AI transcript
0:00:06 [MUSIC]
0:00:06 Pushkin.
0:00:15 Here is an underappreciated world historical fact.
0:00:20 In the past 20 years, the price of solar panels has fallen.
0:00:28 Not by 20%, not by half, but by more than 97%.
0:00:32 And as a result, solar power has gone bananas.
0:00:37 The amount of solar power that was installed in the world over the past two
0:00:42 days, just today and yesterday, is greater than the total amount of
0:00:47 solar power that existed in the whole world in 2004.
0:00:50 And the rate of new installations is still growing.
0:00:54 This is very good news for the world.
0:00:58 Wildly cheap and abundant solar power won’t solve all of our climate problems,
0:01:00 but it will solve a lot of them.
0:01:04 Solar, combined with batteries, will provide a huge chunk of the world’s
0:01:07 electricity in the decades to come.
0:01:10 On top of that, the spread of solar means that within a few years,
0:01:17 energy may be free, free energy in the middle of the day in many parts of the world.
0:01:22 And that free energy will create new opportunities, new ways to generate and
0:01:26 store fuel and heat, new ways to fight climate change.
0:01:32 [MUSIC]
0:01:35 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is What’s Your Problem.
0:01:38 Starting today, and continuing over the next few weeks,
0:01:42 I’m going to be talking to people who are in the middle of the solar power revolution.
0:01:46 People who can tell us how this extraordinary thing happened,
0:01:51 this 97% fall in the price of solar panels, and what it means for the world.
0:01:54 My guest today is Jenny Chase.
0:01:56 She’s one of the world’s top solar analysts.
0:01:59 She’s been covering the industry for something like 20 years.
0:02:03 She’s a writer at Bloomberg NEF, and she’s also the author of the book,
0:02:06 Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon.
0:02:11 I talked with Jenny about how solar power got so cheap and what it means for us now.
0:02:16 So, okay, so it’s the turn of the century.
0:02:19 Solar power is very expensive.
0:02:24 It’s $4 per watt just for the solar panels.
0:02:28 When does that start to change?
0:02:32 What’s the first key moment in this story of solar power getting cheaper?
0:02:41 So, the first moment was probably solar power getting slightly more expensive.
0:02:45 Because the Germans brought in an expanded version of a previous program
0:02:48 called a feed-in tariff in 2004.
0:02:54 This was the, by far, the biggest incentive driving the most solar build
0:02:57 that the world had ever known.
0:03:01 And there was a kind of sucking noise as all the world’s solar modules started going to Germany.
0:03:07 Okay, and so it’s great, I think, for world historical reasons that Germany did this.
0:03:10 I wish they called it something other than a feed-in tariff.
0:03:11 Does it make more sense in German?
0:03:13 I hate this phrase, feed-in tariff.
0:03:16 Is it sensible in German and it’s just a bad translation?
0:03:18 No, not really.
0:03:27 It’s ein Spieze für Gütungen in German, and it literally means feed-in tariff.
0:03:29 Okay, so what is a feed-in tariff?
0:03:35 So it means that you get paid a fixed price for the electricity that you feed in to the grid.
0:03:36 I see.
0:03:42 So it’s basically the German government saying we promise to pay anybody who puts up solar panels
0:03:46 a certain amount for the energy those panels produce.
0:03:47 For 20 years.
0:03:50 I think the first one was 25 years, it’s 20 years now.
0:04:00 Okay, and so tell me more about this, unfortunately, named policy that helped kick off the solar power revolution.
0:04:07 Well, basically, for the first time, it was actually profitable to put solar power plants on fields.
0:04:14 Historically, nearly all solar modules have been at solar rooftops because you just didn’t buy
0:04:18 a huge number of solar modules, you bought small numbers of solar modules because they were expensive.
0:04:25 And so for the first time, there were actually specialised development companies who were rolling
0:04:28 solar panels out on fields, and they were raising money from investors.
0:04:37 And for the first, because the feed-in tariff is paid for the lifetime of the system, more or less, almost,
0:04:41 then you can do things like get bank debt for it.
0:04:47 So banks in Germany also had a support for bank debt for projects, but for the first time,
0:04:51 European banks in particular could get really comfortable with the fact that the cash flows
0:04:57 from these solar projects were extremely reliable, as you could lend money to these projects at quite
0:04:58 a low rate of interest.
0:05:02 So Germany creates the feed-in tariff.
0:05:06 That means it’s easier to get loans because now the government is promising to give you a stream
0:05:10 of income for 25 years, which is a lender’s dream come true.
0:05:12 It’s a sovereign bond-like investment.
0:05:19 You start getting commercial development of solar power for the first time in the history
0:05:19 of the world.
0:05:20 What happens next?
0:05:23 And you get manufacturers ramping up.
0:05:30 So you get US Sunpower and Evergreen Solar, Chinese Suntech, German Q-Cells coming in,
0:05:35 and they went onto the public stock markets and raised money to expand their factories.
0:05:39 And also to secure supplies of their raw material polysilicon.
0:05:50 Now, until the Germans started this crazy solar expansion, the solar industry had got along
0:05:55 just fine using offcuts from the semiconductor industry for their silicon.
0:05:58 The offcuts meaning just scraps from chip factories?
0:06:08 So what does it mean for just this raw material, the silicon, once the industry becomes industrialized
0:06:10 and starts ramping up after this German policy change?
0:06:17 First of all, polysilicon factories are really expensive, and they require a lot of technological
0:06:18 expertise to do.
0:06:21 There’s nasty chemicals.
0:06:27 There’s a point where you have to be simultaneously heating and cooling different parts of a reactor.
0:06:30 There’s all kinds of gases you’re trying to purify.
0:06:34 There’s a huge amount of incredibly technical expertise there.
0:06:37 And at the time, there were only really five companies worldwide that could do it,
0:06:41 which was fine because they were only supplying the semiconductor industry, right?
0:06:42 The demand was not that great.
0:06:49 But solar panels use a lot of silicon compared with semiconductors, and so demand just went up.
0:06:56 So before the Germans, before 2004, you could get silicon for about $25 a kilogram.
0:07:00 What’s the price go up to after when everybody’s trying to get into the solar panel?
0:07:04 So the spot price went up to over $400 a kilogram.
0:07:05 Oh, wow.
0:07:07 So it went up by like, I don’t know, almost 20X.
0:07:08 Exactly.
0:07:12 So there is this thing people love to say about commodities, right?
0:07:18 Which is the cure for high prices is high prices, which basically means if there is a high price
0:07:23 on some commodity thing, more people will make it, will pull it out of the ground, whatever.
0:07:26 And that increased supply will drive down the price.
0:07:28 And that happens here, right?
0:07:30 More polysilicon factories come online.
0:07:36 So the price of the raw material falls and then demand for solar panels grows,
0:07:38 but not as much as people expected.
0:07:40 So there is this collapse in the price, right?
0:07:49 This first big decline where between 2008 and 2009, the price falls from $4 a watt to $2 a watt.
0:07:53 So what does this first big decline mean for the industry?
0:07:54 It has a little wobble.
0:07:59 But the German market expanded because, of course, Germany still had its feed-in tariff,
0:08:01 no cap.
0:08:05 And suddenly you’ve got $2 a watt modules rather than $4 a watt modules.
0:08:08 So developers in Germany were basically getting catching.
0:08:15 The US market, there’s this bloke called Jig Aschauer, who some of you may have heard of,
0:08:19 who since about 2003 had been running a business called San Edison that
0:08:25 sold commercial rooftop solar in America to entities like Walmart.
0:08:29 And I should mention, so Jig Aschauer, this guy you’re talking about,
0:08:30 he actually was on this show.
0:08:36 He now runs an office in the US federal government that’s basically in charge of
0:08:39 lending out money to energy transition companies.
0:08:42 Companies trying to make clean cement and that sort of thing.
0:08:44 So what’s he doing back at this time?
0:08:49 So at this time, he was convincing companies like Whole Foods and Walmart to sign
0:08:56 20-year power purchase agreements with his company so that he could put solar power on their roofs.
0:09:04 So it’s, again, this idea of financing, this idea of if he gets some institution like Walmart
0:09:08 that everybody trusts and everybody thinks is going to be around for 20 years to promise to buy
0:09:13 solar power for 20 years, presumably then he can get the financing to build the panels now.
0:09:15 I mean, is that the basic idea?
0:09:19 Exactly. And then he would go to the financiers and say, look,
0:09:23 I’m selling this power to Whole Foods under a 20-year power purchase agreement.
0:09:27 This is not risky. That lend me some money.
0:09:33 And he had to do some convincing to vary and find the right person in each division.
0:09:42 But he did and he was able to offer these retailers solar power at prices which were
0:09:43 reasonably attractive to them.
0:09:46 So it worked.
0:09:50 It worked. And I think he did very nicely in 2009 because just like,
0:09:57 because this company also had fixed price power purchase agreements in place and suddenly
0:09:59 modules were much cheaper than they’d expected.
0:10:07 So his margins go up. The cheaper modules are. He’s still getting paid the same for 25 years.
0:10:14 It’s great for him. So clearly the rise of Chinese manufacturing of solar panels
0:10:21 is a big part of this story. Where does that happen in the story?
0:10:28 It’s been happening all along. I mean, one of the companies that did an IPO in 2005
0:10:34 with Suntech, which is Chinese essentially, it’s using technology developed in Australia
0:10:38 at the University of New South Wales. But it’s, it is a Chinese company run by a Chinese person.
0:10:45 And yeah, so the Chinese are there from the beginning. But the policy around this time,
0:10:49 the polycylican price is coming down as well. So the polycylican price is coming down to the
0:10:53 sort of $60 a kilogram range from $400 a kilogram.
