Can you start by answering the question everyone wants to know the answer to: is solar power a viable alternative to coal?
Yes, solar energy is viable. It works very well. you put a solar panel in the sun and it will last at least 20 years. There are only two problems with solar energy: one will go away and the other is intrinsic. the only reason we don’t have much more solar energy than we do right now is that it has been very expensive – this is the problem that will go away. Thanks to our Chinese friends who invest huge amounts of money in very large factories, the cost of solar power is coming down very fast. the net result is that it is becoming inexpensive to install in many applications where just a couple of years ago it would not have been.
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The obvious problem with solar power is, what happens when the sun goes down? there really isn’t an answer to that yet. solar energy is not going to be the complete answer to our problems, until, perhaps, we have better batteries. if you have good batteries, you can charge them during the day and use them at night. that too is proceeding at a fairly rapid pace, with huge amounts of money being applied.
There has already been an increase in the use of solar energy, hasn’t there?
Solar energy has grown more than 60%, year over year, over the last decade, and continues to grow by leaps and bounds. when I noticed the increase, my initial assumption was that there had been a breakthrough in technology. but it turned out that it wasn’t that at all. It had to do with politics, in particular, a political innovation developed in Germany that really started the huge growth of solar power. so I was very interested in this question of “what makes technological change happen?” And it’s not just the technology, it’s also the policy mechanisms that support the introduction of new technology.
So, solar power relies heavily on subsidies? what was the political innovation in germany?
The Germans changed the nature of the game by saying, “we want solar power and we’re willing to pay for it.” they devised an innovative way to pay for it, which they call “feeding”. tariff’. What it means is that if you put solar on your roof and feed your electricity into the grid, we’ll keep everything and pay you a premium for it. But that premium will shrink year after year, as more and more solar power is deployed and the price of systems goes down. the idea is that people who install solar panels and solar systems can get their full investment back and make a proper profit, and that they are treated exactly as if they were electric/utility companies. this was a radical notion back in 2000, when it was first enacted by the bundestag. takes the uncertainty out of investing. If you know you’re going to get your money back, why wouldn’t you?
then it becomes a question of how a country pays for it. the Germans came up with the idea that it was the responsibility of the power companies, not the government. any time you have direct subsidies from the government, it’s always a disaster. ‘we’ve run out of money, we can’t do this anymore’, etc. or a new government arrives and cancels the program. that happens over and over again here in australia. but the German system just goes on, because it has nothing to do with the government, other than setting, each year, the rate by which tariffs are reduced. this has been going down and down and down and down. And you will hear different answers, but some people say that from 2015 the price of electricity produced in Germany by solar systems will be equivalent to that produced by coal or nuclear power plants.
that’s extraordinary. but what about in the usa wow, where do i live? Am I going to get any benefit if, wanting to be respectful with the environment, I decide to put a solar panel on my roof?
varies from state to state. They have tried different ways to achieve the same goal. In some places, one place in Florida and one place in Canada, Ontario, have even adopted the German system. but above all, in america, what they do is use a system called “net metering”. instead of feeding all the electricity you generate into the grid, you use the electricity for your own uses and then, if there is any left over, you can feed it into the grid. it will run the meter backwards, so you should ideally end up paying nothing to the power company. this isn’t enough of an incentive to get people really excited about doing it.
another problem in the us. is that the utility companies don’t like it. they do not want to lose market share to individual solar electricity producers. so they’re making it as hard as possible. in particular, the way they do it is through a grotesque bureaucracy. In California, if you want to produce solar energy, you have to fill out a 140-page form. Large solar installers have people whose job it is to fill out these forms. in fact, some companies have more people filling out forms than people in the van going out and installing the solar.
and on the positive side?
what’s happening that’s really interesting in the us. uu. is financial innovation. One of the most exciting areas for this is solar power leasing. there is a company called solarcity that is expanding like a gangster out of california. (Most of these companies started in California, because that’s where people are most excited about solar power, and Arnold Schwarzenegger did a wonderful job promoting it.) So these days you can lease a solar system from a company and put it on your roof, and they’ll guarantee you get more money for the electricity it produces than what you pay them for the lease. In other words, you don’t have to spend a lot of money to install a solar system and you don’t suffer from your commitment to solar energy.
so, solar power is coming to the us. uu. – but it comes very slowly. the Germans are far ahead: they produce more than half of the world’s solar energy. some of the other Europeans are catching up; Italy is the biggest at the moment, because in Italy ordinary electricity is very expensive, so solar energy makes a lot of sense. Spain, Portugal and, lately, the United Kingdom. have begun, long overdue, to put in place the incentives that will presumably see a lot of solar being installed in the coming years.
