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How Solar Energy Became Cheap: A Model for Low-Carbon Innovation
Solar energy is a substantial global industry, one that has generated trade disputes among superpowers, threatened the solvency of large energy companies, and prompted serious reconsideration of electric utility regulation rooted in the 1930s. One of the biggest payoffs from solar’s success is not the clean inexpensive electricity it can produce, but the lessons it provides for innovation in other technologies needed to address climate change. Despite the large literature on solar, including analyses of increasingly detailed datasets, the question as to how solar became inexpensive and why it took so long still remains unanswered. Drawing on developments in the US, Japan, Germany, Australia, and China, this book provides a truly comprehensive and international explanation for how solar has become inexpensive. Understanding the reasons for solar’s success enables us to take full advantage of solar’s potential. It can also teach us how to support other low-carbon technologies with analogous properties, including small modular nuclear reactors and direct air capture. However, the urgency of addressing climate change means that a key challenge in applying the solar model is in finding ways to speed up innovation. Offering suggestions and policy recommendations for accelerated innovation is another key contribution of this book. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of energy technology and innovation, climate change and energy analysis and policy, as well as practitioners and policymakers working in the existing and emerging energy industries.
238 pages, Paperback
Published May 31, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 15, 2019
A fascinating history of the development & deployment of solar PV and the contributions by the US, Japan, Germany, Australia, & China.
For a more detailed summary, read this post
https://energyathaas.wordpress.com/20...
but I'll share a few of the pieces I found interesting:
1) This book is an incredible piece of research with enough pages of journal citations to fill a short novel
2) Greg has broken down PV's cost declines into 9 distinct innovation actions for government, industry, & society
3) He applies these actions broadly to other low-carbon technologies and specifically to two: Direct Air Capture (DAC), & Small Nuclear Reactors (SNR)
4) He catalogs the various steps it took to drop the solar "soft costs" by 50% in the past decade & which can be applied still to reduce these costs even more
5) He categorizes new low-carbon, & carbon-negatives tech into 4 types & gives comparison to developed ones, like PV,showing how we can scale them
6) Finally, he gives us 8 reasons for optimism in our fight against climate change.
For a more detailed summary, read this post
https://energyathaas.wordpress.com/20...
but I'll share a few of the pieces I found interesting:
1) This book is an incredible piece of research with enough pages of journal citations to fill a short novel
2) Greg has broken down PV's cost declines into 9 distinct innovation actions for government, industry, & society
3) He applies these actions broadly to other low-carbon technologies and specifically to two: Direct Air Capture (DAC), & Small Nuclear Reactors (SNR)
4) He catalogs the various steps it took to drop the solar "soft costs" by 50% in the past decade & which can be applied still to reduce these costs even more
5) He categorizes new low-carbon, & carbon-negatives tech into 4 types & gives comparison to developed ones, like PV,showing how we can scale them
6) Finally, he gives us 8 reasons for optimism in our fight against climate change.
October 12, 2023
A concise history of solar photovoltaics. Since its invention at Bell Labs (an engineer working on something else happened to have a cracked block of silicon crystal that had inadvertently become adulterated with phosphorous as it bounced around the lab, creating a PN junction solar cell by accident) a sequence of similarly haphazard programs have just barely kept grid-tied solar PV markets active since the first rooftop program started in late 90s Japan.
Jimmy Carter's late 70s solar development program slashed costs by a third (from $15 to $10/W, in 2019 dollars) in three years, but despite or perhaps because of this success Reagan killed the program, shoving the industry back into small niche markets (minus the military applications that Reagan terminated at the same time) for 15 years. Japan's rooftop program was quite small, but small municipal programs in Germany were starting around the same time, advanced by the anti-nuke activists who started their Green Party, it eventually lead to the feed-in tariff program, essentially just a demand subsidy guaranteeing a market for PV manufacturers. The Q-Cell firm was the early star player in meeting the demand created by Germany's decade-long $200B program, but it's when Zhengrong Shi -- a Chinese student and then colleague of Martin Green's photovoltaic lab at the University of New South Wales since the 80s -- starts Suntech and drives costs down from $3/W to under $1/W where the market really takes off. At its peak between around 2010 Germany was installing nearly 8GW of solar per year.
Shi grows Suntech from an initial 10MW/yr production line to a 2GW/yr company before Germany's subsidy program is abandoned, making it the largest PV manufacturer in the world, before a subsidiary counterfeits half a billion in bonds and bankrupts the company. Chinese competitors pick up the pieces and the government starts its own feed-in tariffs, ensuring that the industry continues growing, until today when China is producing more than 100GW a year and whole terawatts of annual production are visible on the horizon.
What is stunning in all this is how remote the US is from the project. The prime historic contributor to greenhouse emissions, by the time the Biden administration passed the IRA and threw its industrial weight behind the market the cost issue has been solved, the panels are a negligible factor in the cost of installation, and the American subsidy program can be viewed as little more than a domestic labor subsidy, and with its trade restriction it is another retaliatory tariff (when Biden was Vice President the administration slammed a 47% tariff against Chinese solar panels to protect domestic manufacturers) against the very country that did most of the work.
