now?”
“Imagine if we made it something other than a black hole,” she
said.
He frowned.
“Ever hear of agro-voltaics?”
At his headshake, she continued. “Imagine crops growing between
the panels, sheltered from some of the heat. Strawberries, melons.”
She searched her mind for the children’s mural. “Marigolds, poppies.
Even roses. The company took the water rights but hasn’t done any-
thing with them. I’ve confirmed that we can get most back.”
She gestured at the expanse. “Yes, more space, but we’ve got
plenty of that. And the infrastructure to ship the produce out at the
same time. Send the power out to the state but feed it as well.”
“That’s a big change,” he said.
She shrugged. “Some things are big enough to work toward.”
The bottle was dry and sunrise well past by the time they finished
talking.
“What made you change your mind, overall?” he asked as they
120 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

started towards her car.

She shrugged. “Thought about what would piss off Aaron most,
so that meant nothing to do with coal.”
“No, really.”
“That’s as good a reason as any,” she said, but kept her smile tilted
away from him as they walked away from the sunset and down the
path.
 BIG RUR AL 121

Light and Shadows on

the Edge of Nowhere
By Wesley Herche

A major theme of Cat Rambo’s story “Big Rural” is socio-geographic

perception: The story challenges the misguided notion that some
places—in this case, a sparsely populated desert town—are “in the
middle of nowhere.” Truly isolated spaces are ill-suited for large-
scale solar arrays, so we must seriously consider the rural communi-
ties that may serve as host to these supermassive-scale solar arrays.
A key source of conflict in the story is the concept of a rural ver-
sus urban divide. This divide is likely far greater in perception than
physical space. Our protagonist, Trish, is challenged both personally
and professionally to span this so-called divide between her rural
community upbringing and her adult development and education
within a major urban center.
The story also examines the challenges of perception in terms of
the extraordinary scales that are commonplace in large-scale solar
energy deployments. This challenge is often referred to as “trying to
wrap your head around it.” Many energy wonks and public thought
leaders have pointed out that enough solar energy strikes the Earth
to serve 10,000 times all human energy needs¹ across the entire
globe. Another way people have tried to capture this enormity is by
122 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

pointing out that if you captured the sunlight that strikes the Earth
in about an hour, you would have enough energy to power all of
human civilization for an entire year.
These kinds of facts and comparisons often fall short of their
intended impact, because our brains are just not evolved to think on
these scales. Another common way people have tried to illustrate
this point is by drawing a to-scale small square area on a world or
national map and then stating the enough solar energy falls in that
square to power the whole country. Even Elon Musk took the “this
tiny square could power the whole country” approach at his 2016
keynote for the unveiling of the Tesla Powerwall residential battery
storage device. These types of presentations often include a line to
the effect of: and that tiny square of solar could be anywhere; we could
just put it out in the middle of nowhere and it would power everything.
The problem with this rhetorical gambit is that it’s not actually feasi-
ble to build a massive solar array “in the middle of nowhere.” Granted,
large tracts of uninhabited land exist—although that’s already a very
anthropocentric view in which we completely ignore the habitats of
other species—but you need significant infrastructure in place to make
building even a high-output solar array cost-effective. You need trans-
portation infrastructure for trucks and other heavy equipment to get
to the site, you need a water supply for maintenance and cleaning of
the panels, and most of all, you need to have or build electricity infra-
structure to transmit the energy you’re generating out of “nowhere”
to where people are going to consume it.
For many of our current large-scale solar arrays, small rural commu-
nities like the (fictional) town of Tierra del Rey in the story make for
attractive locations. These communities offer proximity to vast swaths
of open land, combined with existing transportation and utility infra-
structure. The southwestern United States is ideal because it contains
 BIG RUR AL 123

a plethora of diffuse rural communities that dot a desert landscape

largely devoid of human inhabitants, combined with some of the best
solar potential in the world.
Even existing large solar fields occupy huge tracts of land that
are geographically as big or bigger than the small communities
that they are near. In “Big Rural,” the existing Phase I solar array
built by the fictional Sol Dominion energy company would be large
enough to power a major city like Phoenix. For the proposed Phase II
build-out, which provides the catalyst for the events of the story, we
imagined an array that would provide enough energy to power the
entire state of Arizona—with a 17% solar conversion efficiency rate,
which is in line with the standards commercially available² today.
Based on these assumptions, the Phase II build-out adjacent to the
small town of Tierra del Rey would occupy approximately 48 square
miles. That is more than twice as big as all of Manhattan (about 23
square miles³), or big enough to cover a major portion of the greater
Phoenix metropolitan area.
In recent years there have been strong and growing sentiments
among denizens of rural communities that they are being aban-
doned or somehow “left behind⁴” in the new hyperconnected global
economy, which is predominantly driven from the urban mega-cen-
ters of the country. “Big Rural” supposes that we might once again
call on these overlooked communities to house the energy gener-
ation required by our urban engines. The U.S. has a long history
of locating power generation facilities in rural⁵ and disadvantaged
communities.⁶
To be clear, solar energy clearly has huge advantages over coal and
other forms of fossil-fuel energy generation. It converts abundantly
available sunlight into usable, clean energy without creating car-
bon dioxide emissions that poison the air⁷ and drive global climate
124 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

change.⁸ But expanding solar generation is not without challenges.

For the United States and the world to make the necessary change to
a fully decarbonized and renewable energy paradigm, the swaths of
land that will be needed seem small at a global scale but will physi-
cally and culturally dwarf and envelop the small rural communities
where they will likely be built. These facilities will dramatically
transform the rural landscapes in which they are sited, potentially
scrambling residents’ sense of place, local identity, and connection
to the land.
This makes the resolution in “Big Rural” paradoxical. When
faced with the challenge of not being completely swallowed by this
proposed behemoth solar array, the solution was an approach that
actually takes up more land area! The plan proposed by Trish is
to use a solar and cropland co-location technique that is a rapidly
growing field of practice (no pun intended) known as agro-photo-
voltaics (or “agrivoltaics”). Agrivoltaics is an avant-garde practice
and burgeoning field of research that has grown out of taking a
more holistic and integrative approach to thinking about food,
energy, and water systems. In some areas, agrivoltaics have been
able to boost total land-use efficiency by up to 60%⁹, meaning that
more food and energy can be generated from a smaller amount of
suitable land than from locating solar facilities and farmland sep-
arately. Researchers at Arizona State University have calculated¹⁰
that using agrivoltaics techniques on the existing agricultural
land in the Phoenix area could produce more than three times the
energy needs of the entire metropolitan area. Since agrivoltaics
is still a nascent practice, we took a conservative approach in our
story and estimated that rows of solar arrays would need to be
evenly interlaced with rows of agricultural crops. This doubled the
size of the land needed for Sol Dominion’s Phase II installation.
 BIG RUR AL 125

The agrivoltaic strategy proposed in the story is not a panacea.

Rather, it is merely an example of the types of approaches that
we’ll need to consider in the face of escalating energy needs and
intensifying climate chaos and resource uncertainty. This approach
demonstrates how we might use design thinking¹¹ to tackle some of
these challenges. Design thinking is a solutions-focused approach.
Instead of trying to isolate and fix problems, teams instead work to
build up ideas and potential solution sets in an iterative and organic
fashion. Design thinking is especially well-suited to tackle so-called
“wicked problems” (as opposed to tame or well-defined problems)
where the challenges are beset with social complexities and system
interdependencies. Our solutions will need to be both scalable and
responsive to the social and cultural environments where our new
clean-energy infrastructure will be built and operated.

