Solar is not growing more rapidly than predicted – it is 25 years late

Some weeks ago I was back in Hungary and in my old room in my parent’s flat I came across the 1980 – 82 series of Alfa, a science for kids magazine that was my favourite at that time. Skipping through them for nostalgia I was stuck by the frequency and modernity of articles about energy technology. In a dozen old, dog eared copies I found articles about heat pump heating, ocean and wave power, concentrated solar for industrial energy use and many more. Maybe Elon Musk was also reading this as a kid, because I found an article about the Hyperloop (at that time it was called Planetrain, but the same concept) and best of all about self-driving electric cars. (No kidding, published in 1980s communist Eastern Europe).

Last but not least, in October 1982 Alfa discussed the economics and prospects of solar PV. The article stated that a 150 watt solar panel is sufficient to power a television but has the price of a car. The article was optimistic about the prospects: it envisaged gigantic factories churning out massive quantities of solar panels, hundreds of times cheaper and discussed how batteries will help to overcome the limitations of sunshine. Large scale mass manufacturing of panels delivering cost reductions was certainly a good prediction but where we are with the hundreds of times cost reduction?

Unless you have a very large wallsize screen, a modern TV does not consume 150 watts. Our black and white set at that time was a byproduct of military radiolocator manufacturing with no clear priority on energy efficiency, my current Sony has twice the screen size and it is around 70 watts. However, this is the progress of energy efficiency rather than solar so let’s leave it out. Eastern European cars were decidedly on the low end of the car market, so say 12000 $ for the present value of one should be reasonable, comparing with average car prices today would introduce a distortion due to quality change. A low end car’s 12000 bucks would buy you around 6 kw rooftop solar capacity today or at least 10 kw ground mounted, the difference is of course the cost of installation as carpenters and eletricians climbing on a rooftop did not experience the disruptive technology improvement of the panels themselves. The different metrics give us a 40-80 times cost reduction, impressive indeed, but still a far cry from “hundreds”

Moreover, this amazing, disruptive cost reduction that I read about as a kid was supposed to happen a “decade from now”, in 1992 whereas the massive factories churning out cheap panels is an appropriate image only of the past 5 years at best.

A kid’s magazine in communist Hungary was not an outlier concerning this early optimism about the energy transition. Google Ngram which measures the frequency of terms popping up in published books shows a sharp peak for the term “solar power” in 1981. At that time the CEO of Exxon had a solar panel on top of his own house and his company funded cutting edge pioneering solar research. What made this time special is that the oil shocks and the seemingly imminent end of oil created a very visible and convincing signal that the existing energy system is not sustainable, and something has to change. Ngram also shows a sharp peak and then collapse for the broader “future of energy” term. Of course 1992 was not the year of mass manufacturing of cheap solar but just the middle of a decade of cheap and readily available oil, no real interest in the future of energy and solar still languishing as an expensive luxury by that time without a strategic interest from major energy companies. The good news on the spring of 2017 is that although 25 years late, we do have the mass manufactured cheap solar panels, and we even started to sort out batteries as well, so it is back to the future of 1982. But it is also back to the future of 1992: as shale investment picks up all across North America with a relentless technological advance as impressive as the solar industry, it is absolutely clear that the expensive and perhaps unavailable oil is not going to help concentrating minds. On the contrary, the flood of more and more efficient and geopolitically secure oil and gas from North America means that the future hydrocarbon supply is more secure than any time in the past decades. The discussion about the future of energy will have to focus on the future of planet Earth, convincing society the hard way. I’m still hopeful that the oil majors will take up the mantle of Exxon’s visionary leader and build solar with the efficiency and professionality that they are famous for. My kid’s magazines are full of renewable energy stories again and the future of energy discussion has an intensity approaching 1982, but I hope this will not be the case for my grandkids: Oil can have yet one more cycle, but the atmosphere does not have another 25 years to lose. For the magazines of my grandkids, clean energy should just be a simple fact of life rather than an exciting new story.