You could argue that last year was the worst year of climate change in human history. Earth has repeatedly experienced the hottest days on record. An abnormal record for atmospheric surface temperature was set in September. The ocean heat also set records. How many wildfires are there in Canada? Another all-time high.
But you don’t have to squint to see the good news. Carbon emissions in the United States and Europe have actually declined this century. The rate of global deforestation is slowing. And investment in clean energy technology, particularly solar power and batteries, is breaking records and changing the world.
This ray of hope comes from an epic annual report by Nat Bullard, an independent climate researcher based in Singapore. bloomberg. In today’s episode, Nat and I discuss the two pillars of the global clean energy revolution (solar power and energy storage), how these two technologies have consistently outperformed experts’ predictions, and how they We discuss how we’re reshaping energy production around the world and what’s holding us back. A clean energy future based on solar and batteries.
If you have any questions, comments, or ideas for future episodes, please email us at [email protected].
In the following excerpt, Nat Bullard and Derek dig deeper into why solar power has taken off so much faster than other energy sources, and why it has been undervalued in recent forecasts. .
Derek Thompson: You published this 200-slide report on the state of the global clean energy revolution, and it’s very important to understand what’s happening in two categories in particular: solar power and storage. I feel important.
Before we get into the numbers here, I want to make sure all of our listeners are on the same page. I would like to start with solar power generation. Could you start by presenting your paper? How would you characterize the speed and intensity of solar energy growth? For example, how does it compare to other energy revolutions such as the growth of nuclear power in the late 20th century or liquid natural gas in the past few decades?
Nat Bullard: I think this is important if you are going to start publishing papers. [to define] The first thing to do is to think about this. That is, this is a uniquely decentralized technology in a world of electron generation that has historically been very concentrated. So this was usually done by successively building units of something in small numbers, gaining their strength over time. That means bigger power plants that are more efficient, and larger infrastructure that makes the units cheaper over time.
Solar power, on the other hand, is inherently decentralized. It works from units as small as the charging capacity of a calculator to deployments on the scale of gigawatts and eventually terawatts. In other words, a lot of power that mimics what the rest of the power grid consumes? But it’s manufactured. Rather than being custom-made or built using heavy machinery, they are manufactured on lines that are in many ways very similar to how chips are manufactured and how displays are manufactured. So it follows this kind of manufacturing economics in terms of what gets built, but behind it, in terms of output that tends to get into the field sooner than people expect. It comes with a certain kind of richness.
I like your question about comparing this to the way new energy carriers have evolved over the past 50 years, the last half century. There’s a comparison I made earlier in the slide. To be clear, I’m borrowing structure from Shell and the oil majors. Comparing solar, wind, nuclear, and LNG (liquefied natural gas). . And the funny thing about this is, if you’re a long-term energy analyst, you’d think nuclear, large, established, centralized, LNG, the primary method of energy transportation. But solar and wind are both faster than nuclear power and LNG in the past. They achieved takeoff by carrying energy. For example, the sun is moving at about twice the speed of the wind.
So, right now, after seven years of achieving early launch, solar power is producing about the same amount of energy as wind power did in about 12 years and nuclear power in about 13 years. It’s basically running twice as fast. If you look at the chart, you’ll see that other energy sources have a shape that reaches a take-off and then levels off, but solar power has a very familiar curve that just slopes. has the beginning of The exponential trend continues. It’s not just moving, it’s moving at an accelerated rate.
Of course, the trick to all of this is to start with a small foundation. So if you don’t pay attention, it’s difficult to notice this early on, in industry, in the flow of capital, if you don’t pay attention. And certainly on the grid, these are very nominal new power additions. But it’s not, and it’s rapidly on its way to becoming the bulk of the new power added to the grid, certainly the bulk of the power being built on a capacity basis, everywhere, and certainly around the world. is progressing to And we’re starting to feel like we’re at the end of the beginning. This is similar to a position that we are beginning to see take off that will have a meaningful and measurable impact on the way the world’s power systems operate accordingly.
Thompson: Global solar installations have increased 1,000 times over the past 20 years. If you’re interested in building clean energy that doesn’t spew carbon into the atmosphere and powers the world in abundance, then you’re proud. It’s not just pride. For me, it’s a mystery. Global forecasting agencies like the IEA, the International Energy Agency, are famous, perhaps even infamous, for consistently missing out on their predictions of the global deployment of solar energy.
I think I read some statistics about the solar revolution. He is 90 years ahead of the 2015 IEA prediction. Just nine years ago, we missed his century mark on the introduction of energy. What is your answer to the question of why this happened? And please don’t give me a tautological answer like “we built more by building more”. For you, what is the root cause answer to how solar energy growth has outpaced estimates by a century?
Bullard: Institutional deficiencies in imagination on the part of planners and forecasters who are generally linear thinkers. So we expect the future to look like, relatively speaking, incremental growth from the past. This is how most things grow, and especially if you’re talking about big things, you would expect them to reach some sort of asymptotic limit in how fast they grow, how big they are, or both. .
And it kind of makes sense, especially when you start thinking about something that has such inherent limitations in terms of space and time and where you put construction materials and equipment. But if you think about something that has a manufacturing logic, the ability to build something is there. [and] Increasing capacity five times in one year isn’t really over the top, but I think it confuses people’s thinking in a way that isn’t particularly helpful.
Another thing is that the task of all these forecasters was to describe what looked like a defensible vision of the near future, rather than a kind of assumption about even more distant periods. There is a certain confusion between forecast predictions looking just a few years out and scenarios looking much further into the future. To be fair, many institutions do both. … So backtesting shows that I probably should have entered the logistic curve to tear things apart. This will give you a better explanation of the present and near future than trying to reorder them. Imposing constraints.
An old colleague of mine at Bloombergnef, where I worked for 15 years and was a way of solar analyst, will forever say, “I know very well what this market is like now,” and even to them this challenge It was a. I know its limitations. I know what will and won’t work in this moment. Therefore, we intend to gradually fine-tune them in the future. ” On the other hand, a better way is to make it look like, “Wait a minute, there’s no capacity limit here.” Even though solar power has grown 1,000 times in his 20 years, he expects to more than triple production this year, based on what he knows is already in the pipeline in terms of manufacturing capacity. It can be done easily. ”
And you have to ask yourself. …Suspending disbelief would be another story. It’s not just a lack of imagination, but don’t you want to suspend your disbelief that it won’t happen and lean more toward the side of, “Well, I have the ability and it’s possible.” Manufacturers are also interested in this. ” We need to start thinking that maybe we shouldn’t impose limits or impose a sense of growth. Impose the statement, “Well, we’ve been able to grow at this pace.” What will happen if we continue like this? ” As opposed to saying, “Well, I’m sure it’ll stop at some point.” People always try to impose the law of large numbers. They want to impose restrictions, but it’s probably better not to do that.
This excerpt has been edited for clarity.Listen to the rest of the episode and follow us here easy to understand english feed On Spotify.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Nathaniel Bullard
Producer: Devon Baroldi
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