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rooftop solar
Some Bright News for a Dismal Week
Solar panels have, over the last months, suddenly gotten so cheap that they’re now appearing in massive numbers across much of the developing world.
Sep 17, 2024
Not perhaps a week for good news—not with former U.S. President Donald Trump trying to initiate a pogrom in Ohio (and the Secret Service protecting him from a crazy right-winger). Not with insane floods across Central Europe where the blue Danube is now a raging brown monster, or in the Lake Chad region where hundreds are dead.
But there’s something else going on behind the scenes—silently. And it’s happening in places where people need it most.
Solar panels have, over the last months, suddenly gotten so cheap that they’re now appearing in massive numbers across much of the developing world. Without waiting for what are often moribund utilities to do the job, business and home owners are getting on with electrifying their lives, and doing it cleanly.
This won’t just transform the climate, it will transform lives.
How do we know? Basically by good sleuthing. The first account I saw came from Azeem Azhar and Nathan Warren. They were looking at Pakistan, where power prices in the wake of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion have soared so dramatically that sales of electricity have gone down 10% in the last two years. That should cripple a country—”yet somehow it’s economy grew by 2% anyway.” Again, that should have been impossible: if there’s a truism, especially in the developing world, it’s that growth in energy use is tied to growth in economies. So what was happening? Basically, Pakistanis were buying huge quantities of very cheap Chinese solar panels and putting them up themselves. Pakistan, they reported, “has become the third-largest importer of Chinese solar modules, acquiring a staggering 13 gigawatts in the first half of this year alone.” This is particularly astonishing because the country’s entire official electricity generating capacity is only 46 GW. In other words:
in just six months, Pakistan imported solar capacity equivalent to 30% of its total electricity generation capacity—an absolutely staggering amount.
Energy analyst Dave Jones has gone to great lengths to track this spread on Google maps, finding building after building across the country with big new solar arrays on the roof. For middle-class Pakistanis, they can pay off the investment in a few years selling back power to the grid; in poor areas, things like tube wells for irrigation are now increasingly run on solar. This means not just a decline in natural gas use for centralized generation; it also means many noisy, dirty, and expensive diesel generators that used to provide backup power are being turned off. The great solar analyst Jenny Chase at BNEF has found much the same thing. As Azhar and Warren point out:
by the end of the year, Pakistan’s distributed solar system could be nearing half the capacity of its entire grid! This isn’t just growth; it’s a silent revolution in energy production.
Were it just Pakistan, it would be a wonderful story but perhaps not definitive. But I had a long talk last week with Joel Nana, an analyst at Sustainable Energy Africa in Capetown who told a very similar story. He’s been leading a project to help countries across the continent deal with the increase in distributed generation, and he reports something similar happening in country after country—Zimbabwe, Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, on and on.
“In Namibia we uncovered they have about 70 megawatts of distributed generation—that’s rooftop solar pv that’s about 11% of Namibia’s installed capacity. Eswatini, it’s an old figure, but they’re already at 30 megawatts and it’s a very small country. That’s about 15% of Eswatini’s installed capacity. South Africa is the biggest market, and it has five gigawatts of distributed solar—about 9% of South Africa’s installed capacity.”
“You will not see these numbers anywhere,” he said. “They’re not reported in national plans, not anywhere in continental statistics. No one knows about them. It’s only when you speak to the utilities,” and even they know mostly about the larger installations—there are doubtless far more hut-scale systems across Africa. People are driven by the high cost of electricity, but also by its unreliability—in much of the continent “load-shedding” is endemic, with diesel generators roaring on to compensate, at least at businesses solvent enough to afford it. But diesel fuel is expensive, and generators are hard to maintain. PV is “a no-brainer for most businesses if not all,” he said. “The prices just make sense. The African market is a huge market for some of the Chinese manufacturers, so we have availability—huge availability. The market is flooded with panels from China.”
All this, he points out, is happening without any help from governments, and except for South Africa without financing from banks, who haven’t yet learned how to evaluate the credit risk. The continent needs more trained solar installers, and coordinated standards. On the other hand, many nations probably won’t need the big and expensive increases in bulk electric supply they’ve been predicting. And Nana and his colleagues are working hard to figure out how to make the most of this—how to turn solar pv into real economic assets for entire communities, through practices like net metering.
This is extraordinary news, in large part because it’s happening in places where people most need power—I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Africa looking at communities getting their very first power thanks to the sun. (And I’m headed back as soon as the election is over, so watch this space for more). This won’t just transform the climate, it will transform lives.