0:10:56 Okay. So this time where it’s like 2011, something like that?
0:11:00 It’s about 2011. 2011 module prices have dropped to $1 a watt.
0:11:03 $1. Okay. So they’ve fallen in half again.
0:11:08 They went from four to two and now to one. And you mentioned polycylican,
0:11:11 silicon prices are coming down. That’s because what people are building more and more of these
0:11:15 factories, there’s an economy of scale. It’s the sort of classic industrial development.
0:11:18 What you’re starting to get then is Chinese companies figuring it out.
0:11:24 So there were hundreds, I mean, pretty much, probably literally a hundred Chinese companies
0:11:28 attempted to make polycylican, but making polycylican is hard and most of them failed.
0:11:33 And some of them were extremely random companies. Then again, the largest polycylican
0:11:38 maker in China these days, Tongwei, started as a fish food maker. So who am I to say about that?
0:11:42 They were in fish food and then they decided to pivot to polycylican?
0:11:43 No, they still make fish food.
0:11:51 How’d that happen? Is there some genius there? They make a million different things?
0:11:54 Or do they just make fish food and polycylican?
0:11:59 They do just make fish food. Now they make polycylican fish food, solar wafers, cells and
0:12:05 modules. But they still work. They still get about 10% of the revenue from fish food.
0:12:18 Amazing. So in 2011 or so, China’s kind of not just solar panel industry, but the raw materials,
0:12:24 the polycylican part is coming online and you’re getting this kind of manufacturing ecosystem.
0:12:28 For which China is famous in a lot of industries, right? They don’t just make one thing. There’s
0:12:33 often a region where lots of different manufacturers are making sort of components for each other and
0:12:38 there’s kind of a whole value chain in one place. That happening in China at this point?
0:12:44 This is probably when it’s starting to appear. So in Jiangsu Province, if you want to buy encapsulant
0:12:50 or silver paste, then you can talk to somebody 20 kilometers away instead of talking to somebody
0:12:54 in another country and this is starting to be very convenient.
0:13:03 Clearly, the price has kept falling by a lot from $1. Why does the price keep coming down after 2011?
0:13:12 Solar panels are manufactured commodity and they have something called the experience curve,
0:13:17 which probably a lot of things have, but then they’re difficult to notice,
0:13:21 particularly if they’re not very commoditized. So Moore’s Law is a special sort of experience curve,
0:13:28 but the experience curve just means that every time you double cumulative experience that we
0:13:34 have as a species at doing something, we get a certain amount better at it. And in the case of
0:13:42 solar panels, it’s probably about 28% better at it. And that comes from having a better recipe to
0:13:49 get your solar models more efficient and you slicing your wafers more thinly. All kinds of
0:13:54 little tweaks you make to use less material and to make your machines through output more energy
0:14:01 and to make the thing more efficient. So I mean, in a way, this is like the big story of
0:14:07 technological development in human life, certainly since the Industrial Revolution a couple hundred
0:14:12 years ago, right? People make these incremental improvements one after the other and things
0:14:18 get cheaper and cheaper. And you’re saying that’s basically how the price of solar panels fell all
0:14:25 the way from $4 a watt to less than 10 cents a watt, which is where we are now. So I want to kind
0:14:32 of take stock. Like just what does this wild decline in the price of solar panels? What does
0:14:39 it mean for the world? I think it’s basically really good news. Solar power only supplied
0:14:46 about 6% of the world’s electricity last year, but it’s growing and you couldn’t stop solar now
0:14:52 if you wanted to. Just because it’s so cheap, like yes, there are subsidies for it in various
0:14:57 ways, but even without subsidies in many cases, it would be the best option. Is that the case?
0:15:03 Exactly. And there were places where, I mean, I love talking about Pakistan right now because
0:15:10 Pakistan probably has about 20 gigawatts of relatively new solar panels, most of which the
0:15:14 normal grid, the traditional grid has no idea about where they are or whether they exist.
0:15:20 Huh. So it’s just people like go into the store buying solar panels and putting them up in their
0:15:26 backyard or on their roof? And it’s factories who are putting solar panels on their roofs. I mean,
0:15:30 they’re probably not just going to the store, they’re probably buying them a bulk. It’s farmers
0:15:36 putting them in instead of to run their irrigation pumps instead of diesel generators. I actually
0:15:40 only know about this because I can see it in Chinese customs data. And then when you go to
0:15:44 Google Earth and look at Lahore or Karachi or Islamabad, you can see that all the roofs have
0:15:51 solar panels on them. A lot of the activity in the developing world increasingly is outside
0:15:55 government programs. I mean, there were some countries which in the developing world too,
0:15:59 that have government supported booms like Vietnam also built about 20 gigawatts of solar
0:16:06 in 2019 and 2020 under a probably slightly badly calibrated government program.
0:16:14 But increasingly, it’s actually the businesses and individuals that are buying solar themselves
0:16:19 because it’s just less effort than trying to go through the government and trying to get support.
0:16:27 In a minute, what the world will look like in the relatively near future
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0:17:47 Give me the big picture for where we are. 25 years ago, solar power was like,
0:17:51 if you’re a rich hippie in Marin County, maybe you spend a crazy amount of money to put solar
0:17:57 power on your roof to feel good about yourself. It was a kind of fringe thing. Where are we now?
0:18:05 The sun is one. Solar power was by far the largest source of new installed capacity last
0:18:12 year, so of any generations. Now, people hate it when you compare capacity, but about 444
0:18:18 gigawatts of new solar panels were installed last year worldwide. And bearing in mind that the whole
0:18:26 power grid after that is about 9,300 gigawatts. So if we keep adding half a terawatt a year,
0:18:29 and we’ll do more than that this year, it’s going to be about 600 gigawatts this year.
0:18:34 I mean, adding half a terawatt every year to a 9.3 terawatt grid,
0:18:41 you pretty quickly get to real amounts of contribution. And this is why I’m pretty
0:18:46 sure that by 2030, power will basically be free whenever it’s sunny.
0:18:52 Power will basically be free whenever it’s sunny around the world?
0:18:53 Pretty much.
0:18:58 2030 is soon, especially in energy terms.
0:19:03 Like, 2030 is fast. Like, most energy infrastructure is really slow to build,
0:19:08 but solar is really fast. And the only way, and we’re already getting to the point where
0:19:14 in California, even in Germany on a sunny day, the wholesale power price goes very low or even
0:19:20 negative. And what you have, so the most likely thing, the most sensible thing to do in response
0:19:27 to that is to hand free power at that time to the customers, so they can actually increase
0:19:30 their demand at that time and then charge them more later when the sun’s gone down.
0:19:38 So let’s talk about that in a little bit more detail. So there is this thing that is already
0:19:42 true in California, among other places, which is in the middle of the day because of the growth of
0:19:52 solar, there is more electricity being generated than people are using. Great, amazing. And so one
0:19:59 option is you could just essentially not take that electricity, right? You could just not use it.
0:20:02 But you’re saying that’s not what’s going to happen. Tell me more about that.
0:20:06 Well, some of that will definitely happen. I mean, we call it curtailment when you literally turn
0:20:11 off the solar panels to stop them doing any damage to your grid. And you can do that. It’s
0:20:17 super easy. It’s actually way easier than it is for fossil fuel plants. What makes most sense is to
0:20:23 offer free or extremely cheap power to people in the hope that they’ll actually use it. You know,
0:20:28 if it’s an individual, you might turn your air conditioner on to make your house really nice
0:20:32 and cool. So you can turn it off in the evening and your house will stay comfortable into the night.
0:20:40 You might do your laundry. And if you’re an industrial company, you can do a lot more. So if
0:20:46 you have a meat freezer, you can chill it to minus 27 degrees Celsius and then let it warm up to
0:20:52 minus 19 when power is expensive. You can charge your electric car. I mean, especially if you can
0:20:59 charge at work. You can heat your water for a shower later. There are all kinds of things
0:21:03 that we can do to shift when we use power into the daytime. And of course, if you’ve got batteries,
0:21:12 you can charge your batteries. Yes. So what’s happening with storage, right? That’s the sort
0:21:17 of complementary piece of this that everybody always talks about. What’s happening with storage?
0:21:24 So storage is definitely growing. I just looked at the new energy storage market outlook from my
0:21:31 colleagues. And a new bill of energy storage grew 76%. They estimate that it’s grown about
0:21:38 over 70% from 2023 to 2024. So it’s growing. That’s good. And it’s basically lithium ion batteries
0:21:43 and kind of batteries that are in electric vehicles. It’s mostly just lithium ion batteries,
0:21:46 you know, because electric vehicles have driven them down the experience curve as well.
0:21:54 And electric vehicles, laptops, phones, these are actually quite, they’re getting more and more
0:22:03 affordable. And so I think we can probably assume that by 2030, you have batteries charging and
0:22:09 discharging every day to absorb some of that daytime solar power. And the question is how much?
0:22:15 The question is how much? Yeah. Yeah. And what does that turn on? I mean,
0:22:23 is it just how fast do lithium ion batteries get cheap? Is that the key unknown question?
0:22:27 It does. But I think what people don’t realise when they talk about solar and batteries being the
0:22:32 answer to everything. But first of all, they may be right in climates that are not very seasonal.
0:22:40 So if you’re day, if every day you have a long day, and then a similar length night, then it may
0:22:46 actually be fairly feasible to run your civilization on solar and batteries in places like northern
0:22:53 Europe where I am, then you’re going to hit the problem that the biggest battery you can imagine
0:22:59 will not hold power from summer to winter. And the economics of that will be terrible.
