How solar power could become a victim of its own success
Solar power is outstripping growth for all other renewables. But as 95,000 megawatt hours just went to waste in California, is the solar surge too much too soon?
Solar is the world’s fastest growing source of new energy, outpacing growth in all other forms of renewable energy, according to research by the International Energy Agency (IEA) published in November. Renewables overall accounted for two thirds of new power added to the world’s grids in 2016, and solar even overtook coal in terms of net growth. This enormous boost has come about thanks in part to the plummeting costs of getting rigged up to wind and solar, as well as massive growth in China and India.
Good times, then, for the Earth’s long-term prospects of continuing to power itself, and taper the consumption of fossil fuels. At the end of April, 85 per cent of German electricity came from renewable sources, establishing a new national record for the country, with breezy, warm and sunny weather combining to create a renewable whammy of unseen proportions.
Last week, solar overtook biomass to become the third source of renewable energy in the US, and renewables in the country now provide 17 per cent of overall electricity, marking good progress, though there is still a way to go with solar only constituting one per cent.
There are various challenges to harnessing the sun’s inexhaustible power, and foremost among them has been cost. But continuous technological improvement and massive economies of scale especially in places like China have turned solar into one of the cheapest renewables around and the easiest to erect in terms of infrastructure. According to Paolo Frankl, head of renewable energy at the IEA, this is "a huge advantage in terms of de-risking investment". The manufacturing capacity globally is now higher than 100 Gigawatts per year, almost the total power capacity of a country like Italy, Frankl says.
While the upfront costs of solar panel installation are still fairly high to the average person, these can be offset in the longer term (for citizens) by subsidisation, incentivising people to bear these costs and allowing them to sell energy back to the grid. Cities have not historically been a natural fit for solar energy because of the space needed to host upturned panels – but companies like Brooklyn SolarWorks have been designing panels which can make use of industrial rooftop expanses and enable communities to buy into these public goods by ‘subscribing,’ eventually reducing their energy costs.
In South London, a number of cooperative initiatives like Brixton Energy and Vauxhall Energy are similarly empowering communities. These sorts of initiative – more and more of which are subsidy-free – are absolutely cost-effective and are – in Frankl's words "a no-brainer... it's actually unstoppable".
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