Chris Goodall - The Switch: How Solar, Storage and New Tech Means Cheap Power for All

About the author

Chris Goodall is a world-leading expert on new energy technologies. His previous book for Profile, Ten Technologies to Fix Energy and Climate, was one of the Financial Times Books of the Year. How to Live a Low Carbon Life won the 2007 Clarion award for non-fiction. He publishes Carbon Commentary, a website and newsletter on energy efficiency and advances in renewables. He is also an investor in young companies in the low carbon world.

www.carboncommentary.com

The Switch

The Switch

Chris Goodall

First published in the UK in 2016 by
Profile Books
3 Holford Yard
Bevin Way
London
WC1X 9HD

Chris Goodall, 2016

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978 1 782832485

Contents

Introduction
Cheap solar changes everything

A cheap, clean source of energy would change everything, declared Bill Gates in February 2016. The annual letter from his charitable foundation focused on the need for a revolution that gives abundant power to all without further disruption of the climate. Gates is in no doubt of the importance of the challenge, particularly for those currently without access to electricity, and optimistic that the solution will be found. Within the next fifteen years and especially if young people get involved I expect the world will discover a clean energy breakthrough that will save our planet and power our world.

It wont take fifteen years. The argument of this book is that the breakthrough that Gates anticipates has already occurred. The world now has a set of technologies that will offer cheap and clean power to all, twenty-four hours a day, twelve months a year. From the favelas of Latin America and villages of India to the cities of Europe, solar power offers electricity that is now competitive with all other energy sources. And it is becoming cheaper each month through predictable technological changes. Researching this book I talked to no one who thought these improvements would slow down, let alone stop.

The speed of change is remarkable, given solars somewhat slow beginnings. The basic technology has been around for more than half a century. Vanguard 1 the fourth satellite ever to be launched carried six solar panels into orbit in 1958. This was the first time the world had ever used photovoltaics (PV) for a real purpose. The little rectangles of silicon produced a maximum half a watt, a tiny charge that nevertheless enabled the satellite to send data about the composition of the atmosphere back to Earth for the next six years. These primitive panels cost many thousands of dollars per watt. However, by the mid 1970s, the figure had fallen to $100 a watt. Now the cost is about 50 cents and the decline continues. We can generate electricity from the suns rays at costs which seemed utterly unimaginable even a few decades ago. Unimaginable even now, it seems, given the conservatism of almost every estimate that appears in financial reports or the press. In my research I found only one historic forecast of future declines in PV costs that had overestimated the speed of the change.

Solar panels with a purpose: GPS pioneer Roger L Easton (left) inspects the Vanguard 1 satellite with its six silicon solar panels.

Nevertheless, perhaps we should have anticipated the rapid decline in solar costs in this decade. Peter Eisenberger, now a professor at Columbia University in New York, co-wrote a paper for his employers at the oil company Exxon in 1989 that predicted solar energy (probably to heat water rather than generate photovoltaic electricity) would become cost competitive with fossil fuels by 2012 or 2013. Technology evolves in a surprisingly regular way, he recently told Bloomberg News when explaining his prediction. Much of the first chapter of this book is about why we can be confident that PV cost reductions will continue and make THE SWITCH inevitable. Every time the worlds accumulated total of solar panels has doubled, the cost has reliably declined by about twenty per cent.

In the sunnier parts of the world solar photovoltaics already offer electricity at lower total cost than other forms of power. As I write, a Californian utility has just announced another record US low for the price paid for a megawatt hour of electricity from PV farms. Subsidised by a tax break, the figure of about $37 per megawatt hour is said to be the lowest long-term purchase agreement for US electricity. Recent published prices for solar electricity in places as diverse as Chile, India and Brazil show equally striking declines and, crucially, to levels lower than conventional electricity generators.

Even in the gloomy countries of northern Europe, light from the sun will soon provide electricity at prices lower than fossil fuel alternatives. Fraunhofer, a sober German research institute, sees the cost of solar power from solar parks in south Germany falling as low as 4 euro cents (about 3.2 pence) per kilowatt hour by 2020, a cost that beats any competing source of electricity from a new power plant. In Britain the dramatic fall in the price of solar panels has already pushed PV almost to cost parity with planned gas-fired power stations. Power from wind turbines in the best locations on Atlantic coasts is currently cheaper but even this will be beaten as PV continues its relentless downward march.

The falling cost of a PV panel is a major part of this change: both in its production costs and financing. Solar farms can now be financed at far lower rates of interest than any other source of electricity. Because PV is so utterly reliable and almost maintenance-free, it is a perfect investment for pension funds seeking consistent yearly returns for the thirty-five years of a panels life. As other investment opportunities around the world have dried up in recent years and interest rates have fallen to unprecedentedly low levels, solar farms have become able to raise money at cheaper and cheaper rates. This is surprisingly important. Cutting the annual interest charge from 8 per cent to 5 per cent reduces the underlying cost of producing electricity from solar installations by almost a third.

But, as solar sceptics never tire of saying, cheap daytime-only power isnt enough. We need the capacity to store solar-generated power for use when the sun isnt shining, or other renewable sources that complement the suns power. In places like the UK, this means using wind and plant material for substantial amounts of energy. Importantly, well also need huge amounts of electricity storage, both for overnight and for throughout the dark seasons of the year.

We also need to be able to manage our electricity grids so that they can cope with the impact of unpredictable supplies during the daylight hours. This means finding ways of adjusting electricity demand to match the available supply, not the other way round.

The good news is that this is all well within our reach now, and at costs that seem reasonable today and which will get less expensive every year. Tesla, for example, the electric car and battery company, is offering energy storage at prices that are falling at least as fast as the costs of PV. Rapid advances in complementary technologies such as wind, hydrogen production and anaerobic digestion mean that the world will not lack power when the sun is down. The second part of this book focuses on these areas of storage and non-solar renewables.