0:23:03 Because the first bunch of batteries you put in that charge and discharge every day,
0:23:08 their cost per cycle is relatively low because they have a lot of cycles.
0:23:15 However, your next wave of batteries isn’t necessarily needed every day.
0:23:21 And if they’re cycling every two days, for example, that essentially doubles the cost per cycle.
0:23:27 The less you use it, the more expensive it is per unit of service it’s providing you.
0:23:33 The economics of building a battery that cycles once a year are almost impossible.
0:23:37 I mean, you might be able to do something like fill a huge tank with a chemical fuel
0:23:46 or fill a huge big tank of salt. What you could do is make a big tank of salt molten
0:23:49 and then use that heat in the winter because salt is relatively cheap.
0:23:54 So you could have a lot of it to make hot. So you could build essentially like
0:24:00 a giant salt cavern under the earth, spend all summer heating it up and all winter using the
0:24:06 heat to whatever, make steam and spin a turbine. Yeah, or to heat your home.
0:24:09 I mean, that would be the probably the easiest way of doing it. But exactly.
0:24:13 Molten salt is kind of a pain to work with as well because it tends to,
0:24:21 if it gets above about 200 and if it gets below about 271 Celsius, as I recall, it freezes.
0:24:24 And so if you’ve got any pipes that it’s meant to be going down,
0:24:27 your pipes are now full of just non-molten salt.
0:24:35 Yeah. So is the sort of medium term unsolved problem long duration storage for these reasons?
0:24:40 Like you clearly see a very short term path to free power in the middle of the day.
0:24:45 It sounds like you’re pretty optimistic about kind of overnight charging.
0:24:47 Like if you, when you can charge in the day and discharge overnight,
0:24:52 like lithium ion will do that. But once you get to the sort of seasonal problems,
0:24:55 is that where we don’t really have a clear answer?
0:24:59 Is it a lot less obvious what the answer is, which is why as a solar analyst,
0:25:02 I say a lot that we should be building wind as well.
0:25:07 I mean, because the great thing about wind, especially in a climate like Northern Europe
0:25:10 and a lot of others around the world, is it blows at night and in the winter.
0:25:21 Uh-huh. It’s a good compliment. So wind has gotten cheaper, but not nearly as much cheaper
0:25:27 as solar, right? It didn’t win clearly in the way that solar won. Why not?
0:25:35 Wind is heavy engineering. It’s not bulk manufacturing.
0:25:44 That said, there have been huge improvements in wind turbines and in wind maintenance and in
0:25:47 financing for wind. And wind turbines are just getting bigger. I mean, one of the things you
0:25:53 can do with wind turbines as the materials to make blades get better and better,
0:25:56 you can make wind turbines bigger and it’s windier high up.
0:26:04 So wind has gotten cheaper, but it seems like building, you know, gargantuan blades, gargantuan
0:26:13 turbines, it doesn’t have that beautiful commodity race to the lowest price element that solar panels
0:26:19 have, that dead, simple. They don’t have to move once you make them. You can make a little one or
0:26:25 a big one just by adding more. Like, I love how commodified solar panels are. I know it’s a terrible
0:26:29 business to be in, but it’s the same reason, right? It’s a terrible business to be in because it’s
0:26:36 this amazing, cheap, relatively simple thing that that is quite different from a turbine the size
0:26:42 of a giant building that is a thousand feet up in the air or whatever. It really is. I mean,
0:26:47 solar panels are the first major electricity generation source that doesn’t involve anything
0:26:56 moving. Yeah, that’s incredible. Yeah, nothing to get stuck. You’ve been doing this job. You’ve
0:27:02 been following the solar power market for 20 years. When you look ahead another 20 years
0:27:06 from now, what do you think will be going on?
0:27:18 That’s such a hard question. I mean, I think we will, I’m actually relatively optimistic about
0:27:26 us achieving a worldwide energy transition. I think that in 20 years, nations that are
0:27:30 currently developing will have substantial economies running substantially on solar power
0:27:41 and batteries. And I hope they also have air conditioning and ways to protect themselves
0:27:45 from the effects of extreme climate change because we will also have increasingly extreme
0:27:53 climate change. So I think that the developing world will be substantially solar powered,
0:27:56 at least the bits of it, the sunny and realize that’s not actually the whole developing world.
0:28:04 I hope there are much more widespread transmission grids around the world
0:28:09 because it’s often sunny and windy in one place when it’s not sunny or windy in another place.
0:28:15 If the more we can run big power lines to smooth that out and sell each other power,
0:28:22 the easier this whole energy transition will be and the less gas we’ll need to burn sometimes.
0:28:30 There’s a project now where they want to build solar panels in Australia and run a wire to Singapore
0:28:35 to send the energy to Singapore, right? I love that one. I love that idea. Is that a real thing
0:28:46 or is that just like silly? It’s a really big cable. I mean, I hope they’ve got this all figured
0:28:53 out, but that’s a 4,000 kilometer cable. I mean, there’s cables. I know there are different kinds
0:28:59 of cables, but they ran a cable across the Atlantic for a telegraph, whatever, 150 years ago or something.
0:29:07 Yeah. I mean, that’s a good reason to think it is possible. I think it’s technically possible. I
0:29:13 suppose part of me wonders whether Singapore won’t decide it’s easier to buy power from,
0:29:18 for example, Indonesia, which is closer. Yes. I mean, Australia is just so far away
0:29:25 from Singapore. Yes. I mean, that’s why it’s sort of so thrilling to consider,
0:29:31 right? This idea of like, well, we got sun down here. They need power up there. Let’s just build
0:29:37 a big cord. I mean, also as a solar analyst, I prefer the idea of running cables east to west.
0:29:41 I mean, if we just put a big cable all the way around the world, we’re sorted.
0:29:46 Right. Because it’s always sunny somewhere. It’s always sunny on about half the world at one time.
0:29:50 Yeah. That’s funny. I didn’t even think of that, of course.
0:29:57 Well, so a couple of things. We haven’t talked about the grid. We’re talking about wires and
0:30:02 plugging things in. We haven’t talked about moving power just from one place to another
0:30:09 place, not so far away. I understand that the grid is in many places, including in the developed
0:30:14 world, not optimally efficient and is a sort of binding constraint in some instances. Tell me
0:30:24 about the grid. Well, grids are actually pretty efficient. So as you move from a quite a centralized
0:30:30 power system with large power plants in a couple of locations to a decentralized system where you’ve
0:30:35 got wind farms and solar farms all over the place being connected, you need a lot more grid.
0:30:42 And we estimate that investment in the grid has to be about 60% of the investment in the actual
0:30:48 solar and wind farms themselves by 2030 to stick to a net zero pathway. So investment in the grid
0:30:54 needs to be substantial. We need to bolster the short-range grid because literally, if you’re
0:30:58 trying to feed too much electricity in one point in the grid at one time, it gets stuck and you
0:31:02 can’t get it all through it and then some of your farms don’t get paid. And also just to be clear,
0:31:08 we’re electrifying, right? We’re not only switching the source of electricity from fossil fuel
0:31:16 to solar power, but we’re also taking things like stoves and cars that have been previously
0:31:21 directly powered by fossil fuel and powering them with electricity. So we just need more wires,
0:31:25 however we’re getting the electricity or more room in the wires.
0:31:34 Pretty much, yes. But building grid specifically for, for example, a solar plant
0:31:37 is quite tough because the utilization of the grid will be quite low.
0:31:42 Because the solar plant is not providing electricity all the time?
0:31:47 Exactly. I mean, solar plant output is very peaky. It really does peak in the middle of the day.
0:31:52 You can have panels that follow the sun and then it’s less peaky, but it’s still not a big part
0:31:59 of the day. So yeah, I mean, basically we have to build more grid. We have to connect both local
0:32:05 grid and also long range grid just to connect whole regions. And is that happening? Like,
0:32:11 is that becoming a constraint already? Like, where are we in terms of the relationship between the
0:32:17 development of solar power and the development of the grid? So if you walk into any solar
0:32:22 conference all around the world and say, oh, the problem in this market is grid,
0:32:26 then everyone will nod and say, this person knows what they are talking about.
0:32:33 Because the developers all know how difficult it is to get. Sometimes it’s just they need to
0:32:37 get permission to connect to the grid. And because there are hundreds of people trying to get
0:32:42 permission to connect to the grid, and the grid has to be quite choosy. And they don’t, and grids,
0:32:46 just a lot of the time, they just don’t have the manpower to make that decision
0:32:50 when you’ve got when you’ve suddenly got hundreds of power plants, asking whether they can
0:32:55 join your wires. Like, this is not necessarily a decision making process that grids were set up to
0:33:00 do. So sometimes it’s as simple as manpower. Sometimes it’s actually a question of building
0:33:06 of their being substantially more grid build needed. But grid is always a problem. And
0:33:12 there are thousands of gigawatts of solar and wind projects in on the planning table,
0:33:17 but waiting to get permission to connect to the grid and get built around the world.
0:33:24 So you mentioned that the U.S. is weird in terms of solar power.
0:33:30 Why? Why is the U.S. weird in terms of solar power?
0:33:35 So the U.S. is much slower to grow than you would expect in a market of its size and wealth
0:33:42 and support level. And partly that’s because it’s got quite a NIMBY problem.
0:33:48 It’s hard to get permission to build plants. It’s also partly because the U.S. is an expensive
0:33:53 place to buy solar panels, which again is partly because there’s been a trade war
0:33:59 between the U.S. and China since 2012. Obama brought in the first import tariffs on Chinese
0:34:06 modules. And consistently, solar modules in the U.S. are at least double the price that they are
0:34:16 elsewhere. Oh, wow. So you were saying the global price of solar panels now is 9. something per
0:34:21 watt, not 9-ish cents per watt? Yes, 94 cents per watt. You would pay at least twice that in the
0:34:27 U.S. right now. Oh, wow. So it’s like 20 cents a watt instead of 9.4 cents per watt?
