Mastodawn

https://mastodon.green/@solar_chase/113214911341855405

I have put out this thread once a year on X since 2017 and Mastodon / Bluesky since 2024. See 2024 thread below, and from there links to previous threads. So you can see what I got wrong, or at least changed.

Some of these assertions will contain links to BloombergNEF content under a paywall. If you are not lucky enough to have access, you'll have to believe me that's what it says.

Also, I'm on maternity leave, so this thread is lighter on changes than in some years.

Jenny Chase (@[email protected])

Time to make 2024 updates to my annual “opinions about solar” thread. If you like these, the second edition of my book, Solar Power Finance Without The Jargon is out. https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/q0437#t=aboutBook

Mastodon.green

1. To opinions! Solar is the cheapest source of bulk electricity in many countries, and the quickest to deploy, and now you couldn't stop it being built if you wanted to. The limits to PV build in most places are grid access, permitting, and sometimes installation labour.

2. 20 years ago when I got this job, I thought maybe solar would one day be 1% of global electricity supply. In 2024 it was about 7% worldwide, and rising fast. You can see this eating into fossil fuel power generation in, for example, Europe.

3. Solar will not solve every problem. But the biggest problem is that our civilisation relies on digging up fossil carbon and burning it, which is destabilising the climate, which multiplies a lot of very unpleasant threats. Solar is part of stopping us needing to do that.

4. We don’t need a solar technology breakthrough. The challenges to building solar are usually getting a grid connection and planning permission, or increasingly, power price cannibalization. Of which more later in thread.

5. Solar modules now cost 8.9 US cents per Watt (higher in US, India due to trade barriers). Solar panels are cheaper than most ordinary fencing materials. For rooftop installs, non-module cost is still $0.50-3.00 per Watt, so further module price declines make little difference.

@solar_chase

Thanks for this thread, loaded with useful data! A question: what do you make of the fact (IEA) that 80% of the whole PV supply chain is controlled by one country - China - and therefore the today’s PV price is a product of Chinese subsidies, forced labour and poor environmental standards?

@kravietz @solar_chase Seriously? China isn't North Korea. It has lifted more people out of poverty than any country in my lifetime. It hasn't done so with forced labour. Its environmental footprint is improving. China's not perfect, sure. But has it overthrown democratically elected governments it didn't like, like the US and UK? Claimed global warming was a hoax and done its best to ramp up hydrocarbon use? We should be grateful for the lifeline & avoid cutting off our noses to spite our faces

@samueljohnson @solar_chase

As a reminder, communist China has illegally occupied Tibet, murdered and starved to death millions of people during Cultural Revolution, right now it’s pursuing violent prosecution of Uyghurs and makes heavy use of forced labour. It also enforces strict censorship and many other attributes of a totalitarian state.

If you control 80% of market, you’re not “throwing a lifeline”, you’re a practical monopoly. And monopolies always do what monopolies do, that is abuse their monopolist situation, which is what China just started doing on rare earth metals market:

https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-new-rare-earth-and-magnet-restrictions-threaten-us-defense-supply-chains

In case of EU, it’s also about fundamental values - if we say our socio-economic model is the best and our environmental laws should be copied by everyone, then we should put the money where our mouth is and prove it in practice.

That is, run mining and industrial operations inside EU at low environmental footprint rather than import everything from a totalitarian state “because cheap”. The current policy just ridicules what we say.

China’s New Rare Earth and Magnet Restrictions Threaten U.S. Defense Supply Chains

China has imposed its most stringent rare earth and magnet export controls yet, restricting products with even trace Chinese content. This bolsters its leverage ahead of the Trump-Xi meeting and heightens risks to U.S. defense and semiconductor supply chains.

@kravietz @solar_chase I've spent time in China and don't need any reminders about Tibet or anything else on the downside. The West doesn't have much in the way of a moral high horse and if China has a near monopoly on solar its precisely because of Chinese long term thinking. As for control of minerals China is perfectly entitled to use geopolitical tools at its disposal. The US hasn't hesitated to do so. US: good, China: bad is tripe. Others will make choices on a more sophisticated basis.

@samueljohnson @solar_chase

If you haven’t noticed, I’m not living in the US so I’m not quite sure why you bring this unrelated third party to this discussion.

And, as you said, if “China is perfectly entitled to use geopolitical tools”, this also implies that EU is entitled to use all tools at its disposal to avoid repeating the Gazprom 2021-2022 fun, isn’t it?

@kravietz @solar_chase The US isn't an unrelated 3rd party. It was until recently supposedly an ally and the co-guarantor of European security. Yes, the EU should use its own geopolitical power as it sees fit, though this hard to do given the nature of the entity. German purchase of Russian energy was always questionable but the effort to integrate Russia economically given German moral debt wasn't. It failed. That was not Germany's or the EU's fault and will accelerate decarbonisation.

@samueljohnson @solar_chase

Funny that you use the old Steinmeier’s “moral debt” fallacy in a way that is very favourable for Putin’s Russia while completely ignoring the numbers that indicate that the actual largest “moral debt” Germany owes to Poland, Belarus and Ukraine, the countries Germany had traditionally been throwing under the bus whenever it comes to pleasing Putin.

@kravietz @solar_chase I am unfamiliar with Steinmeier and made no reference to relative moral debt. I don't consider the idea of moral debt fallacious, but then I'm a citizen of a country subjected to foreign oppression for hundreds of years. Nor, apparently do you, with your score keeping approach to crimes against humanity. Trade and economic convergence are how we have tried to move past hostilities in the EU (once evil is defeated, as Putin must be).

https://internationalepolitik.de/de/verflechtung-und-integration

@samueljohnson

I was referring to this once famous 2007 article by Steinmeier, which was a kind of canonical text in the Wandel durch Handel thinking of German political class:

When reading it today, one can only exclaim on most paragraphs “OMG how naive he was!”

Steinmeier’s problem was of course that he was brought up in the combination Christian morality and Germany’s post-war complex of guilt that he internalised so deeply, that he was unable that human societies developed very different moral systems out there. One of them is the predatory model, mastered by Putin. Everything else is the consequence of this blindness - if you hand a slice of bread to a crocodile because you only know horses, it will always end up in one way.

@solar_chase

Verflechtung und Integration

Der Erfolg der Integration Europas – durch Verflechtung von Interessen deren friedlichen Ausgleich zu erreichen, zudem Wohlstand und soziale Gerechtigkeit – macht die Europäische Union zum weltweit bewunderten politischen Modell. Jetzt gilt es, diesen Erfolg auch auf die europäische Nachbarschaft auszudehnen und ihn global zu verankern.

Internationale Politik

@kravietz Thanks. I note however, that Poland has a gas pipeline to Germany and can therefore be regarded as being willing to trade with former enemies, no doubt for pragmatic reasons. Here in Ireland the British in Northern Ireland (the local Donbas) refer to the natives as crocodiles. It's one of the reasons they will not tolerate street signs in the language of the natives or anything else they consider "feeding the crocodiles".

We are, in fact, all mammals.