1. https://www.sandia.gov/~jytsao/Solar%20FAQs.pdf

2. https://news.energysage.com/what-are-the-most-efficient-solar-panels-on-
the-market/

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan

4. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/i-feel-forgotten-a-decade-
of-struggle-in-rural-ohio

5. http://sites.utexas.edu/energyinstitute/files/2016/09/UTAustin_FCe_
History_2016.pdf

6. https://www.scientificamerican.com/articlecoal-plants-smother-
communities-of-color/

7. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/
we-just-breached-the-410-ppm-threshold-for-co2/
126 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

8. https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

9. https://www.pveurope.eu/News/Solar-Generator/
Agrophotovoltaics-increases-land-use-efficiency-by-over-60-percent

10. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Martin_Pasqualetti/
publication/321188251_Dual_use_of_agricultural_land_
Introducing_'agrivoltaics'_in_Phoenix_Metropolitan_Statistical_Area_USA/
links/5a43eab4aca272d2945c0d53/Dual-use-of-agricultural-land-Introducing-
agrivoltaics-in-Phoenix-Metropolitan-Statistical-Area-USA.pdf

11. https://hbr.org/2015/09/design-thinking-comes-of-age
 BIG RUR AL 127

Designing Socially
Relevant Solar
Photovoltaic Systems
By Dwarak Ravikumar

In our group’s story, “Big Rural,” the energy company Sol Dominion’s
vision is to supply all of Arizona’s electricity demand through solar
photovoltaic (PV) technology, which converts the sun’s energy
directly into electricity, thereby eliminating our dependence on cli-
mate-intensive fossil fuel sources. Operationalizing a vision of this
scale requires two critical resources: millions of square meters of
solar PV panels and large tracts of land on which the solar panels
can be installed.

Apart from helping Arizona transition to more environmentally

sustainable sources of electricity, the large scale of operations
entailed by this vision is also well-aligned with Sol Dominion’s goal
of increasing their profitability by reducing the costs associated with
generating electricity from solar PV panels. This near-future strat-
egy is supported by today’s rapidly declining costs both of manu-
facturing PV systems and of generating electricity from PV systems
as installations increase worldwide. Recent trends show that costs
128 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

for manufacturing PV systems at a commercial scale decreased

from $7 per watt of electricity generated in 2010 to around $3 per
watt in 2017. The share of electricity generated by solar PV sources
increased from 0.1% to 1.4% of the total electricity generated in the
United States during the same time frame.¹

Given this trend, in “Big Rural,” Sol Dominion initially favored a

large-scale design paradigm in which a monolithic structure of solar
panels is installed on the outskirts of Tierra del Rey to meet the elec-
tricity demand for the entire state of Arizona. The latest estimate for
the total electricity demand in Arizona is 78 billion kilowatt-hours
(kWh).² To determine the area of land required by Sol Dominion to
meet this electricity demand through solar PV technology, we need
to consider two key technical aspects: (1) the maximum solar energy
that theoretically falls on Arizona’s land surface, and (2) technical
losses that decrease the amount of electricity that can practically be
generated from the maximum available solar energy.

The maximum solar energy that theoretically falls on Arizona’s land

surface is 8 kWh per square meter per day,[3] which means that
there is a potential to extract a maximum of 8 units of electricity per
day from sunlight for every square meter in Arizona. Three catego-
ries of technical loss reduce the amount of energy that can actually
be collected and processed into usable electricity: (1) the efficiency
of the solar panels, (2) the losses in converting DC electricity gen-
erated by the solar panels into the AC electricity used by consum-
ers, and (3) electricity transmission losses over the grid. Today’s
commercially available solar PV technology systems operate at an
average efficiency of 17%, which means that only 17% of the solar
energy available from sunlight can be converted into DC electricity.
 BIG RUR AL 129

Inverters, which are the main technology used in the market to con-
vert DC to AC, have a conversion efficiency of 80%,[4] so 20% of the
DC electricity being generated by the PV panel is lost in conversion
to AC. Furthermore, 7% of the AC electricity made available by the
inverter will be lost in the process of transmitting electricity over
the grid from Sol Dominion’s plant in Tierra del Rey to the point of
consumption (whether that’s a restaurant or school or apartment,
etc.).

Accounting for the maximum solar energy that falls on Arizona’s

land surface and the three categories of technical loss, Sol
Dominion’s panels installed on one square meter of land in Arizona
can meet an annual demand of 370 kWh. So, to meet a statewide
demand of 78 billion kWh, Sol Dominion would need to install PV
panels over an area of 209 million square meters (i.e., 78 billion kWh
divided by 370 kWh generated per square meter) on the outskirts of
Tierra del Rey.

Sol Dominion’s initial plan to install an unbroken expanse of pan-

els failed to account for the social dimensions and values of the
stakeholders in Tierra del Rey. Given the conflicts, the technology
design team in Sol Dominion adopted an alternative, more socially
responsive design paradigm, agro-photovoltaics. The novel design
features smaller circular solar panels that can be mounted on towers
and co-located with cropland. Smaller PV panels provide shade and
thereby positively affect crop growth. More importantly, co-locating
multiple smaller PV panels in the fields necessitates more security
staff to prevent vandalism and theft of PV infrastructure, plus a
team of maintenance personnel to manage or address module dam-
age or failures. This offers new employment opportunities for the
130 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

community and strengthens the partnership between Tierra del Rey

and Sol Dominion.

We assume an area of 5 square meters to be ideal for the newly

designed circular PV panels as part of the agro-photovoltaic system,
which means that each panel would have a radius of 1.27 meters.
Based on an area of 5 square meters per PV panel and an overall
requirement of covering 209 million square meters with PV panels,
the new design requires 42 million circular solar PV panels (i.e., 209
million meters squared divided by 5 meters squared). In addition,
assuming that each circular PV panel will be mounted on a single
support tower, the agro-photovoltaic design also requires 42 million
towers.

Despite the increased number of towers, the novel design reduces

social conflict (for more on this, see Wes Herche and Samantha
Janko’s essays in this book), provides opportunities for Sol Dominion
to increase employment for the Tierra del Rey community, and
reduces conflicts around land use by being co-located with crop-
land. In summary, the mutual benefits for Tierra del Rey and Sol
Dominion will strengthen the project’s prospects for success.

1. Karen Hao, “Solar Is Now So Cheap in the US It Beat Government Goals

by Three Years,” Quartz, September 14, 2017, https://qz.com/1077688/
solar-costs-in-the-us-beat-government-goals-by-three-years.

2. U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Arizona Electricity Profile 2016,”

January 25, 2018, https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/arizona.
 BIG RUR AL 131

3. Arizona Solar Center, “Resource Maps: Wind, Solar Photovoltaic, Collocated

Geothermal, Concentrating Solar Power, and Biomass,” http://www.azsolarcen-
ter.org/resources/resource-maps.

4. Vasilis Fthenakis, Rolf Frischknecht, Marco Raugei, Hyung Chul Kim,

Erik Alsema, Michael Held, and Mariska de Wild-Scholten. Methodology
Guidelines on Life-Cycle Assessment of Photovoltaic Electricity (Paris, France:
Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme, International Energy Agency, 2011).
132 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES
 BIG RUR AL 133

Building Tierra
del Rey: Design Features
of Centralized Solar in a
Rural Community
By Samantha Janko

To build the world of Tierra del Rey for the story “Big Rural,” our
group considered a litany of real-world issues associated with the
design and implementation of solar power plants. At the heart of
the story is the idea of centralized solar generation in a rural envi-
ronment. These two design features for our vision of the future—
size and geography—inspired the team to explore challenging and
potentially contentious topics, including the importance of culture
and community perspectives. We also drew inspiration from other
design features, including aesthetics, ownership, storage, and security,
which influence the attitudes and reactions of the Tierra del Rey
community.
Many towns across the United States were established around
coal mines during the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies (Hazard, Kentucky, Sheridan, Wyoming, and Centralia,
Pennsylvania, to name just a few). Many became ghost towns, but
134 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

in the ones that survived, coal is deeply engrained in the culture as a

source of jobs, cheap electricity, and economic prosperity. Our team
imagined Tierra del Rey as a farming town where a wealthy family
opened a coal mine in the 1900s after discovering the resource was
plentiful in the nearby mountain. About a century later, with the
enticing promise of improved air quality as well as continued job
security and cheap electricity for the town, the wealthy Paulsen
family allowed Sol Dominion to purchase the coal plant at a loss and
shut it down. In its place, Sol Dominion constructed their first large-
scale solar project with some of the best technology available—large,
high-tech solar-storage hybrid towers. After the success of Phase I,
Sol Dominion moves forward with Phase II after a state mandate is
enacted to meet all of Arizona’s energy needs with solar. However,
since the solar plant operates almost completely autonomously, the
initial influx of jobs during the construction stage declined and the
town largely returned to its agricultural roots, but now without the
dependable energy-sector employment formerly available at the coal
plant. The community begins to feel bitterness towards the solar
plant and soon makes its displeasure known through vandalism.
The aesthetics of the solar plant are an important contributing
factor to the conflict. Sol Dominion shaped the large, high-tech
structures like flowers with a sharp, modern design. This design
might work well in an urban environment, but sticks out as alien in
a rural setting. Residents of Tierra del Rey find the towers foreign
and unpleasant, marring their landscape and obstructing the view
of their valley. This visual reminder adds to their growing resent-
ment—the community doesn’t feel ownership over the solar plant in
the same way they had with the original coal plant that helped grow
their town. Sol Dominion purchased the land for their own and built
what they felt was attractive and cost-effective, without consulting
 BIG RUR AL 135