0:34:32 20-something cents per watt, I think, although you might get some that are in containers at a
0:34:37 port and need to be sold in a great hurry for a bit less. So is that just because of tariffs
0:34:42 that exist in the U.S. and not in other places? Yeah, that’s basically tariffs and also the
0:34:49 uncertainty because the U.S. import restrictions are quite complicated. If you’re a developer,
0:34:53 you don’t want to take the risk of buying a module that will be stopped at customs.
0:34:59 So there’s a strong sort of push towards just a few name brands. And
0:35:04 that also pushes out the prices a bit. But yeah, it’s basically the tariffs and the trade war.
0:35:13 Is there a U.S. solar panel manufacturing industry that that tariff is protecting?
0:35:19 There wasn’t for a long time. There was first solar which manufactured mostly in Malaysia.
0:35:27 And there is a move to onshore it specifically since the Inflation Reduction Act passed.
0:35:31 The Inflation Reduction Act is pretty generous for solar installations,
0:35:36 but it’s really generous for solar manufacturers setting up plants on U.S. soil.
0:35:40 And there has been a boom in announcements of solar factories returning to the U.S.
0:35:46 We’ll see how they do. Let’s talk about the Inflation Reduction Act, the IRA.
0:35:51 Like it’s a giant bill, despite its name, it’s much more about sort of
0:35:57 subsidizing the energy transition than about specifically fighting inflation.
0:36:03 How does that affect the adoption of solar power in the U.S.?
0:36:09 I mean, to me, it feels like somebody is pushing down really hard on the accelerator
0:36:10 while the handbrakes on.
0:36:16 So the break is the tariff and the accelerator is the Inflation Reduction Act?
0:36:21 The break is the tariff and also the difficulty with getting planning permission to do things in
0:36:26 the U.S. And also the fact that grid is also an issue in the U.S. as everywhere else.
0:36:29 And the gas?
0:36:34 And the gas is the fact that the Inflation Reduction Act will give you loads of money
0:36:37 if you manage to get one of these projects through.
0:36:42 There is a reason why one of your fastest growing regional markets is Texas.
0:36:46 Because there’s not a lot of breaks in Texas.
0:36:49 There are data centers setting up there that will increase power demand.
0:36:52 The solar wind really booming there.
0:36:53 There’s not a lot of what in Texas?
0:36:56 There’s not a lot of nimbyism.
0:37:02 Or it’s a market where you can actually build things.
0:37:06 That is interesting, right? Because politically, solar power has this
0:37:11 left valence, in the U.S. has a very sort of democratic leaning valence.
0:37:13 Texas is a very Republican state.
0:37:17 And the fact that solar power is booming the most there is really telling.
0:37:22 It really is. And batteries too.
0:37:29 I mean, Texas is building wind solar and batteries at one of the most rapid paces
0:37:30 of any region in the U.S.
0:37:38 So you started covering this field in 2005, right at the moment when it was all starting.
0:37:42 And nobody knew it at the time.
0:37:47 But when you tell the story, it all sounds sort of clear in retrospect, right?
0:37:50 Like solar panels are this fundamentally very simple thing.
0:37:52 They don’t have to move.
0:37:55 The input is pretty straightforward.
0:37:58 Why has it been so surprising?
0:38:00 Why did nobody see it coming?
0:38:01 I think what we…
0:38:04 So there are a couple of things we didn’t expect.
0:38:08 So we didn’t quite estimate correctly how fast demand would pick up and how…
0:38:13 And actually, how quickly governments would come in and set their own subsidies,
0:38:15 realizing that the subsidy didn’t have to be so high anymore.
0:38:19 And how fast organic markets would kick off.
0:38:24 And we basically underestimated human ingenuity and how easy it is to deploy something
0:38:28 that is like a black rectangle that comes out of a factory.
0:38:30 And you put it in the sun somewhere and wire it up.
0:38:33 [Music]
0:38:42 We’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
0:38:47 I want to finish with the lightning round.
0:38:53 And I want to talk a little bit about a particular part of your book.
0:39:02 So in the middle of your book, right after a chapter called “How Markets Set Power Prices”
0:39:07 and right before a chapter called “Solar After the 2008 Crash,”
0:39:13 there is a chapter called “Networking and Other Stuff Not Taught at State Schools.”
0:39:15 And you’re not talking about energy networks.
0:39:20 You’re talking about going to meetings and introducing yourself to people.
0:39:25 And I’m curious, it’s an interesting chapter.
0:39:26 I want to talk to you about it.
0:39:31 But what is that chapter doing in the middle of a book about energy financing?
0:39:39 So, Jacob, I wrote this book for somebody like me, who is not particularly posh,
0:39:44 came through the state school system, which is the sort of government school system,
0:39:51 and literally had nobody to tell me things like how finance worked or what you should wear to a
0:39:59 meeting. And so I wrote this book for somebody looking for a job in something vaguely green.
0:40:02 And this is one of the things that I had to learn.
0:40:07 And I think it would have been useful to me to have someone sit down and say these things.
0:40:11 I would have been a little bit less awkward in many, many meetings.
0:40:15 So you do, in this chapter, just sort of give some simple tips.
0:40:19 Like, what are, say, your three top tips for networking?
0:40:22 I think you can ask people what they do, and then you can ask them how they make money from it,
0:40:26 because they’ll give you a much more interesting answer than if you just let them talk about
0:40:29 how their business is great, because everyone talks about that.
0:40:33 What’s one thing I should not do if I’m at a networking event?
0:40:39 Probably talk too much to somebody who doesn’t want to listen.
0:40:45 It doesn’t happen very often, but I do sometimes get cornered by people who want to talk about
0:40:49 something that is very specific that I, and I will try very hard to find it interesting.
0:40:53 What’s your getaway strategy in that setting?
0:40:59 So this is a tip from somebody else.
0:41:04 If you get drinks, get two drinks, and then if you’re stuck in a conversation that you’re not
0:41:08 happy with, you say, “Oh, I have to go and find the person who I got this drink for,”
0:41:10 and then you get away.
0:41:13 And if it’s a really interesting conversation, you have two drinks.
0:41:20 That’s a very prepared… Do you actually walk around networking events with two drinks in
0:41:23 your hands for just such a circumstance? Occasionally.
0:41:31 There’s a section in this chapter called Being Female, Pros and Cons.
0:41:35 What are the pros and cons of being female in networking settings?
0:41:40 To be honest, I think I’ve benefited over the years from the fact that people would
0:41:44 rather have a woman on the panel than a man. On a panel at a meeting.
0:41:51 On a panel visible. I’m sure that my profile as an analyst has been improved by being a woman.
0:41:57 And I’m grateful to that. And is the converse of that, or is the flip side of that,
0:42:01 it’s been improved because there aren’t very many women in the field?
0:42:03 Yeah, but there are more than there used to be, which is amazing.
0:42:05 So this is working. This strategy is working.
0:42:09 So there are more, and they’re also more confident to actually say proper things.
0:42:12 I’m going to ask you a couple of non-networking questions.
0:42:17 What’s one thing you wish more people understood about energy?
0:42:22 I wish people would understand the difference between CAPEX and OPEX.
0:42:28 Because there’s a huge difference, but things that have high upfront cost
0:42:36 and low running cost, there are ways of comparing them to things that have constant cost.
0:42:44 And just to be clear, CAPEX is capital expenditure. OPEX is operating expenditure, right?
0:42:47 Exactly. Yeah, upfront cost and running cost, basically.
0:42:50 Why is that such a big deal?
0:42:55 It’s the one thing that frustrates me that people will talk about cost and they’ll talk
0:43:04 about solar power being free, for example, and not think about the fact that solar power is not
0:43:11 free. It’s merely paid upfront. And I think if people want to understand energy systems,
0:43:19 or actually almost any system, you need to have some understanding about comparing upfront costs
0:43:24 and later savings. If you weren’t writing about energy, what do you think you’d be doing?
0:43:29 I hope I was writing about sustainable agriculture.
0:43:37 I mean, what I always wanted was to work in some way towards tackling climate change.
0:43:45 Maybe I have trained as a heat pump installer and I would be going around putting in heat pumps.
0:43:47 Maybe I would work for a local planning office,
0:43:51 processing planning applications for wind farms. That’s also a valid part of the energy transition.
0:44:00 I think if you want to have hope for the future and you feel climate anxiety,
0:44:05 which I think a lot of us do, it’s really important to have something that you can do every day
0:44:10 where you think if I do a good job here, the world is better than if I did a bad job or didn’t show
0:44:22 up for work. Jenny Chase is the author of Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon.
0:44:27 Next week on the show, I’ll talk to the founder of a company that’s trying to take that extra
0:44:31 solar energy in the middle of the day and use it to solve one of the biggest
0:44:37 unsolved problems in the energy transition, generating the heat we need to make everything
0:44:42 from steel to clothing. Today’s show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang.
0:44:47 It was edited by Lydia Jean Cotte and engineered by Sarah Brugier.
0:44:53 You can email us at problem@pushkin.fm. I’m Jacob Goldstein and we’ll be back next week with
0:45:01 another episode of What’s Your Problem.
0:45:11 [BLANK_AUDIO]
0:00:06 Pushkin.
0:00:15 Here is an underappreciated world historical fact.
0:00:20 In the past 20 years, the price of solar panels has fallen.
0:00:28 Not by 20%, not by half, but by more than 97%.