It comes on top of more visible good news—the IEA said this weak that oil demand around the world is softening because of “surging” sales of electric vehicles. In China, demand for gasoline will peak this year or next and then decline sharply. Britain, where the coal era was born, will close it’s last coal-fired power plant at the end of this month, while California—arguably Earth’s most modern economy—has managed to weather its worst heatwaves ever without blackouts this simmer thanks to ever-growing batteries of… batteries. (The state’s one big recent blackout came when a gas-fired plant went down in Pasadena). Hey, photovoltaics are getting so sensitive that they’re starting to be useful indoors, where they could replace small disposable batteries.
But nothing beats the idea that solar panels are suddenly sprouting, as if by magic, precisely where they’re needed most. If we can get there fast enough—before we’re overwhelmed by droughts and floods—then a sunny new world is entirely possible.
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Solar Power vs. The Darkness of Trump
We desperately need clean energy now. That’s what this election is about.
Sep 08, 2024
To understand the primal stakes in this year’s election, and to understand the very exciting possibility for rapid progress in the climate fight, a new set of numbers is extremely useful.
They come courtesy of Electrek’s Michelle Lewis, reporting on the longtime renewable researcher Ken Bossong’s analysis of the data on electric generation provided each month by the Energy Information Administration. And what they show is the remarkable transformation over the last decade. In 2014, solar power “utility-scale solar provided a mere 9.25 GW (0.75%) of total installed US generating capacity.” Which is to say, less than one percent. But “by the middle of 2024, installed solar capacity had risen to 8.99% of total utility-scale capacity.” (Add another few percent for rooftop distributed solar).
That still sounds like a relatively small percentage—under ten percent. But in fact what it measns is that we’ve finally moved on to the steep part of an S curve, and if we can keep up anything like that pace of expansion it won’t be long before the numbers are truly incredible. Indeed, as Bossong pointed out on Twitter, “the combination of utility-scale and “estimated” small-scale (e.g., rooftop) solar increased by 26.3% in the first six months of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.” Statistics numb the brain so let me say it another way: we are on the cusp of a true explosion that could change the world. We are starting to put out the fires that humans have always relied on, and replace them with the power of the sun.
Pretty much the same thing is happening with wind, and pretty much the same thing is happening around the world. Bloomberg predicted last week that global installations of new solar modules would hit 592 gigawatts this year—up 33 percent from last year. The point is, when you’re doing this a few years in a row the totals start to grow very very fast. When something that provides one percent of your electricity doubles to two percent, that doesn’t mean much—but when something that supplies ten or twenty percent goes up by a third that’s actually quite a lot. And more the next year.
For a long while, you could see this growth coming, but it hadn’t yet added up to enough to materially dent the use of coal and gas and oil. But that is starting to change. Here’s the most important number I can give you, supplied to me this afternoon by Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, who has been keeping careful track of the California electric grid. As I wrote earlier, it’s been moving to renewable energy faster than almost anywhere in the country. The result: “For the (almost) 6-month period from March 7 to September 4, fossil gas use on the grid was 29% lower in 2024 than in 2023.” I’m going to repeat that. “For the (almost) 6-month period from March 7 to September 4, fossil gas use on the grid was 29% lower in 2024 than in 2023.” That is, the use of natural gas to generate electricity has dropped by almost a third in one year in the fifth largest economy in the world. In 2023, fossil gas provided 23% more electricity to the grid than solar in that six month period. In 2024, those numbers were almost perfectly reversed: solar provided 24 percent more electricity than fossil gas, 39,865 GWh v 24,033 GWh. In one year. That’s how this kind of s-curve exponential growth works, and how it could work everywhere on earth,
All this is the premise for understanding why the fossil fuel industry is so freaked out about this year’s election. They can read these charts as easily as anyone, and they know what’s coming. If it keeps happening at this pace, it will quickly start reducing demand for their products—they have vast reserves of, say, natural gas in the Permian Basin that will stay there forever simply because there’s no market. They have to lock in customers right now, or else watch their whole business start to slowly, and then quickly, fade. And with that fade will come, inevitably, reduced political power. Right now they can still frighten politicians—hence the fact that Kamala Harris, with Pennsylvania on the line, has to insist she supports fracking. But four years from now, not so much.
And if Trump wins, there’s tons that he can do to slow the transition down. He can’t “kill wind,” as he has promised. But he can make it impossible for it to keep growing at the same rate—right now there are teams in the White House managing every single big renewable project, trying to lower the regulatory hurdles that get in the way of new transmission lines, for instance. A Trump White House will have similar teams, just operating in reverse.