community members or being sensitive to their reactions. This ele-

ment was inspired by modern-day wind turbine construction; many
residents of communities where these turbines are built find them
ugly and disapprove of them. In Primghar, Iowa, for example, wind
farms are criticized by some locals as “noisy, over-subsidized eye-
sores that can be dangerous.”¹
The compromise at the end of “Big Rural” involves smaller, less
visually intrusive solar constructions with softer edges, which sug-
gests how communication and community involvement can improve
attitudes towards energy transitions. The inclusion of agrivolta-
ics—the co-location of solar photovoltaic power generation infra-
structure and crops—also creates a symbiotic relationship between
the new solar technology and the traditional agricultural roots of
the town. (For more on agrivoltaics, see Wes Herche’s essay in this
book.) In an agrivoltaic design, solar panels produce electricity while
simultaneously supporting higher crop yields by providing partial
shade for the plants growing beneath them.
Our team also incorporated issues of storage and security in cre-
ating “Big Rural.” For large-scale, centralized power generation that
will provide for a large population, the ability to store energy to uti-
lize at different times of the day is crucial to ensure reliable electric
service. As such, Sol Dominion included storage alongside the solar
towers. This increases the amount of space required, but it’s neces-
sary for a full statewide transition to solar power. Additionally, phys-
ical and cyber security of power plants, substations, and transmis-
sion networks is a very real issue that leaves power infrastructure
vulnerable to attack. In his New York Times bestselling book Lights
Out, celebrated journalist Ted Koppel argues that the American
power grid’s highly customized power transformers are difficult and
time-consuming to replace. This could result in a power outage for
136 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

weeks or even months at a time if grid control systems are hacked

and used to damage components.² Additionally, substations are vul-
nerable to physical attack since they are typically unmanned during
operation. The problem has been analyzed, but is far from solved.³ In
“Big Rural,” community members in Tierra del Rey realize that Sol
Dominion’s Phase I plant is not well protected and find they can eas-
ily break into and vandalize the units. Increased onsite surveillance
and physical security measures could help deter this type of crime.
We were inspired by real-world issues while crafting the setting of
Tierra del Rey and the plot of “Big Rural.” Issues around design fea-
tures such as size, geography, aesthetics, ownership, storage, and security
reveal that the implementation of new infrastructure technologies is
a complex challenge. Infrastructure systems like energy generation
and storage are the backbone of modern society and affect a large
number of people when changes are implemented. As a result, even
a change that seemingly promises only positive outcomes (such as
plentiful clean energy) does not guarantee acceptance by all par-
ties affected by the transition. To achieve success, designers must
take the socioeconomic and cultural aspects of building new infra-
structure as seriously as they do the technical and environmental
considerations. Building infrastructure for a transition to clean,
renewable energy is an investment in our collective future, but doing
it right will require sensitivity to history as well—especially to the
local histories of the communities that will see their economies and
cultures transformed by these projects. Ensuring that our energy
futures are just, not merely clean and efficient, means seeing energy
as a collective, public endeavor: opening up design and planning to
democratic processes and a plurality of voices, enfranchising every-
one affected, and privileging the voices of those who are on the front
lines of change.
 BIG RUR AL 137

1. Donna Eller and Kevin Hardy, “Is Wind Power Saving Rural Iowa or
Wrecking It?” The Des Moines Register, April 20, 2017, https://www.
desmoinesreg ister.com/stor y/tech/science/env ironment/2017/04/20/
wind-power-saving-rural-iowa-wrecking/99789758.

2. Ted Koppell, Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the

Aftermath (New York: Broadway Books, 2016).

3. Carl Herron, “Physical Security Analysis of Substations” (presentation,

Northeast Power Coordinating Council Fall Workshop, Hartford, CT, November
8, 2017), https://www.npcc.org/Compliance/CW/Documents/Physical%20
Security%20Day%202.pdf. See also “Guide for Physical Security of Electric
Power Substations,” an ongoing project at the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Standards Association coordinated by Erin
Spiewak, https://standards.ieee.org/develop/project/1402.html.
138 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

Small Rural
 
TEAM MEMBERS

Christiana Honsberg
Sean McAllister
Clark A. Miller
Kirsten Newkirk
Corey S. Pressman
 
Illustration by
Kirsten Newkirk
SMALL RUR AL 139
140 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES
 SMALL RUR AL 141

Divided Light
By Corey S. Pressman

“Tell us again how you came to the Oasis!”

“OK children, OK. Here we go.”
The robed elder stood tall and made wide eyes.
“She pressed the cold blade against my sweating throat. I could feel my
skin begin to split. The old woman looked down deep into my eyes. She
seemed serene, calm in her violence.
“‘Time to step into the light, young thumb,’ she said.
“Just then it happened. A single thick drop, a liquid miracle, fell wet
on her knife arm. Our four eyes darted to the spot. Another slapped my
cheek, a sharp splash. The sky opened, children, and the water came
down: a million impossible sparkling tears.”
“No, Radrian! That’s the end! Start at the beginning!”
“Forgive me, youngsters. As you know, I was not always a Ramish old
one. So let us begin the right way. At the beginning, as you say. This is the
story of how we divided the light.”

Drawn
My friends and I headed out early; it was a few hours’ ride to
the Oasis from Shade City. We pulled out of town on the eastern
expanse, through our dappled neighborhood, where the great solar
shade that covered the central city offered the variegated light that
142 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

fetched high rents, touristy cactus labyrinths, and the best golf.
Being young and offensive, we were sure to obey zero traffic laws
as we sped through the outer city, where the shade ran out and our
unfortunate neighbors wallowed in the dazzle of full sun most of
the day.
We blazed out into open desert. Looking back, Shade City’s solar
ceiling dominated the horizon, reaching up and out as far as I could
see. Looking forward, the Ramish settlements were almost invisible:
small holdings dotting the landscape, a single slice of green the only
clear indication of human habitation. Even the photon farms seemed
to blend into the desert.
It was my eighteenth birthday, and we were headed to the Ramish
Oasis so I could participate in a new but noble tradition: dunking my
now-adult self in the deep Dragon Tree root pools at the center of the
Ramish settlement. These desert denizens possessed some genius
for biology and air: they engineered giant Dragon Trees that rooted
to the aquifer and drew pools of cold water to the surface. The other
source of Ramish water hung in the sky: a flotilla of tethered diri-
gibles populated by the Ramish aquateers of the stratosphere. Each
mined the sky for humidity, one drop at a time, sloping the water
down to glimmering oasis pools. These hosted a riot of chlorophyll
that could be seen for miles.
I had never seen a body of water larger than a sink. I had never
done more than splash myself with handfuls of lukewarm water. I
had never immersed. Can you imagine, children?
We pointed the buggy at the winking green mirage ahead and par-
tied hard as The Thumb grew hazy behind us. The Thumb—that’s
what we called Shade City, or, to be precise, the huge solar-panel
sunshade that Umbra Corporation was erecting over town. The
giant structure gave us life: it gave us cool shade and clean power. It
 SMALL RUR AL 143

gave us a way to survive, and to attract people back to New Phoenix,

which hadn’t fared well in the flare years. But it also evoked a sort of
dread. It was a hovering menace. It was The Thumb.
But not today.