0:00:32 And as a result, solar power has gone bananas.
0:00:37 The amount of solar power that was installed in the world over the past two
0:00:42 days, just today and yesterday, is greater than the total amount of
0:00:47 solar power that existed in the whole world in 2004.
0:00:50 And the rate of new installations is still growing.
0:00:54 This is very good news for the world.
0:00:58 Wildly cheap and abundant solar power won’t solve all of our climate problems,
0:01:00 but it will solve a lot of them.
0:01:04 Solar, combined with batteries, will provide a huge chunk of the world’s
0:01:07 electricity in the decades to come.
0:01:10 On top of that, the spread of solar means that within a few years,
0:01:17 energy may be free, free energy in the middle of the day in many parts of the world.
0:01:22 And that free energy will create new opportunities, new ways to generate and
0:01:26 store fuel and heat, new ways to fight climate change.
0:01:32 [MUSIC]
0:01:35 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is What’s Your Problem.
0:01:38 Starting today, and continuing over the next few weeks,
0:01:42 I’m going to be talking to people who are in the middle of the solar power revolution.
0:01:46 People who can tell us how this extraordinary thing happened,
0:01:51 this 97% fall in the price of solar panels, and what it means for the world.
0:01:54 My guest today is Jenny Chase.
0:01:56 She’s one of the world’s top solar analysts.
0:01:59 She’s been covering the industry for something like 20 years.
0:02:03 She’s a writer at Bloomberg NEF, and she’s also the author of the book,
0:02:06 Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon.
0:02:11 I talked with Jenny about how solar power got so cheap and what it means for us now.
0:02:16 So, okay, so it’s the turn of the century.
0:02:19 Solar power is very expensive.
0:02:24 It’s $4 per watt just for the solar panels.
0:02:28 When does that start to change?
0:02:32 What’s the first key moment in this story of solar power getting cheaper?
0:02:41 So, the first moment was probably solar power getting slightly more expensive.
0:02:45 Because the Germans brought in an expanded version of a previous program
0:02:48 called a feed-in tariff in 2004.
0:02:54 This was the, by far, the biggest incentive driving the most solar build
0:02:57 that the world had ever known.
0:03:01 And there was a kind of sucking noise as all the world’s solar modules started going to Germany.
0:03:07 Okay, and so it’s great, I think, for world historical reasons that Germany did this.
0:03:10 I wish they called it something other than a feed-in tariff.
0:03:11 Does it make more sense in German?
0:03:13 I hate this phrase, feed-in tariff.
0:03:16 Is it sensible in German and it’s just a bad translation?
0:03:18 No, not really.
0:03:27 It’s ein Spieze für Gütungen in German, and it literally means feed-in tariff.
0:03:29 Okay, so what is a feed-in tariff?
0:03:35 So it means that you get paid a fixed price for the electricity that you feed in to the grid.
0:03:36 I see.
0:03:42 So it’s basically the German government saying we promise to pay anybody who puts up solar panels
0:03:46 a certain amount for the energy those panels produce.
0:03:47 For 20 years.
0:03:50 I think the first one was 25 years, it’s 20 years now.
0:04:00 Okay, and so tell me more about this, unfortunately, named policy that helped kick off the solar power revolution.
0:04:07 Well, basically, for the first time, it was actually profitable to put solar power plants on fields.
0:04:14 Historically, nearly all solar modules have been at solar rooftops because you just didn’t buy
0:04:18 a huge number of solar modules, you bought small numbers of solar modules because they were expensive.
0:04:25 And so for the first time, there were actually specialised development companies who were rolling
0:04:28 solar panels out on fields, and they were raising money from investors.
0:04:37 And for the first, because the feed-in tariff is paid for the lifetime of the system, more or less, almost,
0:04:41 then you can do things like get bank debt for it.
0:04:47 So banks in Germany also had a support for bank debt for projects, but for the first time,
0:04:51 European banks in particular could get really comfortable with the fact that the cash flows
0:04:57 from these solar projects were extremely reliable, as you could lend money to these projects at quite
0:04:58 a low rate of interest.
0:05:02 So Germany creates the feed-in tariff.
0:05:06 That means it’s easier to get loans because now the government is promising to give you a stream
0:05:10 of income for 25 years, which is a lender’s dream come true.
0:05:12 It’s a sovereign bond-like investment.
0:05:19 You start getting commercial development of solar power for the first time in the history
0:05:19 of the world.
0:05:20 What happens next?
0:05:23 And you get manufacturers ramping up.
0:05:30 So you get US Sunpower and Evergreen Solar, Chinese Suntech, German Q-Cells coming in,
0:05:35 and they went onto the public stock markets and raised money to expand their factories.
0:05:39 And also to secure supplies of their raw material polysilicon.
0:05:50 Now, until the Germans started this crazy solar expansion, the solar industry had got along
0:05:55 just fine using offcuts from the semiconductor industry for their silicon.
0:05:58 The offcuts meaning just scraps from chip factories?
0:06:08 So what does it mean for just this raw material, the silicon, once the industry becomes industrialized
0:06:10 and starts ramping up after this German policy change?
0:06:17 First of all, polysilicon factories are really expensive, and they require a lot of technological
0:06:18 expertise to do.
0:06:21 There’s nasty chemicals.
0:06:27 There’s a point where you have to be simultaneously heating and cooling different parts of a reactor.
0:06:30 There’s all kinds of gases you’re trying to purify.
0:06:34 There’s a huge amount of incredibly technical expertise there.
0:06:37 And at the time, there were only really five companies worldwide that could do it,
0:06:41 which was fine because they were only supplying the semiconductor industry, right?
0:06:42 The demand was not that great.
0:06:49 But solar panels use a lot of silicon compared with semiconductors, and so demand just went up.
0:06:56 So before the Germans, before 2004, you could get silicon for about $25 a kilogram.
0:07:00 What’s the price go up to after when everybody’s trying to get into the solar panel?
0:07:04 So the spot price went up to over $400 a kilogram.
0:07:05 Oh, wow.
0:07:07 So it went up by like, I don’t know, almost 20X.
0:07:08 Exactly.
0:07:12 So there is this thing people love to say about commodities, right?
0:07:18 Which is the cure for high prices is high prices, which basically means if there is a high price
0:07:23 on some commodity thing, more people will make it, will pull it out of the ground, whatever.
0:07:26 And that increased supply will drive down the price.
0:07:28 And that happens here, right?
0:07:30 More polysilicon factories come online.
0:07:36 So the price of the raw material falls and then demand for solar panels grows,
0:07:38 but not as much as people expected.
0:07:40 So there is this collapse in the price, right?
0:07:49 This first big decline where between 2008 and 2009, the price falls from $4 a watt to $2 a watt.
0:07:53 So what does this first big decline mean for the industry?
0:07:54 It has a little wobble.
0:07:59 But the German market expanded because, of course, Germany still had its feed-in tariff,
0:08:01 no cap.
0:08:05 And suddenly you’ve got $2 a watt modules rather than $4 a watt modules.
0:08:08 So developers in Germany were basically getting catching.
0:08:15 The US market, there’s this bloke called Jig Aschauer, who some of you may have heard of,
0:08:19 who since about 2003 had been running a business called San Edison that
0:08:25 sold commercial rooftop solar in America to entities like Walmart.
0:08:29 And I should mention, so Jig Aschauer, this guy you’re talking about,
0:08:30 he actually was on this show.
0:08:36 He now runs an office in the US federal government that’s basically in charge of
0:08:39 lending out money to energy transition companies.
0:08:42 Companies trying to make clean cement and that sort of thing.
0:08:44 So what’s he doing back at this time?
0:08:49 So at this time, he was convincing companies like Whole Foods and Walmart to sign
0:08:56 20-year power purchase agreements with his company so that he could put solar power on their roofs.
0:09:04 So it’s, again, this idea of financing, this idea of if he gets some institution like Walmart
0:09:08 that everybody trusts and everybody thinks is going to be around for 20 years to promise to buy
0:09:13 solar power for 20 years, presumably then he can get the financing to build the panels now.
0:09:15 I mean, is that the basic idea?
0:09:19 Exactly. And then he would go to the financiers and say, look,
0:09:23 I’m selling this power to Whole Foods under a 20-year power purchase agreement.
0:09:27 This is not risky. That lend me some money.
0:09:33 And he had to do some convincing to vary and find the right person in each division.
0:09:42 But he did and he was able to offer these retailers solar power at prices which were
0:09:43 reasonably attractive to them.
0:09:46 So it worked.
0:09:50 It worked. And I think he did very nicely in 2009 because just like,
0:09:57 because this company also had fixed price power purchase agreements in place and suddenly
0:09:59 modules were much cheaper than they’d expected.
0:10:07 So his margins go up. The cheaper modules are. He’s still getting paid the same for 25 years.
0:10:14 It’s great for him. So clearly the rise of Chinese manufacturing of solar panels
0:10:21 is a big part of this story. Where does that happen in the story?
0:10:28 It’s been happening all along. I mean, one of the companies that did an IPO in 2005
0:10:34 with Suntech, which is Chinese essentially, it’s using technology developed in Australia
0:10:38 at the University of New South Wales. But it’s, it is a Chinese company run by a Chinese person.
0:10:45 And yeah, so the Chinese are there from the beginning. But the policy around this time,
0:10:49 the polycylican price is coming down as well. So the polycylican price is coming down to the
0:10:53 sort of $60 a kilogram range from $400 a kilogram.
0:10:56 Okay. So this time where it’s like 2011, something like that?
0:11:00 It’s about 2011. 2011 module prices have dropped to $1 a watt.
0:11:03 $1. Okay. So they’ve fallen in half again.