Your first book, From Space to Earth, is about the history of solar electricity.
This is a beautiful book. is everything an introduction to a topic should be. it is structured in a very clever way; has short chapters; It has a lot of good illustrations. is based on many interviews and first-hand research.
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Solar cells were invented in 1954, but for the first 20 years they were only used for one thing: powering satellites. it was only around the time of the oil crisis that people started to think about what could be done on earth with these solar cells; hence the title of the book: from space to earth.
Virtually all early applications of solar cells were “off-grid”. you had a remote app that couldn’t connect to the power grid and so it was wonderful to have a power source on site. Microwave repeater stations in places like Papua New Guinea were a classic example. You’re trying to get a phone line over a mountain range that’s completely covered in trees, and the only way to do that is to install repeater stations that broadcast the signal. if you do it the traditional way, you have to use diesel, which means you have to hire a helicopter every month to bring in the fuel to recharge the generators. Another group of customers for the first solar panels were marijuana growers in Humboldt and Mendocino counties in California. they like to live in remote places, so they were off the grid and had no conventional electricity supplies. solar power was how they got their ordinary electricity.
Until what year does the book go?
goes back to the mid-1990s, so it’s a nice companion to my own book, bringing you up to the present. Perlin’s book is a history of the first 40 years of solar power, when it was used almost entirely for off-grid applications. my book is about grid connection: things that connect to the power grid.
Tell me about your next book, The Grid: A Journey Through the Heart of Our Electrified World
I chose this one because we depend on electricity for almost everything we do, and yet most of us have no idea how this material gets to us, or what it actually is. Philip Schewe, the author, refers to it as “bottled lightning.” He quotes the National Academy of Engineering as saying that the network is the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century and also the largest industrial investment in history. that gives you an idea of the scale of the thing. and yet it is invisible. it is something we take for granted and know nothing about. As part of my research, I visited a power plant and it was very interesting. It was like going back in time, revisiting the age of steam.
does schewe present a specific argument?
not. it is a descriptive book. it’s about the network itself: how it works, what it’s made of. If you want to understand electricity, how it’s produced, and how it gets to you, the Net is the book for you. one of the focuses of the book is what happens when everything goes wrong. There is a very good and very detailed description of a great blackout that took place in New York in 1965, and Schewe explains how it happened and what the consequences of the loss of electricity were. I thought it was a very nice book.
Isn’t part of the problem with using solar power to supply extra electricity to the grid that you can’t turn these coal-fired power plants on and off?
You have this extraordinary balancing act of supply and demand that happens all the time. you can store electricity, but it is very difficult. you have to resort to extreme schemes, like pumping water uphill when it’s cheap to do the pumping, then letting the water come down through turbines when you really need it in peak periods. The book talks a bit about solar energy and what the arrival of renewable energy will mean for the grid. there are problems there.
but the world of utilities is turning upside down right now. It’s interesting because, as Schewe points out in the book, the world of public services has been very boring for a long time. there has been almost no innovation for 100 years. and now all of a sudden it’s becoming a very turbulent world. innovation is happening left, right, and center, and there’s this whole notion of the “smart grid,” where the individual components of this hugely complex machine interact with each other, in a sense like the internet. It’s probably a good analogy for the kind of world we’re headed for. there’s the whole smart electricity metering thing. Do you already have smart metering where you are?
I don’t think so.
The general idea is that, until now, we have been charged an average amount for our electricity every month, which does not reflect the increases in cost: when it is hot and you turn on the air conditioning, everyone else does same. stuff. Smart metering means you’re charged directly for extremely expensive electricity, but ideally it also keeps you informed, so you can adjust your usage to take advantage of cheaper times.
we live 60 miles from new york city and I’m happy if we have electricity. we have power outages when there is snow or thunderstorm.