Ignited
Tall clouds assembled in the distance and tucked into the northern
horizon. This almost-daily assembly was new, and a cause for con-
cern for some. This, and a recent rash of angry red haboobs. Some
whispered a storm was coming, real rain. But that was ridiculous.
No one here had seen rain in decades. And there was no way we were
delaying our party for fear of mythical weather.
Not that rain wouldn’t be remarkable. The lack of rain crafted
our world, ours and that of our Ramish neighbors. The perennial
drought was an active void, a creative hollow we filled with ingenu-
ity, innovation, and life. Shade City filled the void with might—The
Thumb was an engineering masterpiece that captured the sun and
divided the light into raw power and chill shadow. The Ramish took
more of a tinkerer’s approach. With their photon-farming topo-
graphic technologies, everything they used carried its own power
supply. Every artifact derived energy from the sun. And their bio-
tech: hacking trees and hoisting balloons to divide water from the
sand and air was pure alchemy.
A return of the monsoons would certainly rearrange our reality.
We were stopped at The Palm at the Edge of the World—the first
tree since The Thumb. Beyond that leafy waypoint, we could see the
bayou of biohacked Dragon Trees, sprawling photon-farm home-
stead arrays, and curving zeppelin tethers of the Desert Ramish. The
Thumb, with its myriad mantis construction cranes, was now an inky
smudge in the rising heat to the east.
144 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

The Ramish at the gate were guards: a few youths and an elder.
She was a piece of work, this one. As the young guards asked us out
of the buggy, she came our way, right to me.
“That was Goma!”
“Yes, yes, children. That was Goma. Although I did not know her at the
time.”

Like I said, she was a piece of work, a real Ramish mystic. Swathed
in purple and green glowrobes, bright with captured moonlight, she
got in close, enveloping me in that shine.
“This the young shadeling come to cross to old?”
She reached out her arm, streaked with shimmering sol tats, and
touched my cheek. She smelled like water.
I did not move.
The Ramish were fairly liberal with whom they let in. Heck, they
were openly recruiting in Shade City. Step into the light! sang their
swarming folded-reed drones. Join us at the Oasis and make the world!
But the old lady seemed like a decider, and being denied entrance on
my birthday would be super thumby.
Holding my face, she closed her eyes, eyelids aglow with pow-
dered yellow light, and mumbled a fragment of poetry from another
century.
“Be ignited, or be gone.”
We got back in the buggy. We were in.

Immersed
“Is that when you drowned?”
“Ha! Yes, it was pretty much right after we arrived.”

We headed straight for the pools. It was my first time at the Oasis,
 SMALL RUR AL 145

and it was overwhelming. The village was chaotic. And the colors!
In Shade City, we all wore white linen tunics and lived in white-
washed, low-slung homes. Here were flowing robes in a thousand
subtle shades. The Ramish photon tech was legendary, but to see it
in its native profusion was dizzying. Each garment, every face, every
corner, wall, and vessel was aglow with patterns of harvested light
bent to beauty. And the smell! The vast reed paddies emitted a sweet
green musk you could almost taste: more magical Ramish engineer-
ing at work, this time in the novel field of photochemical conversion.
The pools were a common gathering place for the Ramish; a hand-
ful of them watched us with amiable suspicion as we stumbled from
the buggy to the water’s edge. Several offered the traditional Ramish
greeting, step into the light.
Even standing ankle-deep in cold water was ecstasy. We yelped
with false bravado as we dared each other to step deeper. But immer-
sion was the goal here. I took a few wide sloshing strides and leapt in.
And that is when I drowned.
Not to death, mind you. But close. Of course, I couldn’t swim. Few
from Shade City knew how. And I had just slid into the deep end of
the pool. The cold water surrounded me. I panicked and flailed and
lost all sense of up and down. All I could see were bubbles, bubbles
everywhere. My vision dimmed.
And then the light. Jelena’s light. Her facial sol tats glowed a fierce
gold as she carefully hoved towards me in the chaotic dark. There
were arms around me and I was up and out. And in love.
She stood over me as I heaved up a week’s worth of water. Her face
swam in biografted color as the staccato song of the Ramish-made
sun wrens surrounded us.
This was such a foreign moment—the almost dying, the edible
smell, the swirl of biohacked birds, her tattooed gaze. Fascination
146 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

and fear. Right here was all the danger and strange that emanated
from the Ramish, all the elements of their inscrutable otherness.
Why would they engineer cells that way, with nanobio hybrids?
Until then, I didn’t, couldn’t understand. To adapt yourself to the
environment, rather than the other way around, felt like surrender
to the flaring desert. The point of our city, our culture, in Shade
City, was to keep people safe and free to live as before. We shouldn’t
have to biohack ourselves or our animals just to survive, to forge
Frankenstein trees and spend our days mending cell, soil, and air. It
was madness. A single simple bold creation—The Thumb, the latest
engineering wonder of the human race—should be sufficient. Why
this multitude of forms when just one would do?
But in that moment, I understood one facet of it for the first time:
it was astonishingly beautiful. And hers was the most beautiful face
I had ever seen. And still is, children.
“Thank you,” I managed to croak.
She scowled a radiant scowl. “You are an idiot.” This she said
flatly. “You people are always getting in the water like you know
what you’re doing. This isn’t some Shade City recreation facility.”
She helped me up and wiped her hands on her wet turquoise
robes.
“My name is Radrian,” I said, offering my hand. By now, my
friends were all around us, chuckling at my near-death antics and at
this awkward exchange.
She didn’t shake my hand, but was generous enough to give a
small smile. “I am Jelena. Next time, stay in the shallows.”
I didn’t realize I was staring, mute.
“So, Radrian of Shade City, are you an adult now that you’ve done
something publicly stupid?” Her gaze heated me up from the inside
out. My heart tumbled wild. I heard myself speak.
 SMALL RUR AL 147

“Uh, yes, I mean, no. Yes, today’s my birthday. Listen, thanks,

thank you. You, uh, live around here?”
At this, all of us laughed. My friends, Jelena, even me. It felt good
to laugh.
“My, you’re a smooth talker! Yes, you could say that. And you,” she
said, her hand on my arm, tilting her head in exaggerated flirtation,
“… you come here often?” Her hand was rough and warm.
As I commenced the calculus for some witty response, we were
interrupted by a shout from across the water. There, reflected in the
still pool, was a tall Ramish woman, unmistakably a parent.
“Jelena!” she clipped. “Jelena! Come now. Help me get ready for
the market!”
Jelena looked towards her mother, glanced back at me. Bit her lip.
And she was gone.

Entwined
We partied all the way home, our buggy recharged with the new
bent-reed battery we exchanged at the edge of the Oasis. Aside
from water (and, I then realized, Jelena), the reed batteries were the
Ramish’s best thing. These little woven miracles were constructed
of genmod reeds that stored megawatts of potential energy when
folded into complex condensed shapes. Set loose in a gearbox, the
origami could power a buggy for days. Enough reed batteries and
you could power your whole house with unmetered energy. The
Thumb was wired everywhere in Shade City, even beyond, linking
us to a grid that connected every house, every Umbra plantation
in the desert, every desal plant on the Gulf of California eking out
fresh water for food production and human consumption. The reed
batteries, by contrast, let you disconnect, take your power with you,
go wherever.
148 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

It was night when we got back under The Thumb. The Ceiling
was transparent now in most neighborhoods, allowing in the
starshine. Spotlights beamed down in some distant sector, illumi-
nating a criminal on the run or a roadside stop, no doubt. Winking
drones drifted on the Ceiling-fan drafts. The Ceiling in the club
district was pulsing with some AR masterpiece or other. Some
sleepier neighborhoods were dark, where the cool night air circu-
lated in the full shadow of Umbra Corp’s masterwork.
My parents were awake and waiting, lights on full. That meant
trouble. We only used power at night during parties and emergen-
cies. And this was no party.
They had learned where I was, that we had gone to the Oasis. My
mom, a VP of something-or-other at Umbra Corporation and an
upstanding citizen, was not keen on the Ramish. I had heard it all
before: They were not like us. Their origins in Saudi Arabia proved
their whole enterprise was un-American. They were freaks who dis-
torted nature and were altogether unwholesome, unwelcome, and
unsafe.
To my Shade-City-believer, die-hard-Umbra parents, the Ramish
vision was anathema. The Ramish wanted power distributed
throughout society, not concentrated in a single company or an
enormous grid. They wanted to make their own food, via whatever
hijacking and hacking of nature was required, not import organic
produce from half a world away. Perhaps most importantly, the
Ramish were evangelists, seeking to graft their vision to the soul of
New Phoenix. They were a cult, stealing away Shade City youth and
brainwashing the world. They didn’t want Shade City to succeed or
expand. And any Ramish achievement destabilized Umbra’s long-
term revenue projections. “Our very livelihood,” as my mother liked
to remind me.
 SMALL RUR AL 149

