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Imagine that you live in a village in Pakistan or a shack in Lagos, Nigeria. You’ve been waiting decades for your dysfunctional state to deliver you electricity. Then you see the neighbours putting solar panels on their roof. You inquire: a basic home system, using Chinese photovoltaic panels, starts at about $170. A YouTube video teaches you how to install it, or you hire a local who has trained themselves to be a technician. Now you have lights and can charge your phone. Over time, you pay instalments of a few dollars a month to buy enough panels to run a fridge, plus a battery to store energy for the night. Meanwhile, solar mini-grids power your local clinic and school.
In a rare piece of global good news, solar is finally taking off. It accounts for three-quarters of all new capacity of the world’s power plants, Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, tells me. He marvels, “This is amazing, beyond the wildest dreams.” Elon Musk concurs: “Solar is everything . . . Compared to the sun, all other energy sources are like cavemen throwing some twigs into a fire.” The solar revolution can slash emissions, boost developing economies and give almost everyone on earth electricity.
This revolution is driven not by green ambitions but by falling prices. The best solar offered “the cheapest electricity in history”, said the IEA in 2020, and it’s much cheaper now. Prices of panels have dropped 99.3 per cent since 1975, and by 95 per cent just since 2007, reports Our World in Data. And prices continue to fall, as China exports surplus panels — often older, simpler models — to Africa in particular.
Meanwhile, the cost of battery storage systems has plunged 93 per cent since 2010. And unlike with oil or gas, solar prices won’t spike because of war in Iran. Once you’ve installed panels, your daily fuel is free. Some homes even produce surplus energy to resell into the grid.
Solar is the most bottom-up, democratic energy source. In many countries it’s spreading not through state capacity but despite it, says Andrew Lawrence of Wits Business School in South Africa. People no longer have to sit around for years hoping that their state will build some gargantuan dam or coal-fired power plant, or connect them to its shaky grid. A simple technology can help poor countries go green even as international climate finance disappoints (see the recent collapse of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance).
Solar’s potential is biggest in sub-Saharan Africa, a region where one in two people doesn’t have electricity but the sun shines daily. The starting point is near zero: the entire region generates 30 per cent less solar electricity than do the unsunny Netherlands, says Birol. But that’s changing fast. African imports of Chinese solar panels jumped 60 per cent last year. The model is Africa’s leapfrogging of telephone landlines — a technology that most states barely delivered — to go straight to mobile phones. Solar could give the continent 21st-century amenities without worsening climate change.
Obviously solar can’t replace all fossil fuels. It still isn’t easy to use in heavy industry. It will only gradually oust oil in transport, as electric vehicles take over. But it already allows people to refrigerate food, to power agricultural equipment and to light the night. Solar lamps let markets stay open and kids keep studying. The change recalls Europe’s “sight revolution” around 1400, when the proliferation of wax candles, glass windows and eyeglasses helped people see better. And unlike kerosene lamps or charcoal fires, solar doesn’t wreck people’s lungs.
Panels should become the norm on almost every new home worldwide, as essential as a roof.
“Regardless of politics, solar will shape the power systems of the future,” says Birol.
But good politics can help spread the technology. Smart states will give cheap loans for installing panels, monitor these installations to help balance grids and cut pointless red tape, such as making homeowners register panels. They will train solar technicians — a less skilled job than electrician or plumber, notes Lawrence. More countries must also make panels, to end the dangerous reliance on China, which accounts for 80 per cent of global production.
Nothing is ever a panacea, not even solar. But there are three theoretical ways to cut carbon emissions, and two have failed: international agreements and individual sacrifices. That leaves our last chance: cheap green tech that’s so efficient that everyone adopts it for selfish reasons. It’s finally here.
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