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A review by buermann
How Solar Energy Became Cheap: A Model for Low-Carbon Innovation by Gregory F Nemet
4.0
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.