Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: August 2, 2024
Dawn of the Solar Age!
Renowned business periodical The Economist recently published a special edition entitled Dawn of the Solar Age, headlined by an absolutely spectacular deep-dive interactive essay, “Sun Machines.”
“Sun Machines”1 is perhaps the best synthesis yet of the extraordinary exponential growth of solar power and what a constantly improving source of cheaper and cleaner energy means for the world. If you read one article about renewable energy or energy period this year2, make it this one.
Read it and share it with your friends, neighbors, colleagues, and legislators!
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Reasons for Hope
The Economist has a really good data visualization/graphic design team, so this deep-dive essay comes with some absolutely stellar charts and maps that really help the viewer grok the scale of what’s going on. The text is exceptional too; these quotes really help encapsulate the truly extraordinary achievements of the ongoing global solar boom.
First off, it’s just plain incredible how far we’ve come in the last few decades:
“From the mid-1970s to the early 2020s cumulative shipments of photovoltaics increased by a factor of a million, which is 20 doublings. At the same time prices dropped by a factor of 500.”
-Sun Machines
Here’s what that looks like in practice, with key “price crossover” points being passed in the last few years.
“In 2015 BloombergNEF estimated that the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) for solar, on a global basis, was $122 per MWh, almost half as high again as the LCOE for onshore wind, then $83. The LCOE for coal in places without carbon prices at the time was $50-$75. Today both solar and onshore wind are in the low $40s, while coal remains much where it was.”
-Sun Machines
These statistics would have seemed like a dispatch from a ludicrously improbable utopian future just a few years ago! And markets, governments, and homeowners the world over are responding to the incentives.
“Buying and installing solar panels is currently the largest single category of investment in electricity generation…solar power is on track to generate more electricity than all the world’s nuclear power plants in 2026, than its wind turbines in 2027, than its dams in 2028, its gas-fired power plants in 2030 and its coal-fired ones in 2032.”
-Sun Machines
Now, past performance is no guarantee of future results, and it’s possible that 2024 might be the peak, that solar installations will plateau or decline for the foreseeable future while technological innovation sputters out. But…that’s what all the people who drew those yellow-line forecasts in the graph above thought, and solar has proved them wrong again and again.
The longest-standing objection to solar power has been intermittency, the question of how to provide consistent power during sunless storms and nights. The Economist correctly identifies that between long-distance high-voltage power lines and exponentially improving battery technology, this is essentially a solved problem now.
On transmission lines:
“Long-distance connections allow sunnier places to serve those more dimly lit. England could be powered by panels in Morocco, New England evenings served by Nevada afternoons.”
-Sun Machines
On batteries:
“Batteries and other storage technologies allow arbitrage across time rather than space; energy generated at midday, when grid prices are low, can be sold back when the Sun sets and prices are higher…The Rocky Mountain Institute, a think-tank, calculates that the cost of a kilowatt-hour of battery storage has fallen by 99% over the past 30 years.”
-Sun Machines
And even if the rapid rate of improvement in solar tech magically stopped (which is NOT going to happen), we’re still just getting started in the deployment of existing solar tech to bring power to more parts of the world. Richer temperate areas like Germany got a head start on deploying solar farms, while in sub-Saharan Africa some of the sunniest areas on Earth still have almost none.
Human civilization is now in an extraordinary position where we’ve finally developed cheap solar panels, and we’ve barely got started on deploying them in the sunniest parts of the world! There’s nowhere to go but up.
Here’s The Economist on the incredible potential of solar to bring electricity to Africa:
“Solar power’s growth in sub-Saharan Africa will be more off-grid than in other regions. Off-grid, its competition is mostly diesel power, which is much more expensive. Solar with batteries should be able to replace a lot of diesel generators and reduce the market for new ones very quickly…
Africa currently has the lowest electricity use per person of any continent; 600m people in sub-Saharan Africa enjoy no access to electricity at all. For the continent’s average electricity use per person to rise to the level of India’s, which is more than twice as high, would require 2tw of new solar. Ten years ago that would have been unthinkable. At today’s prices it is beginning to look plausible.”
-Sun Machines
And on the limitless potential of a solar-powered future:
“Once you start to think in terms of energy being really copious and all-but free, at least at some times and in some places, brute-force approaches to all sorts of problems begin to appear.
One way to drastically reduce the spread of airborne disease is to speed up the rate at which the air in the world’s buildings is vented and refreshed. If energy is expensive this is not feasible. But what if…?
One way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is to grind certain sorts of rock into fine dust that is then dispersed across the oceans. Given that this needs to be done at a scale of billions of tonnes a year, again the energy requirement is incredible. And again, what if…?”
-Sun Machines
To convey the scale of what has happened here in more figurative and informal terms: the rapid improvement and decreasing cost of solar technology in the past two decades, and the corresponding ever-accelerating buildout of solar farms, has basically been an uninterrupted series of technological miracles. Not miracles in the sense of being physically impossible, obviously, but miracles in the sense of a very good thing happening despite seeming completely implausible, right up there with “all people fighting all wars suddenly decide to lay down their arms in a spirit of friendship” in terms of evoking “yeah, right, that’s definitely not going to happen” as a reasonable response. Someone accurately predicting the current state of solar power in 2024 would have sounded like an utterly mad pie-in-the-sky wild optimist in any previous year!
A lot of people first started really paying attention to climate issues in 2019, when Greta Thunberg became TIME Person of the Year. And it’s been a dramatic few years since then, to say the least, so it’s quite understandable to have not really checked in on climate news much since then, especially because global media has done a pretty poor job of conveying the scale of the solar progress that’s been made in recent years. But “Sun Machines” helps make it clear: everything is different now. Climate activists really need to understand this; for the first time ever, we have the wind at our back! The multidimensional civilization-wide juggernaut “wicked problem” of climate change is finally up against the “wicked solution” of a solar technological revolution, a constantly improving source of ultra-cheap ultra-clean energy that’s only at the beginning of its potential.
Read “Sun Machines,” and then see what you think. There’s a lot of work to do, but our goal has never been clearer or more achievable.
We can run human civilization on clean electrons, stabilize the atmosphere, and revitalize the biosphere in our lifetime.
If you’re paywalled out of the links above, here's a free library copy of “Sun Machines” from the Internet Archive (warning: the interactive graphs are a bit wonky, but the text gets through quite well).
For an even bigger-picture but much more speculative and idiosyncratic perspective on solar potential, check out this blog post from cleantech entrepreneur Casey Handmer. Sample quote: “When we need to produce vast quantities of antimatter to fly to nearby stars, it will almost certainly be in solar powered particle accelerators.”
My daughter-in-law designs solar installations for a living. I will pass this along to her. Thanks!