Gil Friend and David Morris of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance

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PLOWBOY: You think jobs will be waiting for them?

MORRIS: By the time they're ready to go to work there will be a billion-dollar industry waiting to hire them.

PLOWBOY: If all your activities with community-controlled energy are successful and all the things you foresee come true, will urban areas ever be entirely independent of the big utility companies?

MORRIS: Oh, yes. We'll certainly be independent in terms of electricity. That can be possible within ten years. In terms of heating and cooling, though, the answer is less certain. Much depends on such things as the use of insulation and changing consumption habits. If people want to waste energy—to keep their homes at 85 degrees in the middle of winter and cooling it down to 70 during the heat of summer—we'll never be self-sufficient. Then again—at least in the case of solar space heating—we aren't necessarily talking about self-sufficiency, anyway. We're talking about providing maybe 75 to 80 percent of our needs.

FRIEND: But at least we're going to be able to cut down a great deal of our need for outside sources of energy by supplementing our heating with solar collectors.

MORRIS: Absolutely. I recently talked to someone in Connecticut—which is fairly far north—and he says that solar water heaters up there now pay for themselves in two years. For space heaters, the Connecticut pay-back period is currently between seven and ten years.

PLOWBOY: A moment ago you said that there's no doubt urban communities will be able to service their own electrical needs. Is it really that simple? Aren't there some problems that still have to be worked out?

MORRIS: Well, even in medium-density neighborhoods—let alone more highly populated ones—there will be the inevitable problem of unequal access to sunlight . . . and varying amounts of available roof space. This means that centralized generating systems may well be necessary in some neighborhoods. In fact, a study done two years ago indicated that a solar cell power station is most efficient when built large enough to service a whole neighborhood instead of a single house.

PLOWBOY: Gil, tell me about the human side effects of all this technological work. Or do you care about that aspect of your experiments?

FRIEND: Absolutely. We're not just interested in coming up with more efficient ways of doing things, because efficiency itself isn't the whole story. Efficiency without humanity and a decent quality of life will put us right back into the mess we've been trying to escape from.

Our experiments have shown us that Adams-Morgan residents involved in the ILSR program get to know and care for each other as they work together. And they feel happier because of that caring. There's less crime in the neighborhood.

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