Not everyone felt this way. Engineers and artists, young and
old, often converted to Ramish: changing their names, receiving
their sol tats, donning the robes of light. One day they were bored
citizens, formatting voltaics for the Ceiling in a shaded Umbra lab;
the next they were working the wonders of reed, bending or mining
the atmospheric or subterranean aquifers for liquid gold. Even a
distant cousin of my father went Ramish, stepped into the light as
they called it. Now he crafts the genomes of marsh birds, carving
phenotypes that capture water from the air and energy from the
sun, bringing birdsong back to the shushed desert.
And there was the indispensable water the Ramish provided
Shade City. And the reed batteries. And the amazing rainbow of pho-
tocycled garments and flowers and paints. When the Ramish first
immigrated here from the Middle East, escaping the metastasizing,
desert-eating gigawatt arrays of Riyadh’s dune hinterlands, it was a
boon. Really, Shade City couldn’t exist without the Ramish.
My mom closed our argument that night with her standard sum-
mary of the situation: “Just because we can’t live without them,
doesn’t mean we have to live with them.”

Escaped
“Tell us about the fight in the market! How you saved her!”
“Yes, yes, children. That comes next.”

The next week, on market day, I was working on the buggy when I
heard a commotion. I peeked out of the garage and saw the smoke.
The Ceiling was spouting thin streams of irreplaceable water at the
fire. At the market.
I rounded the corner to the open white market square. Most of the
place stood intact, piles of imported melons and racks of white linen
150 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

standing witness to the pocket of ferocity forming in the Ramish

quarter.

Chaos.
Overturned stalls, spilling stacks of reed batteries, some of which
unhinged far too rapidly, exploding with enormous energy, bounc-
ing in all directions like giant fatal morningstars set loose from
their chains. Sprays of lunar flowers scattered, casting a kaleido-
scope of cool color beneath the rising smoke braiding thick above
several burning stalls. Water jetted down over the whole scene, a
perverse and pervasive inside rain.

The Ramish scattered, some trying to save their wares, others

fleeing. One on fire. A knot of Shade City citizens toppled tables,
rousting the Ramish. Yelling and crying accompanied the keening
of approaching sirens. In the middle of it all, kneeling to collect the
scattered glowing flowers, was Jelena.
Our eyes met. Even from that distance, in the smoke and confu-
sion, I could see every detail of her face. Her fig-red lips, her green
eyes, gold sol tats illuminating her wide forehead in the gathering
gloom. For a second time, she offered me her small smile. Burning
fragments of fabric and flowers arced slowly between us. Water
descended, a fall of diamonds. The cacophony somehow dimmed.
My heart slowed despite the panic.
And then I saw it: a market pillar behind her had unmoored and
was careening, falling on Jelena. Children! You could imagine my
terror! I was no brave soul, just a young fool. I tackled her just in
time, both of us rolling away as the pillar collapsed in a flurry of fire
and ash. Then we were running, me pulling her away from the chaos,
away from the danger. Towards my house. I had to get her away from
 SMALL RUR AL 151

here, out of Shade City. This was an orchestrated attack, a reverse

riot designed to stamp out the Ramish menace. Jelena was not safe.
Covered in cold sweat, we reached the buggy. We navigated around
the burning market and headed east, out of town. We burned
through the dappled districts and rocketed out from under The
Thumb and into the full sun. Neither of us breathed a word until we
hit the desert.

Found
“Thank you,” she croaked.
“I’m so sorry, Jelena. I can’t believe this happened, is happening.
I know some folks aren’t happy with the Ramish, but this is crazy.
Who would attack a market?”
“It all happened so fast,” she said. “And you all look the same in
your white linens.” This, with a bit of disdain. “One second I was
arranging photon-flower bouquets, the next there was an angry knot
of thumbies, then shouting and toppled tables and loose batteries.
Then fire. Then you.” She tilted her head onto my shoulder, a fright-
ened bird on a frightened perch.
“Well, we’re out of there now. At this speed, we can get you to
the Oasis in an hour. Although this may be the buggy’s last ride; the
battery is new, but the gears are old. Either way, you’re safe now.”

“Is that when the farmers found you?”

“Yes children, it was not long before we were radioed by the Ramish
caravan. The very angry Ramish caravan.”

“Hey! Thumb-sucker! What’s the hurry?” The message startled us

both. I looked around—at this speed, there was no way any vehicle
could sneak up on us, Ramish or Shade.
152 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

“Uh … this is Radrian from Shade City. There was an attack, a, uh

… fire at the market. We escaped ….”
“Listen, friendo.” Whoever said this had a thick Ramish accent,
sort of Saudi meets Scottish. “We know about your attack. And now
we see you burning towards the Oasis. To finish the job, eh? Well, I
don’t think so.”
Where was this guy? There was no one behind us, no one in the
desert at all. Just the hazy Thumb behind and resolving Oasis ahead.
Then it was dark. A wide shadow inked over us. I pulled back
the roof flaps and there was the great grey ribbed belly of a Ramish
zeppelin. The mammoth multifoiled airship cruised a thousand feet
above. And it wasn’t alone. Looking up and around, we could see that
this was the lead ship in a collection of dirigibles of different hues,
shapes, and sizes. This was a Ramish caravan, come to truck water
and wares. And to stop us.
“I recommend you put on the breaks, hotshot. Would hate to
waste a whole heavy crate of spirulina dropping it on your ugly little
buggy.”
Up ahead, The Palm at the Edge of the World came into view.
Three Ramish buggies sped out of the compound. Like everything
else Ramish-made, they were painted in festive photo-paints,
designed to absorb and emit. These surfaces powered the buggies
and adorned them. I never knew coral pink and powder blue could
look so menacing.
I toggled the radio to all freqs. “This is Radrian from Shade City.
I am with Jelena—we escaped the market attack. I’m bringing her
home. Please, I’m stopping now.”
I slowed the buggy down. The desert dust fanned a high tail
behind us as the wheels bit into the sand.
“Jelena? Is this true?” It was an old woman’s voice on the radio.
 SMALL RUR AL 153

“Yes, Goma. It’s true.”

The zeppelin above slowed with us, the nose dipping. Its front
hatches slid open.
Jelena continued, talking fast, voice trembling. “It’s true. It was
terrible, Goma. They set it all on fire. They broke everything.”
We came to a stop just as the three Ramish buggies skidded in to
surround us. Jelena and I got out as the guards rushed in. Caravan
truckers were thumping to the ground around us, unclipping from
their long bungees as they hit the ground. The dust from the skid-
ding buggies dangled down, enveloping us and shifting in the rising
breeze.
We were surrounded by a knot of glowing guards and sky truckers.
They were moving in slow. Knives out. Somebody’s radio squawked
news or orders.
Jelena took my hand. This stopped them. We all stood blinking in
the dust. The breeze picked up and shifted the Ramish robes in the
silence. The sky seemed to dim. The crowd parted as Goma strode
through, scraping her blade from its place on her hip. She drew to a
full stop before us, eyeing our clasped hands.
Her tone was almost conversational. “Jelena, darling. Please step
away from our … guest.”
Jelena shook her head, grasped my hand tighter.
Goma shifted her gaze to me. The breeze stiffened and flew her
hair like a long grey banner.
“Twenty Ramish,” she said. At this, the crowd seemed to shuf-
fle in closer, straining to hear her above the moving air. “Twenty
Ramish died today in Shade City. Those who tried to escape were
chased down and murdered in the blaze districts.”
The crowd inched in. And not to hear better.
“Jelena, love. Please come here.” Even with all the whipping sand
154 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

and flapping robes, I could see her hand tighten around the hilt.
“No, Goma,” Jelena replied, shaking her head. “Please don’t.
Radrian saved me, wasn’t involved in the violence.”
Goma moved very quickly, children. She came at us, pulled Jelena
away and behind her. Jelena was absorbed by the wall of wind-strewn
robes.
“Not involved? Why, isn’t this the very child who came through
here last week? Who, despite my generous blessings, treated our
pools like a playground? Isn’t that just the sort of involvement that
led to this rampage? And their police did nothing. And no thumb
blood was spilled. Until now.”
My back against the buggy, she had me.
She pressed the cold blade against my sweating throat. I could feel
my skin begin to split. The old woman looked down deep into my
eyes. She seemed serene, calm in her violence.
“Time to step into the light, young thumb.”
Just then it happened. A single thick drop, a liquid miracle, fell wet
on her knife arm. Our four eyes darted to the spot. Another slapped
my cheek, a sharp splash. The sky opened, children, and the water
came down: a million impossible sparkling tears.
“That was the first Bloom, wasn’t it, Grandmother?”
“Yes, children. And it was spectacular. The desert sprung to life. Later,
the caravaners said that, from their high zeppelin vantage, the desert
looked like a vast Ramish tapestry. They had to squint to pick out the
Oasis and the Thumb amidst the profusion. This was the great lesson that
set us on our current course of cooperation. This was the moment we all
felt small enough to be indivisible.”

