The World Future Energy Summit Showed Solar Is Finally Having its Time in the Sun

Last month, I was privileged to be invited to speak at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi.

The summit came just ten months ahead of the emirate hosting COP28 this November.

One of the hottest topics at the summit was solar power, which got me thinking about the past, present, and future of this technology.

Since the Iron Age, when humans first used lenses to focus solar rays and light fires, the sun has been the most visible source of power on our planet.

The question, as always, was whether the technology could match humankind’s ambition and thirst for energy consumption.

By the middle of the 20th?century, solar panels that created energy existed—but they were so expensive the only practical use for them was the US Vanguard 1 satellite in space.?

Those costs have dropped rapidly due to improvements in design, manufacturing, and deployment of solar cells. Between 2010 and 2021, the cost of generating a megawatt of electricity from solar fell by 80%. Other renewables—particularly onshore and offshore wind—have become more efficient too. But it is solar that has seen the biggest improvements by far.

As a result, solar is now seen as a better bet than ever before, with new subsidy-free markets beginning to emerge. According to bp ’s Statistical Review of World Energy 2022, global solar capacity increased from 72.2 gigawatts of installed capacity in 2011 to 843.1 gigawatts a decade later, an average annual growth rate of 27.9%.?

Progress has been even faster in world regions with solar-friendly climates. The average growth rate of solar capacity has been 61.6% in South and Central America, 45.1% in Asia-Pacific, 44.1% in Africa and 44.0% in the Middle East.?

Analysis by BloombergNEF last year stated that there are now enough solar panels installed throughout the world to generate 1 terawatt (TW) of electricity from the sun.

Of the world’s biggest countries, China has invested heavily in solar. Its solar capacity in 2021, at 306.4 gigawatts, is more than the entire world had as recently as 2016. In 2021, China was responsible for 36% of global capacity additions in solar.?

All these advancements are delivering results. For example, in 2021, for the first time ever, wind and solar were responsible for more than 10% of the world’s total electricity, surpassing the contribution of nuclear.

While large-scale solar farms having driven a significant portion of this growth, rooftop installations are also vital—and becoming more so. Much of the solar growth in China has been driven by vast farms in the north of the country, but capacity limitations—not to mention the huge capital costs of such large-scale building—mean that rooftop installations aren’t a strategy that can be scaled up indefinitely.

Instead, China has announced a plan for all new-build public buildings and factories to be covered at 50% by solar panels by 2025. Existing buildings are also getting a rooftop refit, with 50% of rooftop space on party and government buildings, 40% on schools and hospitals, and 30% on industrial buildings due to be covered by the end of this year.

Last year, the French senate approved legislation requiring all existing and new car parks with more than 80 spaces to install solar panels.?It is expected to add 11 gigawatts to the French electricity grid, equal to the power generated by 10 nuclear reactors.

Neither is the United States standing still.?

The recent Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) sets aside USD 369 billion to decarbonise the economy—the largest climate and energy spending package in U.S. history. Individual homeowners will be able to install solar on their roofs with a 30% nt tax credit, saving them at least USD 300 a year. There are also huge tax incentives for businesses to produce and store solar energy.?

By 2030, it is estimated that the IRA will drive the installation of 950 million solar panels.

This investment isn’t a panacea.?

The industry has already experienced problems meeting existing demand, caused largely by problems with global supply chains. But by incentivising domestic production—in the longer term at least—the U.S. government aims to create a more stable market that is less reliant on imported components.

These global developments have led to a confidence in the future of solar, and increasingly bullish predictions about how much of clean-energy demand that it could satisfy. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) has suggested that solar could provide a quarter of the world’s energy by 2050, with global capacity 18 times current levels, while creating 18 million jobs.

While solar power is experiencing a moment in the sun, significant challenges remain in scaling it up as IRENA and others envisage.?

The problem of intermittency remains a profound challenge. Put simply, the problem with the sun is that it doesn’t always shine. And while night times are predictable, cloudy days are not—or at least not to the same degree.?

Solutions to the puzzle of intermittency fall into two general categories.?

One is planning—making sure that solar is part of a sustainable power-generating mix that maximises the periods when it is producing, and covers the periods when it is not.?

That is easier to do in more predictable—and sunnier—climates, and perhaps explains why IRENA expects Asia and, to a lesser extent, North America to dominate overall solar capacity rather than Europe. Big countries, with a sophisticated energy mix and lots of sunny space for solar, have a distinct advantage.

But another key issue is storage.?

Battery technology has increased rapidly over recent years and decades, but lithium-ion batteries—first used commercially by 索尼 in 1991—remain the most economically-viable technology three decades later. These come with costs, not least in terms of the potential for pollution when mining on a vast scale in lithium-rich countries like Argentina. Other technologies—compressed-air energy storage systems, flow batteries, and sand batteries, which use grains of sand to store energy—are not yet viable for large-scale use.

The International Energy Agency, acutely aware of the storage challenge, claims the world will need 10,000 GW-hours of batteries and other energy storage by 2040, a 50-fold increase on today.?

The good news is that it isn’t just governments that have responded, but the industry, too. According to a study by the European Patents Office, between 2005 and 2018, patenting activity in batteries and other electricity storage technology grew four times faster than the average of all technology fields, at an annual average rate of 14%.

That innovation—and competition—isn’t just delivering better technology, but also cheaper technology.?

Since 2010, lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles have seen cost reductions of nearly 90%. Strategic thinking has become more sophisticated too.?

While giant battery farms near substations might be part of the answer, so too might smaller, more portable batteries that can go where demand is.?

So too might micro-solutions—right down to more efficient capture of solar power generated by individual properties, including storage in electric cars.

The potential—and challenges—of solar power remind us that there is no single renewable technology that is likely to “solve” the world’s clean energy demands.?

Rather, the future is one of mixed technologies, with the precise balance determined by the local climate and energy needs.?

It is a future in which technological advances must go hand-in-hand with smart strategic thinking and flexibility.?

It is a future where governments and the private sector will have to be very closely aligned.?

And having attended the World Future Energy Summit , I’m heartened to report that it’s a future in which solar plays a very big part.?