This 11MW solar thermal power station in Seville, Spain, is being expanded to 300MW of capacity. Pic: Flickr – Chausinho

A solar thermal plant being developed in Seville, Spain, will produce 300MW of power at a projected cost of E1,200bn, or R11,6 billion. That’s an installed cost of R4-billion per 100MW. A prototype 11MW plant is already up and running; it’s almost a thing of beauty – take a look here or here. (The rays you see in the atmosphere have not been added to the photograph – they’re not illustrated but real, created by the intense illumination of the solar array hitting atmospheric dust and moisture.)

Eskom’s (our parastatal national electricity provider) prototype Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) is likely to cost R25 billion. The projected output is 120MW. By my admittedly rough calculations, that makes the cost of building the PMBR approximately FIVE times more expensive than solar thermal. Even using the figures Eskom prefers to use, which are of course far lower than R25-billion, the PBMR remains much expensive than solar thermal. (The PBMR has also been judged an economic non-starter for South Africa, by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, according to documents Eskom accidentally sent to Earthlife Africa.)

Of course, no organisation is monolithic. Perhaps it is saner folk at Eskom who are working on a proposal for a solar plant for the Northern Cape, where the cost of 100MW of capacity was estimated in 2003 at R2-billion, quite a lot lower than the figure from Seville (but of course, these figures are four years old). No final decision on whether to proceed with this plant has yet been taken.

So how much would it cost to build a solar power station the size of the Medupi greenfield coal-fired station Eskom has begun constructing in Limpopo? Medupi’s projected output is 4500MW. To build a solar thermal plant the same size would cost at least R90-billion (though this estimate ignores likely economies of scale), quite a lot more expensive than Medupi at R70-billion.

But this does not take into account running costs, financial and environmental: Medupi will burn hundreds of thousands of tons of ever-more expensive coal each year, while pouring CO₂ and pollutants into the atmosphere. While at an equivalent solar power station … ? Well, they’ll be kept quite busy cleaning all those mirrors, a rather less costly procedure.

Of course, another incredibly important factor in all this is that both coal and nuclear power are relatively mature technologies. Whereas solar thermal power is in its infancy. There is no reason not to be absolutely certain that as the technology matures, costs will drop, making it far more

But what happens at night?

Of course, a solar plant does not operate at night. The plant in Seville has capacity for storage of heat that allows generation to continue an hour after sunset. Even a modest extention in this capacity would help with Eskom’s second peak period of demand 17h00 to 21h00. but not sufficiently. But solar innovators are determined to crack this problem. One Californian company, Ausra, proposes a steam storage solution that would make solar energy a round-the-clock solution. Another untested solution proposes using daytime electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The two gases are then burnt at night to produce heat for power generation.

Even before a storage solution makes solar power feasible round the clock, it could already help in reducing the daytime use of coal power.

The decision to continue with coal power is absolutely insane. It ignores:

• the costs of global warming
• the finite supply of coal (even if we are at present a long way from running out)
• the direct impacts of other pollutants from coal – sulphur and particulates, and 30 million tons of coal ash
• and the fact that there is already some risk of coal shortages, and coal prices are already rising.

The decision to continue with nuclear also ignores the unsolved problem of nuclear waste storage, and the inherent dangers of the technology (which are often misunderstood, but that’s another post).

This entire discussion, of course, is limited by the fact that it assumes that we should be relying on extremely centralised power generation. This model has considerable limitations – waste of energy in the course of long-distance transmission, high vulnerability to disruption, But there are now a multitude of technologies that could be used for local and domestic power generation, wind, solar and appropriate biomass (Imagine turning all the invasive, water-sucking plant species that have invaded our biome into power – Port Jackson, hakea, black wattle, eucalyptus — and the incredible employment opportunities this would create.)

What secular fundamentalists don’t really seem to get is that religions are just systems of thought — like political ideologies and scientific rationalism. Although the claims of scientific rationalism to objectivity seem overwhelmingly convincing for those of us steeped in this milieu, so too did the claims of Catholicism for people in 1400, of Calvinism in 17th century Geneva, etc.

William Blake’s Ancient of Days, an image that somehow fuses the divine and the rational. (Was Blake just a good illustrator?)

We might redefine religion as a system of thought that dominates the worldview of an individual or community.

So, for example, the renowned British historian Arnold Toynbee described the three great religions of the 20th century as being communism, nationalism and the belief in the inevitability of progress through the application of technology. Note that he did not list even one of the theistic faiths that pre-occupy our newly energised atheists.

It’s when we forget that all these paradigms are simply metaphors, or systems of metaphors, that we seem to get confused or confrontational. In some ways, Richard Dawkins and his allies are re-running a debate that for some was settled over a hundred years ago. Many Victorian scientists, like many (rather quiet) contemporary scientists, concluded that Darwin’s theory best explained the evolution of species, but continued to find great meaning in Christianity — because it does hold great meaning. They were broad-minded enough to find ways of reconciling the differences, broad-minded in ways that seem to escape participants in our renewed debates on the matter.

Different metaphor systems are good at different things. The Judaeo-Christian religions at their best build community, develop individual ethics, and connect people to the living world as a place to be deeply grateful for (and not as a dull source of raw materials to be ruthlessly exploited to the point of bringing us to the brink of multiple disasters). For all its ability to accurately describe and predict the nature of physical reality, scientific rationalism fails dismally in most of these respects (though hearteningly, with research into happiness and indivisible ecologies, for example, this is starting to shift).

I happen to agree that the claims of science to deep understanding of the make-up of the world are pretty strong compared to some of these earlier philosophies. Few can question the explanatory power of science — but it is right to question what is done with the understanding it gives us. There science loses its grasp. Its ethics where they exist are ad hoc, not deeply rooted. They are also more influenced by the religions of Abraham than scientists may like to think; biblical dominion over birds and beasts has arguably found its way into the laboratory ethic, where the human right to conduct experiments on animals is considered normative.

I probably blame science too much for the effects of uncultivated human nature and expanding populations. But there’s the rub — science holds no coherent vision for the cultivation of our humanity. Other philosophies, whatever their flaws, are better at this. One thing’s increasingly certain — to ensure our survival on this planet, we’re going to have to dramatically change our behaviour, and that’s very difficult without first changing thought. There’s no compelling scientific answer to this quandary of changing thought without compulsion — science has hardly even formulated the problem, still focusing ineptly on behaviour. Hence the acknowledgement of many climate scientists that they themselves continue to be part of the problem, as their personal behaviour is contributing to global warming.

Why does science fail to capture the imagination of human beings? I think the anwer is quite simple — science does not tell a story that grips the human heart. Oh, it grips the intellect all right — it’s fascinating and compelling at that level. But by its very nature, it cannot put human beings at the centre of the narrative, and so leaves us behind. Others will retort that putting human beings at the centre of the narrative has had ill effects — again, the notion, for example, that we have ‘dominion’ over the natural world would seem to have been most destructive. I would heartily agree with such objections. I am pointing to a marketing problem for scientific rationalism, not offering a solution.

It’s true that institutionalised religion has been responsible for dreadful evils. But this superficial impression ignores the underlying truth that in all societies nasty exploitative psychopaths (I mention no names) frequently find their way to power, and dress themselves as far as possible in the most respectable intellectual or spiritual garb of the day. That this so often happens, though, is not necessarily an accurate reflection of the faiths being hijacked, and ignores quiet goodness in favour of noisy evil.

This post started out as a comment on the Guardian’s CIF site.