Again, he can’t hold it off forever—economics insures that cheap power will eventually win out. But eventually doesn’t help here, not with the poles melting fast. We desperately need clean energy now. That’s what this election is about—will Big Oil get the obstacle it desperately desires, or will change continue to play out—hopefully with a big boost from the climate movement for even faster progress.
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The US Should Follow Australia Into the Sun
Here, in a country 13 times the size of Australia, only 4.5 million households have rooftop solar; to be at the same level as Australia, we’d need 47 million households with rooftop solar.
Sep 07, 2024
Australia’s Climate Council has issued a new report on clean energy in the country’s states.
Winter is ending in Australia, but it is worrisome that their August was among the hottest on record this year, presaging a hot dry summer to come, and raising the real risk of further massive bush fires of the sort that scorched the countryside and killed billions of animals in 2019-2020. The continent-country is highly vulnerable to climate change, with its two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, right on the sea and facing coastal erosion from sea-level rise. It is unfortunate that so many Australian politicians and firms have found it so difficult to let go of coal and fossil gas. Although Australia is a relatively small country, the emissions of which are not all that consequential, it just sets a poor example for the rest of the world, especially for developing countries, if a very vulnerable country like Australia is a big coal user. How can it scold China and India for using so much coal, which really is consequential for the fate of the world, if Canberra is itself so irresponsible?
Although Australia has had a love affair with coal, the dirtiest and unhealthiest of the fossil fuels, even that addiction is beginning to subside. Less that 50% of the country’s electricity now comes from coal, an unprecedented development.
Given how sunny it is in the U.S. South and Southwest, it is crazy that we don’t have more [rooftop solar], but conservative state legislatures in the back pocket of Big Carbon have often legislated obstacles.
Obviously, not all the states are as environmentally conscious and ambitious as South Australia.
Western Australia and the Northern Territory are particularly bad actors, actually expanding their use of coal and fossil gas.
Some other states have made great strides and have ambitious goals. South Australia has gone in big on solar energy and has largely dumped coal, and is employing batteries to store and use the solar energy when it is needed at night and at usage peaks during the day. The state wants to have all its electricity come from renewables by 2027, in only three years. And it is a highly plausible plan. Already, 70% of the electricity in South Australia comes from renewables, the best record of any large state by far, though the small Australian Capital Territory in which the capital of Canberra nestles has reached 100% renewable electricity generation and in Tasmania it is 98.2%. South Australia is lightly populated, but some of the more populous states are beginning to make strides as well.
In the country as a whole, there is good news. Since 2018, Australia has doubled the share of renewables in its electricity grid, and much of this increase in clean electricity has been spearheaded by states and territories rather than the federal government.
With a population of 26 million (a little bigger than Florida, a little smaller than Texas), Australia has about 10 million households. A full 3.6 million of them, about 36%, have rooftop solar installations. Half of all households in Queensland now have panels on their roofs.
In the U.S., a country 13 times the size of Australia, only 4.5 million households have rooftop solar. To be at the same level as Australia, we’d need 47 million households with rooftop solar. Given how sunny it is in the U.S. South and Southwest, it is crazy that we don’t have more, but conservative state legislatures in the back pocket of Big Carbon have often legislated obstacles. Australia’s homeowners clearly have managed to outmaneuver the Coal Lobby there. (We have solar panels, and even in Michigan they much reduce our bill most of the year.)
The most populous Australia state, New South Wales, with over 8 million people, has made some strides in renewables. Some 35.6% of its electricity is from renewables, and 34% of its households have rooftop solar. 13% of its travel uses shared transportation, and there is an uptick in purchases of electric vehicles, though the absolute numbers remain small. NSW has banned offshore drilling and mining for fossil fuels.
South Australia, despite its thin population, is a technological leader in renewables. Not only do renewables supply 74.4% of electricity, but it has large battery projects that allow sunshine to be captured and used at night and at peak hours. The state hopes to phase out gas electricity plants in only a few years.
Batteries have also been key to California’s remarkable uptake of renewables.
Now Australia as a whole has six enormous battery projects in the pipeline.
At $1.7 trillion, Australia has the 13th largest GDP in the world. If the G20 states can get to carbon zero by 2050, that will solve the bulk of our climate worries, since all the carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution will be absorbed by the oceans over time. The temperature will immediately stop rising and will decline over time. If we go on spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere after 2050, however, we will outrun the capacity of the oceans to absorb them, and the world will get very hot, and the climate could go chaotic.
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