At first the rain shocked us into stillness. We stood astonished,

tilting our faces to the sky. Our reverie was interrupted by a groan
 SMALL RUR AL 155

from above; the lead zeppelin dipped and rotated like a sick animal.
The great skycraft started limping towards the sky harbor above the
Oasis, followed by the others. Each wobbled under the weight of the
impossible rain, its photon-powered hydro-extractors overwhelmed
by the deluge. Then everyone was on the move, getting in buggies,
heading for shelter, heading for home where the photon farms were
already flooding. Their shouts were reduced to susurrus beneath the
shower’s steady hiss.
Jelena found me in the riot of robes and rain.
And she took my hand.
156 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES
 SMALL RUR AL 157

Choices
By Clark A. Miller

Cities change slowly, if at all. The 1950s choice to make Phoenix into
car city, a giant grid of thoroughfares, endures today in its cook-
ie-cutter housing developments, Walmarts, and Walgreens laid out
in predictable patterns across the Valley of the Sun. But what if the
city had to choose again? Would it take the same path?

The beating heart and circulatory system of any city is its energy
infrastructure. Energy enables and informs urban design, both
materially and socially. It shapes how far and fast people travel,
how extensively they transform their environment, how widely and
thoroughly they draw nets around the food, water, and resources
of their neighboring hinterlands. Energy technologies organize
everyone and everything, from political economy to the routines
of everyday life. Humans are not so much what we eat but how we
convert energy into action.
158 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

Phoenix in the 1950s was the brainchild of the Del Webb Corporation,
the original Sun City, a place where ordinary people could retire to
an active life of fun in the pool and on the golf course, the suburb
of tomorrow in the making. But it was also a place where people
dreamed the future of the city very differently. The legendary archi-
tect Frank Lloyd Wright came to Phoenix every winter, his students
in tow, to teach them to live in and to design according to nature.
Taliesin West, his home just north of Phoenix, is an homage to that
vision and a product of his own and his students’ ideas and hands.
One of Wright’s students, Paolo Soleri, settled in Scottsdale with
dreams of creating a new utopia, Arcosanti, a perfect marriage of
people, technology, and ecology, cultivated under the desert sun.
Wright’s and Soleri’s visions never really caught fire, fading in
the harshness of the relentless, baking heat, but they provided an
alternative, critical gaze that continues to reverberate today in the
persistent—but wrong in many ways—view of Phoenix as the most
unsustainable city in the world.¹

Surprisingly, to many, the denizens of Phoenix use less electricity than

most Americans. They do a better job of recycling and reusing water.
They drive their cars no further than the national average on a daily
basis. All of these facts run counter to the narrative of Phoenix as
particularly unsustainable. That narrative stems from two fallacies.
The first is about air conditioning. Introduced to mass culture in
the 1950s, air conditioning is a symbol of modern convenience—or
excess, depending on your point of view. But it takes significantly less
energy to cool a Phoenix home when it’s 120 degrees outside than it
does to heat a home in Chicago when it’s 0. So why does our culture
 SMALL RUR AL 159

consider air conditioning an unsustainable luxury, while heating is an

unavoidable necessity? The second fallacy concerns the vast technol-
ogies that sustain Phoenix. Phoenix is brazen about its dependence
on technology, making no bones of the fact that it moves water hun-
dreds of miles across the desert to slake its thirst. As such, it is highly
exposed to disruptions in supply chains. Yet, in this respect, Phoenix
is no different than any other U.S. city. All cities today rely on global
technological systems to provide food, energy, water, and materials.
None are exempt. New York ran out of fuel during Hurricane Sandy.
San Juan suffered the longest blackout in U.S. history after Hurricane
Maria. We are all vulnerable. Phoenix just wears its vulnerability a
little more visibly than other cities.

Phoenix stands on the precipice of the future. Old energy—the

giant, world-spanning energy systems that made Phoenix possible,
pumping water over vast distances, moving people along Route 66
from Chicago to Los Angeles, air-conditioning the desert—is under
the gun. Carbon has to go, full stop. Internal combustion engines,
gas turbines, and coal-fired power plants are stranded dinosaurs,
dying the slow death of extinction. So, too, the old weather that
drew privileged white people to the Valley. Climate change is mak-
ing the desert even hotter. Water is slowly evaporating from the
Colorado River. “A hundred days over a hundred” is becoming “a
hundred and ten over a hundred and ten.” It’s a precarious situa-
tion, and it’s set Phoenix politics and social life on edge.
As Corey S. Pressman’s story “Divided Light” hints, Phoenix in its
current form may not make the cut. A whiff of meaningful change,
and people might hesitate before moving to town. A recent Rolling
160 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

Stone exposé on climate refugees inside the United States identified

individuals who’ve already left the city over its rising temperatures.²
A trickle could turn into a stream, and then a flood, just as the waters
wash across the landscape during the monsoon.

Shade City is the direct descendent of Sun City. Its raison d’être is
relaxation in a resort-style bubble, insulated from the harsh desert
environment by a smart-glass, photon-hacking, quantum conversion
barrier with a wide array of technological capabilities variously called
The Shade, The Ceiling, and The Thumb. The Shade’s panels can shift
from transparent to opaque to translucent, dividing the light, dap-
pling the surface beneath, creating patterns of starlight and moonlight
never before seen in the night sky. It’s a constant work of art, carrying
the colors and lines of saguaro and organ pipe cactus gardens into the
clouds, even as its shimmering hues contrast the monochromatic sim-
plicity of the dense, multifamily housing structures, golf courses, and
shopping malls below. Shade City is present-day Phoenix taken to an
extreme, a socio-technical system so thoroughly techno-encapsulated
that you barely notice the nature outside the 10-kilometer-square fish-
bowl created by The Shade. It’s an illusion, of course, heightened by
the long-term drought that has banished the monsoon and with it
any hint of rain on the glass roof. Yet, it’s an illusion that’s pretty darn
compelling for those who live under the Thumb.

The Shade’s high-efficiency photon capture devices collect most of

the solar spectrum, reflecting the rest into space. The output is vast
 SMALL RUR AL 161

energy resources for Shade City. At 35% efficiency, the Shade produces
300 times the energy needed by the city’s residents to power their
homes. Electrons are cheap and abundant for everyone. Shade City
denizens don’t just enjoy central air conditioning in their houses; the
city keeps the daytime temperature cool under the entire canopy.
Biolights feed their cactus gardens, and people float down the golf
course or across town to the mall in their Boeing electric, hex-a-rotor
aircaddies. Their answer to the constraints of life in the desert? Move
stuff, long distances if necessary. They move power from The Shade
to the city itself through a giant central stanchion (The Thumb). So,
too, they move that power to the city’s desalination plant on the Gulf
of California via enormous, high-voltage DC transmission lines. The
newly cleaned water—and the salt, separately—come back in giant
electric caravans, along with shipments of food from the city’s vast
Sonoran plantations, running along electrified guidewires tied into
the new regional super-grid. The Shade is not just art or shade or
ceiling; it is the infrastructural pump for energy networks that flow
downward and outward from Shade City across millions of square
kilometers of desert landscape. The result of all that infrastructure?
As the billboards announce: the power to live the perfect life of com-
fort, convenience, and security.[3] A life of ease, as our protagonist
makes so abundantly clear. No worries, be happy. Play golf, enjoy a
walk in the cactus gardens, take a nap in the shade.