0:11:08 They went from four to two and now to one. And you mentioned polycylican,
0:11:11 silicon prices are coming down. That’s because what people are building more and more of these
0:11:15 factories, there’s an economy of scale. It’s the sort of classic industrial development.
0:11:18 What you’re starting to get then is Chinese companies figuring it out.
0:11:24 So there were hundreds, I mean, pretty much, probably literally a hundred Chinese companies
0:11:28 attempted to make polycylican, but making polycylican is hard and most of them failed.
0:11:33 And some of them were extremely random companies. Then again, the largest polycylican
0:11:38 maker in China these days, Tongwei, started as a fish food maker. So who am I to say about that?
0:11:42 They were in fish food and then they decided to pivot to polycylican?
0:11:43 No, they still make fish food.
0:11:51 How’d that happen? Is there some genius there? They make a million different things?
0:11:54 Or do they just make fish food and polycylican?
0:11:59 They do just make fish food. Now they make polycylican fish food, solar wafers, cells and
0:12:05 modules. But they still work. They still get about 10% of the revenue from fish food.
0:12:18 Amazing. So in 2011 or so, China’s kind of not just solar panel industry, but the raw materials,
0:12:24 the polycylican part is coming online and you’re getting this kind of manufacturing ecosystem.
0:12:28 For which China is famous in a lot of industries, right? They don’t just make one thing. There’s
0:12:33 often a region where lots of different manufacturers are making sort of components for each other and
0:12:38 there’s kind of a whole value chain in one place. That happening in China at this point?
0:12:44 This is probably when it’s starting to appear. So in Jiangsu Province, if you want to buy encapsulant
0:12:50 or silver paste, then you can talk to somebody 20 kilometers away instead of talking to somebody
0:12:54 in another country and this is starting to be very convenient.
0:13:03 Clearly, the price has kept falling by a lot from $1. Why does the price keep coming down after 2011?
0:13:12 Solar panels are manufactured commodity and they have something called the experience curve,
0:13:17 which probably a lot of things have, but then they’re difficult to notice,
0:13:21 particularly if they’re not very commoditized. So Moore’s Law is a special sort of experience curve,
0:13:28 but the experience curve just means that every time you double cumulative experience that we
0:13:34 have as a species at doing something, we get a certain amount better at it. And in the case of
0:13:42 solar panels, it’s probably about 28% better at it. And that comes from having a better recipe to
0:13:49 get your solar models more efficient and you slicing your wafers more thinly. All kinds of
0:13:54 little tweaks you make to use less material and to make your machines through output more energy
0:14:01 and to make the thing more efficient. So I mean, in a way, this is like the big story of
0:14:07 technological development in human life, certainly since the Industrial Revolution a couple hundred
0:14:12 years ago, right? People make these incremental improvements one after the other and things
0:14:18 get cheaper and cheaper. And you’re saying that’s basically how the price of solar panels fell all
0:14:25 the way from $4 a watt to less than 10 cents a watt, which is where we are now. So I want to kind
0:14:32 of take stock. Like just what does this wild decline in the price of solar panels? What does
0:14:39 it mean for the world? I think it’s basically really good news. Solar power only supplied
0:14:46 about 6% of the world’s electricity last year, but it’s growing and you couldn’t stop solar now
0:14:52 if you wanted to. Just because it’s so cheap, like yes, there are subsidies for it in various
0:14:57 ways, but even without subsidies in many cases, it would be the best option. Is that the case?
0:15:03 Exactly. And there were places where, I mean, I love talking about Pakistan right now because
0:15:10 Pakistan probably has about 20 gigawatts of relatively new solar panels, most of which the
0:15:14 normal grid, the traditional grid has no idea about where they are or whether they exist.
0:15:20 Huh. So it’s just people like go into the store buying solar panels and putting them up in their
0:15:26 backyard or on their roof? And it’s factories who are putting solar panels on their roofs. I mean,
0:15:30 they’re probably not just going to the store, they’re probably buying them a bulk. It’s farmers
0:15:36 putting them in instead of to run their irrigation pumps instead of diesel generators. I actually
0:15:40 only know about this because I can see it in Chinese customs data. And then when you go to
0:15:44 Google Earth and look at Lahore or Karachi or Islamabad, you can see that all the roofs have
0:15:51 solar panels on them. A lot of the activity in the developing world increasingly is outside
0:15:55 government programs. I mean, there were some countries which in the developing world too,
0:15:59 that have government supported booms like Vietnam also built about 20 gigawatts of solar
0:16:06 in 2019 and 2020 under a probably slightly badly calibrated government program.
0:16:14 But increasingly, it’s actually the businesses and individuals that are buying solar themselves
0:16:19 because it’s just less effort than trying to go through the government and trying to get support.
0:16:27 In a minute, what the world will look like in the relatively near future
0:16:31 when solar energy is free in the middle of the day in a lot of places.
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0:17:47 Give me the big picture for where we are. 25 years ago, solar power was like,
0:17:51 if you’re a rich hippie in Marin County, maybe you spend a crazy amount of money to put solar
0:17:57 power on your roof to feel good about yourself. It was a kind of fringe thing. Where are we now?
0:18:05 The sun is one. Solar power was by far the largest source of new installed capacity last
0:18:12 year, so of any generations. Now, people hate it when you compare capacity, but about 444
0:18:18 gigawatts of new solar panels were installed last year worldwide. And bearing in mind that the whole
0:18:26 power grid after that is about 9,300 gigawatts. So if we keep adding half a terawatt a year,
0:18:29 and we’ll do more than that this year, it’s going to be about 600 gigawatts this year.
0:18:34 I mean, adding half a terawatt every year to a 9.3 terawatt grid,
0:18:41 you pretty quickly get to real amounts of contribution. And this is why I’m pretty
0:18:46 sure that by 2030, power will basically be free whenever it’s sunny.
0:18:52 Power will basically be free whenever it’s sunny around the world?
0:18:53 Pretty much.
0:18:58 2030 is soon, especially in energy terms.
0:19:03 Like, 2030 is fast. Like, most energy infrastructure is really slow to build,
0:19:08 but solar is really fast. And the only way, and we’re already getting to the point where
0:19:14 in California, even in Germany on a sunny day, the wholesale power price goes very low or even
0:19:20 negative. And what you have, so the most likely thing, the most sensible thing to do in response
0:19:27 to that is to hand free power at that time to the customers, so they can actually increase
0:19:30 their demand at that time and then charge them more later when the sun’s gone down.
0:19:38 So let’s talk about that in a little bit more detail. So there is this thing that is already
0:19:42 true in California, among other places, which is in the middle of the day because of the growth of
0:19:52 solar, there is more electricity being generated than people are using. Great, amazing. And so one
0:19:59 option is you could just essentially not take that electricity, right? You could just not use it.
0:20:02 But you’re saying that’s not what’s going to happen. Tell me more about that.
0:20:06 Well, some of that will definitely happen. I mean, we call it curtailment when you literally turn
0:20:11 off the solar panels to stop them doing any damage to your grid. And you can do that. It’s
0:20:17 super easy. It’s actually way easier than it is for fossil fuel plants. What makes most sense is to
0:20:23 offer free or extremely cheap power to people in the hope that they’ll actually use it. You know,
0:20:28 if it’s an individual, you might turn your air conditioner on to make your house really nice
0:20:32 and cool. So you can turn it off in the evening and your house will stay comfortable into the night.
0:20:40 You might do your laundry. And if you’re an industrial company, you can do a lot more. So if
0:20:46 you have a meat freezer, you can chill it to minus 27 degrees Celsius and then let it warm up to
0:20:52 minus 19 when power is expensive. You can charge your electric car. I mean, especially if you can
0:20:59 charge at work. You can heat your water for a shower later. There are all kinds of things
0:21:03 that we can do to shift when we use power into the daytime. And of course, if you’ve got batteries,
0:21:12 you can charge your batteries. Yes. So what’s happening with storage, right? That’s the sort
0:21:17 of complementary piece of this that everybody always talks about. What’s happening with storage?
0:21:24 So storage is definitely growing. I just looked at the new energy storage market outlook from my
0:21:31 colleagues. And a new bill of energy storage grew 76%. They estimate that it’s grown about
0:21:38 over 70% from 2023 to 2024. So it’s growing. That’s good. And it’s basically lithium ion batteries
0:21:43 and kind of batteries that are in electric vehicles. It’s mostly just lithium ion batteries,
0:21:46 you know, because electric vehicles have driven them down the experience curve as well.
0:21:54 And electric vehicles, laptops, phones, these are actually quite, they’re getting more and more
0:22:03 affordable. And so I think we can probably assume that by 2030, you have batteries charging and
0:22:09 discharging every day to absorb some of that daytime solar power. And the question is how much?
0:22:15 The question is how much? Yeah. Yeah. And what does that turn on? I mean,
0:22:23 is it just how fast do lithium ion batteries get cheap? Is that the key unknown question?
0:22:27 It does. But I think what people don’t realise when they talk about solar and batteries being the
0:22:32 answer to everything. But first of all, they may be right in climates that are not very seasonal.
0:22:40 So if you’re day, if every day you have a long day, and then a similar length night, then it may
0:22:46 actually be fairly feasible to run your civilization on solar and batteries in places like northern
0:22:53 Europe where I am, then you’re going to hit the problem that the biggest battery you can imagine
0:22:59 will not hold power from summer to winter. And the economics of that will be terrible.
0:23:03 Because the first bunch of batteries you put in that charge and discharge every day,
0:23:08 their cost per cycle is relatively low because they have a lot of cycles.
0:23:15 However, your next wave of batteries isn’t necessarily needed every day.
