The first huge renewable-energy revolution—the one that dotted the US with hydroelectric dams and ultimately made power ubiquitous in every American home—started at a bankruptcy sale. In 1877, Jacob Schoellkopf went to an auction for a waterway owned by the Niagara Falls Canal Company. A succession of entrepreneurs had tried and failed to harness the ferocious power of the falling water. That night he told his wife, “Momma, I bought the ditch.”

Two years later, Thomas Edison made a light bulb that glowed for 40 continuous hours in his lab. Three years after that, Schoellkopf installed a generator below the falls to power 16 electric lamps above it.

See more from The Climate Issue | April 2020. Subscribe to WIRED. Illustration: Alvaro Dominguez

Those first lights wowed tourists and gave people a sense of the powerful waterfall's potential. But they didn't reveal how to generate power that could travel long distances, never mind how to make a profit on it. For the next 14 years investors tried to harness the falls (one engineer proposed building a long tunnel beneath them to feed 38 vertical shafts with turbines that could power factories above), but everyone failed. It took Nikola Tesla's invention of an efficient polyphase generator to transmit those electrons—and the sale of his patents to Westinghouse—to make hydro viable. In 1896 the “Cathedral of Power” started sending watts to the towns of Niagara and Buffalo, right next door.

But this 17-year sprint from the lab to Buffalo was, in a sense, only a proof of concept, what we might now call a demonstration project. It would be another quarter century before even a third of US homes got electricity. In 1905 there was a political backlash against the idea of diverting the public beauty of the falls for the gain of private companies. “Shall We Make a Coal-Pile of Niagara?” asked the Ladies' Home Journal, sparking one of the first examples of federal legislation focused on the environment. The politics of power began to shift, as people realized how important it was; in 1912 a federal report noted that 60 percent of hydropower in the US was controlled by just two companies. In 1931, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt created a state power authority that could act as a check on private monopolies, announcing that he was giving “back to the people the waterpower which is theirs.” It would take FDR's national power initiatives to eventually wire all of rural America. Today Niagara Falls creates enough electricity to power 3.8 million homes, and hydro plants provide 16 percent of the world's electricity.

Niagara's long timeline is worth remembering as we get serious about reducing carbon emissions fast enough to keep average global temperature increases below 2 degrees by 2100. To accomplish this we will need to push many techno-Niagaras from the light-bulb-in-the-lab stage to full deployment around the world—within just a few decades. These days we tend to think of such energy revolutions—with all of their attendant bankruptcies and political backlashes—as impossible tasks. Or only for dreamers. But this is not true. In fact the United States has led such sweeping technological revolutions before, and we could do it again. But we'll need to dismantle some old myths and ideologies about who bankrolls innovation and who benefits.

Americans are, in general, complacent about innovation, assuming the solution to our energy problems is one brilliant new mind away. A few more Elon Musks and we'll be saved. But it's been obvious for nearly a decade that the private sector isn't getting us where we need to go. In 2011 there were 1,256 patents filed for global-warming-related energy technologies; by 2018, only 285 were filed. And US venture capitalists, long seen as the drivers of global innovation, have been eschewing the cleantech sector since their investments peaked at over $7.5 billion in 2011. They invested less than $2.4 billion in 2019. Today's VCs, with their focus on quick profitability, would see the transformative powers of Niagara Falls as nothing more than a bankrupt ditch.