The Ramish are a different shade of light altogether. They are disci-
ples of a generation of ambitious—and perhaps a bit mad—sci-
entists and engineers lured by the cash liberated by the sale of
Aramco and the rush of innovation spurred by Saudi Arabia’s
162 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

Vision 2030, the Kingdom’s effort to transform itself from a

petrostate into a center of Islamic technological and cultural
entrepreneurship and exchange.[4] The Ramish are techno-en-
trepreneurs, libertarian craftspeople, inexorable makers, lumi-
nosity artists, and desert smallholders who make their living
hacking quantum-conversion technologies as sources of income,
and of beauty. Their ideas initially took shape in a tent city set
up in the sand dunes halfway between Riyadh and Masdar City,
before they were pushed out by growing arrays of solar panels
gobbling the Arabian sands. Their culture internalizes, rather
than externalizes, the food-energy-water nexus. They produce
their own, rather than importing from other places. They are
photon pharmers, protein engineers, and water miners. And they
are lightsmiths and reed-benders, sculptors of high technology
who forge photons into every conceivable form of energy service
the Ramish need or can sell to their neighbors. Like the leaves
of desert plants, like palo verde trees or creosote bushes, their
devices transform light via molecular design into a vast array
of chemical and physical phenomena that do work—and create
splendor—for humankind.

Ramish technology is something to see: “batteries” made of reeds

that bend in on themselves, unfolding to release potential energy;
luminescent inks that impregnate the epidermis, creating perma-
nent new cellular luminescence for sol tats, tattoo markings that
signal an array of social, cultural, and familial information; sunbirds
such as raptors, herons, and wrens with photoreceptive feathers that
take in sunlight and convert it into food and water; dragon trees
 SMALL RUR AL 163

with roots that penetrate rock to vast depths and desalinate brine
aquifers to create potable water; dirigible skins that use photons to
coax water from the dry desert sky.

Ramish culture is decentralized. Their holdings are small and scat-

tered across the desert. Dirigibles, photon pharms, and dragon trees
are usually family-owned businesses. So, too, light forges and bio-
artistry co-ops. Families are arranged professionally in guilds and
genealogically in loose kinship networks. Groupings of smallholders
are arranged around Oases—literally places that store water, but
also places of gathering, worship, commerce, and intrigue.

At the heart of Ramish political economy are the practices of mak-

ing and valuation. Making is the act of creation, of the bringing of
an object, an event, or a person to perfection. The Ramish greet-
ing “Step into the light” is an invitation to forge oneself, to see the
potential within oneself, while also being forged by the community
into a disciple of the light: to declare one’s intent to be remade into
a maker and to subject oneself to the process of making. Makers are
material foundries: transformers of the basic elements of Earth and
water and light and life into the material foundations of societies.
Valuation is the accounting for use: an assessment of whether
innovation enhances or undermines the thriving of individuals,
households, businesses, communities, and societies. The great
mistake of the Silicon Valley juggernauts of the early twenty-first
century was to forget that the ultimate source of value creation is
164 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

people’s ability to use technology productively. Modern business

models too often focus on creating value for the business, not for
the user. Yet, if users cannot use a technology, first, to create value
for themselves—and not just any value, but real value, net of the
burdens or risks of use—then that technology will inevitably create
a drag on its users, sapping income or wellbeing and undermining
thriving.[5] This can occur even if customers seem willing to pay the
price for the technology. Some utilities in poor countries give away
televisions when they hook up new customers to the grid, because
they know they’ll pay their bills, even if it costs their last dime, not
to have their TV cut off. Valuation is, by contrast, an attempt to
reverse that cycle through patterns and practices of reinvestment
that trickle value in rather than out—to find ways to ensure that new
technologies create real value for their users.⁶
For the Ramish, valuation is essential. Ramish technologies empower
their users, nurturing value creation, looping generative feedbacks that
strengthen communities. They are instruments of human thriving,
wrought with thoughtful care to work sunlight into human creative
possibility.

Choice is what makes the future. Or rather choices. Lots of choices.

Individuals, families, businesses, organizations, governments: each
chooses what to see and how to see it; how to understand and frame
problems; how to respond; what kinds of values to commit to; what
kinds of possibilities to imagine and strive for; what policies to adopt;
what to buy; who to buy it from; how much to pay; how to use what
they buy to create value for themselves, or not. Taken together, all of
these choices add up to create the tomorrows that everyone inhabits.
 SMALL RUR AL 165

Perhaps it is this indeterminacy—no one’s individual choices shape

the future alone—that leaves us feeling disempowered. No one need
be responsible for the future, if everyone contributes only a small bit
to its making.

Yet, there are also big choices. Recently, an influential political

leader declared a preference for a future of plentiful solar energy in
Arizona, while also suggesting that the state should obviously want
the solar future that would be the least expensive.[7] As the story
of Shade City and the Ramish suggests, however (alongside all of
the stories in this book), the cost of future solar systems is hardly
the only design choice that matters. For Arizona, and for Phoenix,
choices about how to arrange solar systems on the land, how to
arrange their ownership, in what ways to make them beautiful, or
whether to partner them with transmission networks or storage sys-
tems are just as important as cost. Energy is the lifeblood of modern
societies. As such, choices about energy systems determine far more
than just how we produce and consume energy. The future of many
aspects of Phoenix is at stake in how we choose to design our solar
energy future.

1. For a representative example of this argument, see Andrew Ross, Bird on Fire:
Lesson’s from the World’s Least Sustainable City, New York: Oxford University
Press, 2011.

2. Jeff Goodell, “Welcome to the Age of Climate Migration,” Rolling Stone,

Februar y 25, 2018, https://w w w.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/
166 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

welcome-to-the-age-of-climate-migration-202221.

3. Our imagination of Shade City is indebted to Abraham Tidwell, who describes in

his dissertation, “Morals in Transition: Imaginaries and American National Identity
Through Three Energy Transitions,” and particularly Chapter 5, the sales cultures
of green energy living in the retirement communities of the Phoenix West Valley.

4. For more on Vision 2030, visit the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s official website for
the plan: http://vision2030.gov.sa/en.

5. See Clark A. Miller, et al. “Poverty Eradication through Energy Innovation,”

https://ifis.asu.edu/sites/default/files/general/miller_et_al_2018_asu-ae4h_pov-
erty_eradication_through_energy_innovation.pdf.

6. Jameson Wetmore has written eloquently in “Amish technology: reinforcing

values and building community,” in IEEE Technology & Society, about the ways
in which Amish communities are highly deliberate in their introduction of new
technologies into their societies, making sure that those technologies fit their
values and their preferred ways of living and organizing community. Crucial for
the Ramish is the insistence that this exercise of valuation is a responsibility of
the maker and not just the user.

7. “Commissioner Tobin Proposes Comprehensive Energy Reform,” Arizona

Corporation Commission, January 30, 2018, https://www.azcc.gov/Divisions/
Administration/news/2018Releases/1-30-18Commissioner%20Tobin%20%20
Energy%20Reform.asp.
 167

About the Contributors

AUTHORS

Stuart Bowden is an associate research professor in the

School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering at
Arizona State University, and a senior sustainability scientist at
the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. He has
extensive experience in the characterization of silicon materials
for photovoltaic applications, and presently heads up the silicon
section of Arizona State University’s Solar Power Laboratory.
He received his PhD from the University of New South Wales
for work on static concentrators using silicon solar cells.

Brenda Cooper is a writer, a futurist, and a technology profes-

sional. She often writes about technology and the environment.
Her recent novels include Keepers (Pyr, 2018), Wilders (Pyr, 2017)
POST (Espec Books, 2016), and Spear of Light (Pyr, 2016). She is the
winner of the 2007 and 2016 Endeavor Awards for “a distinguished
science fiction or fantasy book written by a Pacific Northwest author
or authors.” Her work has also been nominated for the Philip K. Dick
and Canopus awards. She lives in Woodinville, Washington with her
family and four dogs.