0:23:21 And if they’re cycling every two days, for example, that essentially doubles the cost per cycle.
0:23:27 The less you use it, the more expensive it is per unit of service it’s providing you.
0:23:33 The economics of building a battery that cycles once a year are almost impossible.
0:23:37 I mean, you might be able to do something like fill a huge tank with a chemical fuel
0:23:46 or fill a huge big tank of salt. What you could do is make a big tank of salt molten
0:23:49 and then use that heat in the winter because salt is relatively cheap.
0:23:54 So you could have a lot of it to make hot. So you could build essentially like
0:24:00 a giant salt cavern under the earth, spend all summer heating it up and all winter using the
0:24:06 heat to whatever, make steam and spin a turbine. Yeah, or to heat your home.
0:24:09 I mean, that would be the probably the easiest way of doing it. But exactly.
0:24:13 Molten salt is kind of a pain to work with as well because it tends to,
0:24:21 if it gets above about 200 and if it gets below about 271 Celsius, as I recall, it freezes.
0:24:24 And so if you’ve got any pipes that it’s meant to be going down,
0:24:27 your pipes are now full of just non-molten salt.
0:24:35 Yeah. So is the sort of medium term unsolved problem long duration storage for these reasons?
0:24:40 Like you clearly see a very short term path to free power in the middle of the day.
0:24:45 It sounds like you’re pretty optimistic about kind of overnight charging.
0:24:47 Like if you, when you can charge in the day and discharge overnight,
0:24:52 like lithium ion will do that. But once you get to the sort of seasonal problems,
0:24:55 is that where we don’t really have a clear answer?
0:24:59 Is it a lot less obvious what the answer is, which is why as a solar analyst,
0:25:02 I say a lot that we should be building wind as well.
0:25:07 I mean, because the great thing about wind, especially in a climate like Northern Europe
0:25:10 and a lot of others around the world, is it blows at night and in the winter.
0:25:21 Uh-huh. It’s a good compliment. So wind has gotten cheaper, but not nearly as much cheaper
0:25:27 as solar, right? It didn’t win clearly in the way that solar won. Why not?
0:25:35 Wind is heavy engineering. It’s not bulk manufacturing.
0:25:44 That said, there have been huge improvements in wind turbines and in wind maintenance and in
0:25:47 financing for wind. And wind turbines are just getting bigger. I mean, one of the things you
0:25:53 can do with wind turbines as the materials to make blades get better and better,
0:25:56 you can make wind turbines bigger and it’s windier high up.
0:26:04 So wind has gotten cheaper, but it seems like building, you know, gargantuan blades, gargantuan
0:26:13 turbines, it doesn’t have that beautiful commodity race to the lowest price element that solar panels
0:26:19 have, that dead, simple. They don’t have to move once you make them. You can make a little one or
0:26:25 a big one just by adding more. Like, I love how commodified solar panels are. I know it’s a terrible
0:26:29 business to be in, but it’s the same reason, right? It’s a terrible business to be in because it’s
0:26:36 this amazing, cheap, relatively simple thing that that is quite different from a turbine the size
0:26:42 of a giant building that is a thousand feet up in the air or whatever. It really is. I mean,
0:26:47 solar panels are the first major electricity generation source that doesn’t involve anything
0:26:56 moving. Yeah, that’s incredible. Yeah, nothing to get stuck. You’ve been doing this job. You’ve
0:27:02 been following the solar power market for 20 years. When you look ahead another 20 years
0:27:06 from now, what do you think will be going on?
0:27:18 That’s such a hard question. I mean, I think we will, I’m actually relatively optimistic about
0:27:26 us achieving a worldwide energy transition. I think that in 20 years, nations that are
0:27:30 currently developing will have substantial economies running substantially on solar power
0:27:41 and batteries. And I hope they also have air conditioning and ways to protect themselves
0:27:45 from the effects of extreme climate change because we will also have increasingly extreme
0:27:53 climate change. So I think that the developing world will be substantially solar powered,
0:27:56 at least the bits of it, the sunny and realize that’s not actually the whole developing world.
0:28:04 I hope there are much more widespread transmission grids around the world
0:28:09 because it’s often sunny and windy in one place when it’s not sunny or windy in another place.
0:28:15 If the more we can run big power lines to smooth that out and sell each other power,
0:28:22 the easier this whole energy transition will be and the less gas we’ll need to burn sometimes.
0:28:30 There’s a project now where they want to build solar panels in Australia and run a wire to Singapore
0:28:35 to send the energy to Singapore, right? I love that one. I love that idea. Is that a real thing
0:28:46 or is that just like silly? It’s a really big cable. I mean, I hope they’ve got this all figured
0:28:53 out, but that’s a 4,000 kilometer cable. I mean, there’s cables. I know there are different kinds
0:28:59 of cables, but they ran a cable across the Atlantic for a telegraph, whatever, 150 years ago or something.
0:29:07 Yeah. I mean, that’s a good reason to think it is possible. I think it’s technically possible. I
0:29:13 suppose part of me wonders whether Singapore won’t decide it’s easier to buy power from,
0:29:18 for example, Indonesia, which is closer. Yes. I mean, Australia is just so far away
0:29:25 from Singapore. Yes. I mean, that’s why it’s sort of so thrilling to consider,
0:29:31 right? This idea of like, well, we got sun down here. They need power up there. Let’s just build
0:29:37 a big cord. I mean, also as a solar analyst, I prefer the idea of running cables east to west.
0:29:41 I mean, if we just put a big cable all the way around the world, we’re sorted.
0:29:46 Right. Because it’s always sunny somewhere. It’s always sunny on about half the world at one time.
0:29:50 Yeah. That’s funny. I didn’t even think of that, of course.
0:29:57 Well, so a couple of things. We haven’t talked about the grid. We’re talking about wires and
0:30:02 plugging things in. We haven’t talked about moving power just from one place to another
0:30:09 place, not so far away. I understand that the grid is in many places, including in the developed
0:30:14 world, not optimally efficient and is a sort of binding constraint in some instances. Tell me
0:30:24 about the grid. Well, grids are actually pretty efficient. So as you move from a quite a centralized
0:30:30 power system with large power plants in a couple of locations to a decentralized system where you’ve
0:30:35 got wind farms and solar farms all over the place being connected, you need a lot more grid.
0:30:42 And we estimate that investment in the grid has to be about 60% of the investment in the actual
0:30:48 solar and wind farms themselves by 2030 to stick to a net zero pathway. So investment in the grid
0:30:54 needs to be substantial. We need to bolster the short-range grid because literally, if you’re
0:30:58 trying to feed too much electricity in one point in the grid at one time, it gets stuck and you
0:31:02 can’t get it all through it and then some of your farms don’t get paid. And also just to be clear,
0:31:08 we’re electrifying, right? We’re not only switching the source of electricity from fossil fuel
0:31:16 to solar power, but we’re also taking things like stoves and cars that have been previously
0:31:21 directly powered by fossil fuel and powering them with electricity. So we just need more wires,
0:31:25 however we’re getting the electricity or more room in the wires.
0:31:34 Pretty much, yes. But building grid specifically for, for example, a solar plant
0:31:37 is quite tough because the utilization of the grid will be quite low.
0:31:42 Because the solar plant is not providing electricity all the time?
0:31:47 Exactly. I mean, solar plant output is very peaky. It really does peak in the middle of the day.
0:31:52 You can have panels that follow the sun and then it’s less peaky, but it’s still not a big part
0:31:59 of the day. So yeah, I mean, basically we have to build more grid. We have to connect both local
0:32:05 grid and also long range grid just to connect whole regions. And is that happening? Like,
0:32:11 is that becoming a constraint already? Like, where are we in terms of the relationship between the
0:32:17 development of solar power and the development of the grid? So if you walk into any solar
0:32:22 conference all around the world and say, oh, the problem in this market is grid,
0:32:26 then everyone will nod and say, this person knows what they are talking about.
0:32:33 Because the developers all know how difficult it is to get. Sometimes it’s just they need to
0:32:37 get permission to connect to the grid. And because there are hundreds of people trying to get
0:32:42 permission to connect to the grid, and the grid has to be quite choosy. And they don’t, and grids,
0:32:46 just a lot of the time, they just don’t have the manpower to make that decision
0:32:50 when you’ve got when you’ve suddenly got hundreds of power plants, asking whether they can
0:32:55 join your wires. Like, this is not necessarily a decision making process that grids were set up to
0:33:00 do. So sometimes it’s as simple as manpower. Sometimes it’s actually a question of building
0:33:06 of their being substantially more grid build needed. But grid is always a problem. And
0:33:12 there are thousands of gigawatts of solar and wind projects in on the planning table,
0:33:17 but waiting to get permission to connect to the grid and get built around the world.
0:33:24 So you mentioned that the U.S. is weird in terms of solar power.
0:33:30 Why? Why is the U.S. weird in terms of solar power?
0:33:35 So the U.S. is much slower to grow than you would expect in a market of its size and wealth
0:33:42 and support level. And partly that’s because it’s got quite a NIMBY problem.
0:33:48 It’s hard to get permission to build plants. It’s also partly because the U.S. is an expensive
0:33:53 place to buy solar panels, which again is partly because there’s been a trade war
0:33:59 between the U.S. and China since 2012. Obama brought in the first import tariffs on Chinese
0:34:06 modules. And consistently, solar modules in the U.S. are at least double the price that they are
0:34:16 elsewhere. Oh, wow. So you were saying the global price of solar panels now is 9. something per
0:34:21 watt, not 9-ish cents per watt? Yes, 94 cents per watt. You would pay at least twice that in the
0:34:27 U.S. right now. Oh, wow. So it’s like 20 cents a watt instead of 9.4 cents per watt?
