Solar panels
By Per Espen Stoknes, chair, Centre for Green Growth, Norwegian Business School
The mass-produced car needed around 60 years to spread from 10% to 80% of American households; the radio needed 15, and colour TVs spread even quicker. In the western world as a whole, the internet took around eight years to expand its coverage in a similar way, while smartphones needed just six, from 2009 to 2015. So what about solar and wind power?
Understanding the impact of innovations involves looking at how quickly a technology doubles in size or volume. In the previous 10 years, the amount of solar power installed each year has doubled more than four times from 3GW in 2006 to 75GW in 2016. There’s a well-known riddle about lilies on a lake, whose numbers double every day. If the lilies blanket the entire surface after 30 days, when do they cover half of it? On the 15th day? No, as you’ll have worked out, on the 29th.
The diffusion of innovations forms an S-curve; slow at first, then accelerating, and then flattening out when nearly everyone has the new technology. The faster the growth, the steeper the curve.
The S-curve also brings, and benefits from, falling costs. Each time the volume doubles, costs come down by around one quarter. These have gone through a little-noticed revolution. Since the 1970s the cost of photovoltaic solar power has dropped by 99%. From 2008 to 2016 alone, it fell, incredibly, by more more than 80%.
As prices for solar and wind power come crashing down, they shatter the coal and gas price floor, and continue downwards. These are already – or very soon will be – the cheapest power for anyone anywhere. All 7 billion of us must re-programme our assumptions of what combinations of cheap solar, wind, storage and smart grids will bring.
The impact of these price drops can be seen in the increased popularity of solar technology. Every day in 2015 around 500,000 solar panels were installed – mostly in China, India, Japan and the US. By 2016, this had already risen to 800,000 panels per day. Now, in 2017, more than 3 million people head out to work each day to set up ever more solar panels.
We estimate that – to have a good life in 2050 – a person will use around 2,500 kWh a year for transport, the same for heating and cooling, and 5,000 kWh for producing food, clothes, gadgets, entertainment, and everything else. That adds up to about 10,000 kWh. In Nordic countries today, we use around 14,000 kWh per person-year – the world’s highest amount – in quite wasteful ways.
Suddenly people everywhere can profitably start building a sunny future without plundering the planet. This can happen in three main steps.
Step 1: Power
We can build more sun and wind power over the next 20 years, doubling annual installations just three more times – from 150GW of sun and wind power technologies now, to 1,200GW new power by around 2037 (see figure 1). Continuing to add 1,200GW per year for another decade will give all 9 billion people then on Earth enough power. Finally, there’ll be “power to the people”. It will get cheaper and cheaper to the point where the cost of generating an extra kWh is close to zero.
How much space will it all take? Surprisingly little. Meeting the entire world’s energy needs only with solar, would require just 1% of the Sahara desert. Of course, in practice, all the panels won’t go there: they will be put wherever needed. And solar will be combined with windmills and storage for power when there is little sun or wind.
Step 2: Transport
Electric cars, buses and trucks will soon be cheaper to buy, own and run than those powered by fossil fuels. They will use ever better and cheaper batteries and hydrogen, charged or produced from solar and wind. The cars will accelerate quicker. They’ll help pay electricity bills by stabilising the grid.
Owning a diesel car in 2030 will be as old-fashioned as using a horse or donkey to get around today. Self-driving electric vehicles will come and pick people up when needed. Ships and planes will eventually become electrified as well.
Step 3: Heating
Other fossil energy use – for heating and cooling buildings and materials – can be cut by efficient design, better insulation and energy storage. And heat-pumps can provide the remaining heating needs. When these run on solar or wind power, demand for fossil fuels will approach zero.
These three steps, taken in parallel, will profitably cut demand for coal, oil and gas by 70% by 2040 – slowing global warming. They can and will give everyone a good life while starting to restore the global commons.
Many fossil fuel companies, of course, will fight against this with all their lobbying power and dirty money. But they will go bust if they don’t reinvent their business models.
All the building blocks for kick-starting this renewable economy are now available. But two main challenges remain. Can we both increase investments quickly enough, and solve energy poverty?
Around $300bn (£227bn) is now invested in renewables every year – a huge amount. But, if the revolution is to happen fast enough, this must triple to $1tn by 2030. So we must support government action until markets grow to that level.
Meanwhile, 1.4 billion people still lack access to electricity. Will the new solar power be only for the rich? Large financing of small-scale power with storage on rooftops in cities, slums and villages – everywhere – is critical. If all the money goes to big solar parks for big utilities, the poor won’t get access to clean power. More crime, refugees, and urban breakdown will follow.
Solar power for everyone can give real energy democracy. There’s daylight and wind freely available for all. But producing this freedom won’t happen by itself. We need more leadership, political will, entrepreneurship and crowdfunding. We should support the NGOs and new companies, such as Sweden’s TRINE investment service, that are on this job.
Above all, making this bright sun-rich future happen quickly enough needs all of us to support it: telling and re-telling the story of these three steps with our voices and votes, our money and actions.