Michael Duah is an independent designer and creative problem

solver living and working in Phoenix, Arizona. He has a knack for
collaborating with experts, professionals, and academic specialists
to develop new ideas from existing research in fields like higher
education, financial services, and software development. Michael’s
specialty is in designing communication solutions for organizations
dealing with complex topics and services.
168 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

Dr. Wesley Herche is a Senior Sustainability Scientist with the Julie

Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. His primary research
focus area is the topic of policy, geospatial technology, and market
factors in the global transition to renewable energy. Dr. Herche is
currently a strategic management consultant with a major global
consultancy firm. He earned his PhD in Sustainability at the School
of Sustainability at Arizona State University, and an MBA at the
Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Christiana Honsberg is a professor in the School of Electrical,

Computer and Energy Engineering at Arizona State University,
and a senior sustainability scientist at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global
Institute of Sustainability. Her areas of expertise include ultra-
high efficiency solar cells and silicon solar cells. She is the chief
scientist at Arizona State University’s Solar Power Laboratory,
and serves as a member of the technology advisory board at Blue
Square Energy. She received her PhD in electrical engineering from
the University of Delaware.

Andrew Dana Hudson is an award-winning speculative fic-

tion writer. He studies at Arizona State University in the School
of Sustainability and is a fellow in the Center for Science and the
Imagination’s Imaginary College. His fiction seeks to envision the
lived experiences just around the corner in our climate-changed
world, and the struggle to make good choices in the sustainability
crisis. His research explores how scholars, designers, and creatives can
collaborate to tell stories about our post-normal world. His nonfiction
writing has appeared in Slate, among others. He serves as associate
editor of Oasis, a Phoenix-based journal of anticapitalist thought.
 169

Samantha Janko is a Systems Engineering PhD student at Arizona

State University and Managing Director for the Laboratory for
Energy and Power Solutions where she works with microgrid system
design, installation, operation, and control. She is a recipient of an
NSF GRFP fellowship to investigate self-organizing techniques for
control of microgrid networks, and she manages several projects
related to containerizing microgrid systems for off-grid deployment,
workforce development, and hands-on microgrid training. In her
free time, she enjoys hiking and weekend road trips.

Darshan M.A. Karwat is an aerospace engineer with a background

in combustion chemistry and sustainability ethics from the University
of Michigan. He’s an assistant professor in the School for the Future
of Innovation in Society and The Polytechnic School at Arizona State
University, where he runs re-Engineered, an interdisciplinary group
that embeds peace, social justice, and environmental protection in
engineering. Previously, as a AAAS science and technology policy
fellow, he worked at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on
climate resilience and community-based air pollution monitoring, and
then at the U.S. Department of Energy as the technical lead of the
Wave Energy Prize.

Lauren Withycombe Keeler is a futurist and sustainability scien-

tist in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona
State University, where she holds the position of assistant research
professor, and at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany, where
she is a guest scientist. She studies how different people with differ-
ent professional responsibilities understand and make sense of the
future, and how futures are created through professional practice.
She is an expert in futures and transdisciplinary methods and their
170 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

application to issues of governance and to complex sustainability

challenges.

Joshua Loughman is a systems engineer and technology scholar

at Arizona State University. He has been a lecturer in the Ira A.
Fulton Schools of Engineering and the director of the Engineering
Projects in Community Service (EPICS) Program since 2015. He is
also a researcher with the Center for Energy and Society and the
Center for the Study of Futures, where he explores the intersection
of changing global energy systems and society.

Sean McAllister is a PhD student in the Human and Social

Dimensions of Science and Technology at Arizona State University’s
School for the Future of Innovation in Society. His research inter-
ests include the human effects of innovation, especially in regard to
governance and social outcomes.

Brian Miller is the founder of graphic design and illustration studio

Hi-Fi Colour Design. Best known for his pop culture propaganda
artwork, he currently illustrates artwork for Star Wars, Doctor Who,
The X-Files, Rick & Morty, Archer, and other properties. Brian’s
illustrations have been featured at major events like Star Wars
Celebration, Epcot’s International Festival of the Arts, San Diego
Comic-Con International, and Disney’s D23 Expo. He works with
major publishers like DC, Marvel, Image, Disney, IDW, and Dark
Horse on graphic novels. He has also authored several art-instruc-
tion books and contributed stories to business journals and anthol-
ogy series.
 171

Kirsten Newkirk has more than 16 years of experience creating

illustration, editorial design, and print collateral. Her most recent
projects include work for Speaker magazine, Sip Northwest mag-
azine, and The Academy of Country Music. Before setting off on
her own, she worked for Ditko Design in Phoenix and Fallon in
Minneapolis. Her first piece of solar technology was a calculator her
brother gave her in the third grade, which she instantly proclaimed
to be “magic math.”

Corey S. Pressman is anthropologist and imagination profes-

sional. As Principal at Intangible, he works with clients large and
small to help them envision and enact human-centered innovation
and nurture a vital organizational culture. Corey is also a fellow of
Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination.

Cat Rambo is the author of over 200 stories, two novels, a cook-
book, and multiple writing books. She writes from atop a hilltop in
West Seattle. The current president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy
Writers of America, she also runs online writing school The Rambo
Academy for Wayward Writers. Find out more about her work at
kittywumpus.net.

Dwarak Ravikumar is a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State

University. He has completed his PhD in Civil, Environmental and
Sustainable Engineering and conducts research on improving the
environmental and economic performance of solar panels. He is
investigating novel technologies that improve the recycling of solar
panels and developing analytical methods that incorporate concerns
of environmental sustainability in the early stages of technology
development.
172 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

Laura Wentzel is a Phoenix-based graphic designer who special-

izes in brand identity, product package design, patterns, and illustra-
tions. Through storytelling, creativity, and functionality, her work
supports the vision of Arizona small businesses and entrepreneurs,
as well as creative brands nationwide. Her background in art history
and printing has helped hone the simple, modern design aesthetic
that is prevalent in her work.

EDITORS

Clark A. Miller is a designer, theorist, and analyst of techno-hu-

man futures. He explores how societies create and inhabit new
technologies and their global implications for the future of people
and the planet. This work aims to redesign technology innovation as
a tool for creatively imagining and constructing inclusive, thriving
communities. He helps lead Arizona State University’s School for
the Future of Innovation in Society, where the motto is: “The future
is for everyone.” He also established the interdisciplinary PhD in
the Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology. An
electrical engineer by training, Miller directs the Center for Energy
and Society and the sustainability research group of the Quantum
Energy and Sustainable Solar Technologies (QESST) photovoltaics
engineering research center.

Joey Eschrich is the editor and program manager at the Center

for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. He is
also an assistant director for Future Tense, a partnership of ASU,
Slate, and New America that explores emerging technologies and
their transformative effects on policy, culture, and society. He is the
coeditor of Overview: Stories in the Stratosphere (2016), Everything
 173

Change: An Anthology of Climate Fiction (2016), The Rightful Place

of Science: Frankenstein (2017), and Visions, Ventures, Escape
Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures (2017), which was sup-
ported by a grant from

PROJECT DIRECTORS

Ed Finn is the founding director of the Center for Science and

the Imagination at Arizona State University, where he is an asso-
ciate professor in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and
the Department of English. He is also the academic director for
Future Tense, a partnership of ASU, Slate, and New America that
explores emerging technologies and their transformative effects on
policy, culture, and society. He is the author of What Algorithms
Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (MIT Press, 2017) and
coeditor of Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers and
Creators of All Kinds (MIT Press, 2017), Visions, Ventures, Escape
Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures (Center for Science and the
Imagination, 2017) and Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better
Future (William Morrow, 2014).

Ruth Wylie is the assistant director of the Center for Science and
the Imagination and an assistant research professor in the Mary
Lou Fulton Teachers College. Ruth earned her Ph.D. in Human-
Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University in 2011 and
her bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Berkeley in
Cognitive Science with minors in Computer Science and Education.
She concentrates on interdisciplinary, translational research that
leverages knowledge and insights from theory and laboratory stud-
ies to answer real-world problems. Her previous research projects
174 W EIGHT OF LIGHT: A COLLECTION OF SOLAR FUTURES

have been on the design, development, and implementation of edu-

cational technology for students and teachers in middle schools,
high schools, and universities.
175
Center for
Science and the
Imagination

School for the

Future of Innovation
in Society