0:34:32 20-something cents per watt, I think, although you might get some that are in containers at a
0:34:37 port and need to be sold in a great hurry for a bit less. So is that just because of tariffs
0:34:42 that exist in the U.S. and not in other places? Yeah, that’s basically tariffs and also the
0:34:49 uncertainty because the U.S. import restrictions are quite complicated. If you’re a developer,
0:34:53 you don’t want to take the risk of buying a module that will be stopped at customs.
0:34:59 So there’s a strong sort of push towards just a few name brands. And
0:35:04 that also pushes out the prices a bit. But yeah, it’s basically the tariffs and the trade war.
0:35:13 Is there a U.S. solar panel manufacturing industry that that tariff is protecting?
0:35:19 There wasn’t for a long time. There was first solar which manufactured mostly in Malaysia.
0:35:27 And there is a move to onshore it specifically since the Inflation Reduction Act passed.
0:35:31 The Inflation Reduction Act is pretty generous for solar installations,
0:35:36 but it’s really generous for solar manufacturers setting up plants on U.S. soil.
0:35:40 And there has been a boom in announcements of solar factories returning to the U.S.
0:35:46 We’ll see how they do. Let’s talk about the Inflation Reduction Act, the IRA.
0:35:51 Like it’s a giant bill, despite its name, it’s much more about sort of
0:35:57 subsidizing the energy transition than about specifically fighting inflation.
0:36:03 How does that affect the adoption of solar power in the U.S.?
0:36:09 I mean, to me, it feels like somebody is pushing down really hard on the accelerator
0:36:10 while the handbrakes on.
0:36:16 So the break is the tariff and the accelerator is the Inflation Reduction Act?
0:36:21 The break is the tariff and also the difficulty with getting planning permission to do things in
0:36:26 the U.S. And also the fact that grid is also an issue in the U.S. as everywhere else.
0:36:29 And the gas?
0:36:34 And the gas is the fact that the Inflation Reduction Act will give you loads of money
0:36:37 if you manage to get one of these projects through.
0:36:42 There is a reason why one of your fastest growing regional markets is Texas.
0:36:46 Because there’s not a lot of breaks in Texas.
0:36:49 There are data centers setting up there that will increase power demand.
0:36:52 The solar wind really booming there.
0:36:53 There’s not a lot of what in Texas?
0:36:56 There’s not a lot of nimbyism.
0:37:02 Or it’s a market where you can actually build things.
0:37:06 That is interesting, right? Because politically, solar power has this
0:37:11 left valence, in the U.S. has a very sort of democratic leaning valence.
0:37:13 Texas is a very Republican state.
0:37:17 And the fact that solar power is booming the most there is really telling.
0:37:22 It really is. And batteries too.
0:37:29 I mean, Texas is building wind solar and batteries at one of the most rapid paces
0:37:30 of any region in the U.S.
0:37:38 So you started covering this field in 2005, right at the moment when it was all starting.
0:37:42 And nobody knew it at the time.
0:37:47 But when you tell the story, it all sounds sort of clear in retrospect, right?
0:37:50 Like solar panels are this fundamentally very simple thing.
0:37:52 They don’t have to move.
0:37:55 The input is pretty straightforward.
0:37:58 Why has it been so surprising?
0:38:00 Why did nobody see it coming?
0:38:01 I think what we…
0:38:04 So there are a couple of things we didn’t expect.
0:38:08 So we didn’t quite estimate correctly how fast demand would pick up and how…
0:38:13 And actually, how quickly governments would come in and set their own subsidies,
0:38:15 realizing that the subsidy didn’t have to be so high anymore.
0:38:19 And how fast organic markets would kick off.
0:38:24 And we basically underestimated human ingenuity and how easy it is to deploy something
0:38:28 that is like a black rectangle that comes out of a factory.
0:38:30 And you put it in the sun somewhere and wire it up.
0:38:33 [Music]
0:38:42 We’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
0:38:47 I want to finish with the lightning round.
0:38:53 And I want to talk a little bit about a particular part of your book.
0:39:02 So in the middle of your book, right after a chapter called “How Markets Set Power Prices”
0:39:07 and right before a chapter called “Solar After the 2008 Crash,”
0:39:13 there is a chapter called “Networking and Other Stuff Not Taught at State Schools.”
0:39:15 And you’re not talking about energy networks.
0:39:20 You’re talking about going to meetings and introducing yourself to people.
0:39:25 And I’m curious, it’s an interesting chapter.
0:39:26 I want to talk to you about it.
0:39:31 But what is that chapter doing in the middle of a book about energy financing?
0:39:39 So, Jacob, I wrote this book for somebody like me, who is not particularly posh,
0:39:44 came through the state school system, which is the sort of government school system,
0:39:51 and literally had nobody to tell me things like how finance worked or what you should wear to a
0:39:59 meeting. And so I wrote this book for somebody looking for a job in something vaguely green.
0:40:02 And this is one of the things that I had to learn.
0:40:07 And I think it would have been useful to me to have someone sit down and say these things.
0:40:11 I would have been a little bit less awkward in many, many meetings.
0:40:15 So you do, in this chapter, just sort of give some simple tips.
0:40:19 Like, what are, say, your three top tips for networking?
0:40:22 I think you can ask people what they do, and then you can ask them how they make money from it,
0:40:26 because they’ll give you a much more interesting answer than if you just let them talk about
0:40:29 how their business is great, because everyone talks about that.
0:40:33 What’s one thing I should not do if I’m at a networking event?
0:40:39 Probably talk too much to somebody who doesn’t want to listen.
0:40:45 It doesn’t happen very often, but I do sometimes get cornered by people who want to talk about
0:40:49 something that is very specific that I, and I will try very hard to find it interesting.
0:40:53 What’s your getaway strategy in that setting?
0:40:59 So this is a tip from somebody else.
0:41:04 If you get drinks, get two drinks, and then if you’re stuck in a conversation that you’re not
0:41:08 happy with, you say, “Oh, I have to go and find the person who I got this drink for,”
0:41:10 and then you get away.
0:41:13 And if it’s a really interesting conversation, you have two drinks.
0:41:20 That’s a very prepared… Do you actually walk around networking events with two drinks in
0:41:23 your hands for just such a circumstance? Occasionally.
0:41:31 There’s a section in this chapter called Being Female, Pros and Cons.
0:41:35 What are the pros and cons of being female in networking settings?
0:41:40 To be honest, I think I’ve benefited over the years from the fact that people would
0:41:44 rather have a woman on the panel than a man. On a panel at a meeting.
0:41:51 On a panel visible. I’m sure that my profile as an analyst has been improved by being a woman.
0:41:57 And I’m grateful to that. And is the converse of that, or is the flip side of that,
0:42:01 it’s been improved because there aren’t very many women in the field?
0:42:03 Yeah, but there are more than there used to be, which is amazing.
0:42:05 So this is working. This strategy is working.
0:42:09 So there are more, and they’re also more confident to actually say proper things.
0:42:12 I’m going to ask you a couple of non-networking questions.
0:42:17 What’s one thing you wish more people understood about energy?
0:42:22 I wish people would understand the difference between CAPEX and OPEX.
0:42:28 Because there’s a huge difference, but things that have high upfront cost
0:42:36 and low running cost, there are ways of comparing them to things that have constant cost.
0:42:44 And just to be clear, CAPEX is capital expenditure. OPEX is operating expenditure, right?
0:42:47 Exactly. Yeah, upfront cost and running cost, basically.
0:42:50 Why is that such a big deal?
0:42:55 It’s the one thing that frustrates me that people will talk about cost and they’ll talk
0:43:04 about solar power being free, for example, and not think about the fact that solar power is not
0:43:11 free. It’s merely paid upfront. And I think if people want to understand energy systems,
0:43:19 or actually almost any system, you need to have some understanding about comparing upfront costs
0:43:24 and later savings. If you weren’t writing about energy, what do you think you’d be doing?
0:43:29 I hope I was writing about sustainable agriculture.
0:43:37 I mean, what I always wanted was to work in some way towards tackling climate change.
0:43:45 Maybe I have trained as a heat pump installer and I would be going around putting in heat pumps.
0:43:47 Maybe I would work for a local planning office,
0:43:51 processing planning applications for wind farms. That’s also a valid part of the energy transition.
0:44:00 I think if you want to have hope for the future and you feel climate anxiety,
0:44:05 which I think a lot of us do, it’s really important to have something that you can do every day
0:44:10 where you think if I do a good job here, the world is better than if I did a bad job or didn’t show
0:44:22 up for work. Jenny Chase is the author of Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon.
0:44:27 Next week on the show, I’ll talk to the founder of a company that’s trying to take that extra
0:44:31 solar energy in the middle of the day and use it to solve one of the biggest
0:44:37 unsolved problems in the energy transition, generating the heat we need to make everything
0:44:42 from steel to clothing. Today’s show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang.
0:44:47 It was edited by Lydia Jean Cotte and engineered by Sarah Brugier.
0:44:53 You can email us at problem@pushkin.fm. I’m Jacob Goldstein and we’ll be back next week with
0:45:01 another episode of What’s Your Problem.
0:45:11 [BLANK_AUDIO]
What does sickness sound like? Sometimes it’s obvious, like a cough, sniffle, or stuffy nose. But some conditions cause subtle changes that only a trained ear – or AI – can detect. Dr. Yael Bensoussan is a professor of otolaryngology and the director of the Health Voice Center at the University of South Florida. Her problem is this: How do you build a giant, public database of thousands of voice recordings, and use it to train AI tools that can hear when people are getting sick?
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