Sounds like you’re a natural for solar power! In addition to becoming cheaper, it is also becoming more reliable. research. maybe you can even earn some money by investing in it.
let’s move on to gain our energy independence, by david freeman.
this book is not specifically about solar energy, but david freeman has been, and still is, a very active advocate of solar energy in his time. he is a very, very interesting man. he has been around forever and is now 83 years old. I met him a couple of years ago in Los Angeles. he is from tennessee, although his parents are lithuanian; his father was an umbrella repairman. he trained as a lawyer and claims to have been the first energy policy person to work in washington; He dates back to the Johnson administration. When Carter was crafting his energy policy, he built on Freeman’s work. What’s interesting is that after leaving Washington, Freeman became a utility manager. at one point, he was known as “the utility repairman” because he was the guy called when something went wrong. one of the places he went was smud, the sacramento municipal utility district. they were having terrible problems because their nuclear reactor was breaking down left and right. it was a twin to the three mile island nuke, and it was eventually shut down.
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Have you already retired?
is still active. When I saw him, he was running the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the local utility, and commissioning large amounts of solar power. The reason I love this book is that it’s so good with one-liners, like “many professionals in the utility industry resist change as much as a small child resists a bath.” and he really calls things by his name. for example, he writes, “the phrase clean coal is an insult to human intelligence. there is no such thing. coal is inherently dirty.’ can’t play with dave freeman.
what is the book about specifically?
It’s about what needs to happen to the utility industry so we can get out of this mess we’re in. the solution, of course, involves large amounts of renewable energy in general and solar in particular. this book is very well done. it is formatted in a really accessible way. It has little boxes in which it puts anecdotes and, although the intention is serious, they are almost always funny, or have some joke.
Has the book been persuasive? does it have influence?
he is, in california. he has been tremendously influential and continues to be. My theory, which I hope is correct, is that what California does today, the rest of the US does. uu. it will tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, in some cases.
and even if u.s. Conservatives aren’t very interested in renewables per se, they are keen on the idea of reducing dependence on foreign oil.
yes. While renewables in general, and solar in particular, are perceived as Democrat/Liberal issues, the whole energy independence part also works well for a Republican audience. so solar power tends to be compatible across the board. it is very popular with everyone except our friends in the oil and coal industry. The thing about Freeman is that he really knows what he’s talking about: he has more experience than anyone else in running electric utilities; he knows more about the energy business than anyone. and he expresses it in such an entertaining way. so many books on serious subjects are unbearably boring, but this one is really enjoyable. it is also a fairly unknown book. I don’t imagine many people have found it, but it deserves to be widely read.
your next choice is a solar manifesto, by hermann scheer.
For anything to succeed, you need supporting legislation, and to get supporting legislation you need committed and informed politicians. herman scheer was the great political champion of solar energy in germany. He was the one who swept crucial legislation through the German parliament, against the wishes of the Schroeder government. without him, the whole radical change in solar energy in germany would not have happened.
He was not a scientist by training, but he recognized that there was a problem here: the problem of the depletion of conventional fossil fuels and nuclear energy which has a whole series of problems of its own. he was politically ambitious and recognized that he had an opportunity to make his mark defending renewable energy in general and solar energy in particular. he was self-taught, read and was prepared to take on anyone, regardless of whether they were scientists or economists. he would face them head-on and win.
He was a bulldog of a man, powerful and compact, a really dynamic individual. in his youth he played water polo, which was probably good training for the kind of political battles he later fought. Tragically, he died late last year, aged 66.
There are two books here: I originally chose the solar manifesto because it was the first, but scheer also wrote the solar economy, which came out in 2004 and is therefore more up to date. reinforces everything said by the first, but adds more details and more practical material. books reflect the author. they are so strong. you can really believe, as he did, that 100% renewable energy is a viable solution in a relatively short space of time. he cites the example of railways: how quickly they were built once people really got the idea that they were going to be useful. he says, ‘we’ve done it before; we can do it again.’
So he is a true visionary?
absolutely. unparalleled. he was unique, hermann scheer. there is no one else like him, anywhere. we owe him a great debt.
Let’s move on to his latest book, Earth: The Sequel: The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming
This book is only partly about solar energy, as part of the solution to the energy problem. I chose it partly because it’s a relatively new book, but also because we already had books by a historian, a utility manager, and a politician; environmental ngos are also playing a very important role in all of this, changing legislation, campaigning, and fred krupp is president of the environmental defense fund. fred is interesting because, unlike a lot of people in the ngo world, he’s prepared to get dirty with corporate types. he sees that working with companies probably has more effect than being just and holier than you. the book provides examples of companies, of startups, that are doing good things, that could help in the grand scheme of things. from the reader’s point of view, it is a good introduction to a range of possible solutions to the energy problem.
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