What Will We Do With Our Free Power?

“I simply cannot believe where we are with solar,” says Jenny Chase, the BloombergNEF analyst and quite possibly the person in the world who knows the most about the business of turning the light of the sun into electricity. “And if you’d told me nearly 20 years ago what would be the case now, 20 years later,” she continues, “I would have just said you were crazy. I would have laughed in your face. There is genuinely a revolution happening.” By just 2030, Chase estimates, solar power will be absolutely and reliably free during the sunny parts of the day for much of the year “pretty much everywhere.”

In 2023, the world installed 444 gigawatts of new solar photovoltaic capacity, according to BloombergNEF. While that figure can be hard for normie brains to process, it represents a staggering step forward: nearly an 80 percent year-on-year jump and more than was cumulatively installed between the invention of the solar cell in 1954 and 2017. Although solar power still provides just under 6 percent of global electricity, its share has nearly quadrupled since 2018, an exponential curve that is expected to continue for some time.

“When it was a 10th of its current size 10 years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown,” The Economist noted in a recent cover story. “The next tenfold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.” By the 2030s — not very long from now — solar power will most likely be the largest source of electricity on the planet.

Even more remarkable than the scale is the cost. By one measure, the cost of solar power is less than one-thousandth of what it was when hippies and environmentalists first made a point of installing panels on their roofs in the 1960s. A decade ago, it was considered a moonshot goal to reduce the price of a solar module to a dollar per watt; now they are being manufactured for one-tenth as much. The price fell by nearly half in 2023 alone.

One result is that, by some ways of tabulating, solar power is already cheaper than all other new sources of electricity for something like 95 percent of the world. Another result is that the price of a solar panel is becoming a smaller and smaller fraction of the true cost of generating and using electricity from it — with a much larger portion coming from the price of installation and interconnection, grid expansion and whatever it is you might be doing to supplement that solar at night and in winter.

Of course, because the sun can be simply counted on to rise every day, you don’t need to pay in any ongoing way for a commodity input, like oil or gas, to keep the system humming — only to set it up initially to manage and endure the novel challenges of drawing reliable energy from the giant fireball 94 million miles away.

And over the next decade, even that all-in cost is expected to fall in half again. Negative electricity prices, in which consumers are actually paid to consume electricity, are already a recurring feature in the world’s mature markets. This summer, they have been almost a regular phenomenon in Texas and in California, where a particularly rapid battery revolution has essentially eliminated the state’s need for natural gas to offset the sun’s famous “intermittency.”

Though it seems like a line from starry-eyed science fiction, the dream of electricity “too cheap to meter” arose first in the giddy early days of nuclear power, the phrase coined by the midcentury atomic advocate Lewis Strauss (whom Robert Downey Jr. recently immortalized in the film “Oppenheimer” as both a modern-day Faust and a prototype for Joseph McCarthy). And it is easy to get carried away with the gauzy utopian possibilities of energy both functionally infinite and effectively free. In a recent essay calling “the solar industrial revolution” “the biggest investment opportunity in history,” the entrepreneur Casey Handmer listed about a dozen pie-in-the-sky applications, including large-scale solar-powered water desalination plants; the construction of artificial rivers; scaling up the production of carbon-free synthetic fuels to power industrial decarbonization; and even the production of antimatter to power intergalactic travel.

Turn your imagination loose on the idea of zero energy costs and projects closer at hand in the biosphere will suggest themselves, too: vertical farming, for instance, whose growth has been limited among other reasons by its enormous energy needs, or industrial-scale carbon removal, which could in theory help restore the planetary balance that has governed the entire Holocene and effectively “undo” the full climatological damage of the Industrial Revolution.

Many of these applications are far-fetched, even “delusional,” Chase says, at least in the short term. But already, across Europe, homeowners are building garden fences with solar panels simply because it’s not much more expensive than doing so using traditional materials — namely, wood. You might not get much actual power from a module standing upright and facing away from the noonday sun, but anything you do get is, financially speaking, a bonus anyway.

It’s one reason you’re now seeing so many parking lots and even roadways shaded by solar installations. The challenge of optimally angling panels to absorb the maximum amount of sunlight has been such an intimidating technical challenge, it has inspired a whole subfield of machine learning, but these days, given the price of those panels, it doesn’t seem to matter all that much. In Pakistan, so much rooftop solar was recently imported from China in just six months that the country increased its electricity capacity by 30 percent — without anyone really noticing.

This is not game over for fossil fuels and global warming — electricity is just one of a number of carbon challenges; solar probably won’t solve it on its own; and there are still huge investment and infrastructural obstacles ahead.

But the exploding scale and disappearing cost of solar do mean that the energy game will now be played according to some pretty different ground rules. A piece of coal provides power only so long as it burns; a solar panel, once installed, for several decades. Critics worry over the extractivism inherent to renewable energy, but solar power sufficient to power the world would require a tiny fraction of the mining that continuously producing enough fossil fuels does.

And because solar power will often be effectively free but not always, industries and enterprises that do not require energy round the clock or round the calendar but can instead dial up or dial down their activities in response to solar conditions and the spot price of power — these will be huge beneficiaries, with many more projects concocted or retrofit to work on that basis.

The job of storing and transporting that electricity will become more important — beyond even city-scale batteries, like the one brought online this year outside Los Angeles, capable of powering 680,000 homes. A whole new kind of long-distance transmission line, primarily traveling from west to east and from the tropics to the midlatitudes, might emerge to deliver solar power from those places where the sun is still up or shining more intensely to those parts of the globe in evening or in the sun-shy north. (One such generation-defining project is now underway in Australia, where a 30,000-acre solar farm will send electricity first through 500 miles of overland cables and then 2,500 miles of underwater cables to Singapore, where it will eventually provide one-sixth of the city-state’s electricity needs.)

In the large sunnier patches of the world, countries long dependent on importing their sources of power, and geopolitically vulnerable as a result, may be able to seize a much greater share of autonomy and energy independence, especially if financial reform lowers the capital cost of new green energy infrastructure there.

When the energy analyst Rob Carlson announced in 2022 that “the sun has won,” the triumphalism was probably a bit premature. But solar power is inarguably winning. The main question now is what we will choose to do with the dividends.