In any case, if we don't choke to death on fossils you can thank, as a first order approximation, Martin Green's lab in Australia, the German Green Party, and the unnerving authoritarian competence of the Chinese Communist Party. Maybe the most frustrating lesson in this book is that any nation or coalition of them since 1980 could have coordinated the ~$20B/yr investment that allowed the industry to rapidly reduce costs and expand to meet the needs of a fossil-free energy economy.
By dragging our heels for so long we've lost decades of runway, an endlessly frustrating policy failure for any environmentalist to watch unfold. It very easily could have not happened at all as humanity white knuckles its way into an uncertain future, and we could still easily fail.
Jimmy Carter's late 70s solar development program slashed costs by a third (from $15 to $10/W, in 2019 dollars) in three years, but despite or perhaps because of this success Reagan killed the program, shoving the industry back into small niche markets (minus the military applications that Reagan terminated at the same time) for 15 years. Japan's rooftop program was quite small, but small municipal programs in Germany were starting around the same time, advanced by the anti-nuke activists who started their Green Party, it eventually lead to the feed-in tariff program, essentially just a demand subsidy guaranteeing a market for PV manufacturers. The Q-Cell firm was the early star player in meeting the demand created by Germany's decade-long $200B program, but it's when Zhengrong Shi -- a Chinese student and then colleague of Martin Green's photovoltaic lab at the University of New South Wales since the 80s -- starts Suntech and drives costs down from $3/W to under $1/W where the market really takes off. At its peak between around 2010 Germany was installing nearly 8GW of solar per year.
Shi grows Suntech from an initial 10MW/yr production line to a 2GW/yr company before Germany's subsidy program is abandoned, making it the largest PV manufacturer in the world, before a subsidiary counterfeits half a billion in bonds and bankrupts the company. Chinese competitors pick up the pieces and the government starts its own feed-in tariffs, ensuring that the industry continues growing, until today when China is producing more than 100GW a year and whole terawatts of annual production are visible on the horizon.
What is stunning in all this is how remote the US is from the project. The prime historic contributor to greenhouse emissions, by the time the Biden administration passed the IRA and threw its industrial weight behind the market the cost issue has been solved, the panels are a negligible factor in the cost of installation, and the American subsidy program can be viewed as little more than a domestic labor subsidy, and with its trade restriction it is another retaliatory tariff (when Biden was Vice President the administration slammed a 47% tariff against Chinese solar panels to protect domestic manufacturers) against the very country that did most of the work.
In any case, if we don't choke to death on fossils you can thank, as a first order approximation, Martin Green's lab in Australia, the German Green Party, and the unnerving authoritarian competence of the Chinese Communist Party. Maybe the most frustrating lesson in this book is that any nation or coalition of them since 1980 could have coordinated the ~$20B/yr investment that allowed the industry to rapidly reduce costs and expand to meet the needs of a fossil-free energy economy.
By dragging our heels for so long we've lost decades of runway, an endlessly frustrating policy failure for any environmentalist to watch unfold. It very easily could have not happened at all as humanity white knuckles its way into an uncertain future, and we could still easily fail.
March 24, 2021
Pretty good read. Good history of solar’s growth. Good conclusion. Could be shorter. My only complaint is that it’s fairly dense.
July 29, 2023
This book goes through the history of solar PV's development and identifies what allowed it to scale up and come down the cost curve. The author clearly enumerates the factors that were necessary at each stage to enable that process, and generalizes them such that the framework can be applied to other analogous technologies. This book made me see climate technology in a new light, and I feel much more focused on modularity and disruptive innovation/manufacturing than before. This book also made me feel optimistic, in that a lot of the factors that led to solar's slow but impressive growth have been addressed and improved. This is a great book for anyone working on climate technology.
The invention formula outlined in this book is the following: The first stage is basic scientific discovery (the photoelectric effect). The next stage is demonstration of harnessing this scientific principle in a small scale device (Bell Labs first practical solar cell). The next stage is finding niche markets to deploy the extremely expensive, novel device (what is enabled by this new technology?). From then on, it is finding increasingly large markets that provide opportunity for scaling up. As scale is increased, specialty machinery is designed to lower manufacturing costs. Everything is about disruptive innovation (how do we make this as cheap as possible) rather than engineering everything perfectly. The cheapest material and manufacturing method beats the higher performance or higher precision one. Essential to all of this is government support, creating markets where they wouldn’t exist at the earlier stages. Also, knowledge flows across continents is essential, both in policy and engineering. Different countries offer different comparative advantages that are more or less important at different stages of invention/development.
The invention formula outlined in this book is the following: The first stage is basic scientific discovery (the photoelectric effect). The next stage is demonstration of harnessing this scientific principle in a small scale device (Bell Labs first practical solar cell). The next stage is finding niche markets to deploy the extremely expensive, novel device (what is enabled by this new technology?). From then on, it is finding increasingly large markets that provide opportunity for scaling up. As scale is increased, specialty machinery is designed to lower manufacturing costs. Everything is about disruptive innovation (how do we make this as cheap as possible) rather than engineering everything perfectly. The cheapest material and manufacturing method beats the higher performance or higher precision one. Essential to all of this is government support, creating markets where they wouldn’t exist at the earlier stages. Also, knowledge flows across continents is essential, both in policy and engineering. Different countries offer different comparative advantages that are more or less important at different stages of invention/development.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews