Volts

In his book The Price Is Wrong, Brett Christophers argues that, contrary to recent economic triumphalism among renewables advocates, wind and solar are not profitable enough to attract the private capital necessary to scale as fast as they need to scale. In this episode, he and I dig deep (extremely deep) into the details.

In this episode, I talk with CEO Paul Lambert of startup Quilt, which came out of stealth this week with heat pumps that are not ugly. They perform well too, and are easy to buy and install, but mostly they’re not ugly.

In this episode, longtime solar industry analyst Jenny Chase, author of Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon, catches us up on the current state of the global solar industry and looks to where it’s going.

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David Roberts

Jenny Chase went to work for the London-based startup New Energy Finance in 2005, straight out of university in Cambridge. She founded its solar analysis team and helped establish some of the first reliable indexes of prices in the solar supply chain, as well as some of the first serious industry models and projections.

The solar power industry barely existed then. Now solar is the cheapest source of new power in most markets and the International Energy Agency expects it to dominate global electricity by 2050. Throughout that heady transition, Chase has run and grown the solar analysis team, even after the company was bought by Bloomberg and became Bloomberg NEF in 2009. It has become one of the most respected teams in the business and a widely cited arbiter of industry data.

In 2019, Chase wrote a book summarizing what she learned over her years analyzing the industry. It is called Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon, but the title is somewhat misleading — it covers solar power finance but also solar power history, technology, and policy. It is leavened here and there with droll bits of biography or advice from Chase and contains an incredible amount of information in a highly compact and readable package, just over 200 pages.

A heavily updated second edition was released this month. Also this month came Chase's yearly “opinions about solar” Twitter thread, which is highly anticipated among a certain kind of energy dork [waves].

I figured it would be fun to have Chase on the pod to talk about the current state of the solar industry, whether anything but standard-issue solar PV is ever going to flourish, and what the world needs to help balance out increasing penetrations of solar.

Okay then. Jenny Chase from Bloomberg NEF. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Jenny Chase

Thank you so much for inviting me, David.

David Roberts

I read your book over the past week and it's just delightful. I really recommend it to anyone. I feel like the title is a little well, I guess it does say without the jargon, but I just feel like the word finance is going to scare off some readers. But it's really just a nice, extremely approachable introduction to this whole thing of solar in the markets and how it's funded and how it's proceeded over the years. So I really was charmed by it. I noticed actually that it had a little bit of kind of autobiography in the first few chapters and I thought it was really kind of funny.

I had never really thought about it, but you and I have some parallels in our history. We sort of snuck into what was at the time a relative backwater in the world right around 2004, I think, both of us, and then just kind of hung around.

Jenny Chase

Absolutely. And I can't get another job, so I'm stuck doing solar at Bloomberg NEF now.

David Roberts

Same, we've been doing this for so long now that I couldn't really do anything else, but we just kind of planted ourselves and stuck around until the area we were in suddenly became huge around us.

Jenny Chase

It's a pretty good place to be planted, though. I mean, back in 2004, I was looking at this industry, and I started specializing in solar in late 2005. And I was like, "One day this might be 1% of global electricity supply, but, you know, that's worth working on. Even 1%, it's worth working on if we can make it clean." And last year, it was 5%, and it isn't done growing.

David Roberts

Same, I started covering climate change during the George W. Bush administration. I was like, maybe someday someone will do something about this. Maybe someday we'll pass legislation. And then here we are. PV dominates the world. People are targeting net zero. How things change.

Jenny Chase

Yes.

David Roberts

So I want to ask you, you have been following now the solar industry. I mean, honestly, one of the coolest, most fun, most sort of, like, optimistic of all the dark things h...

Upgrading power lines — “reconductoring,” in the biz — is a straightforward way to boost the capacity of the electrical grid by enabling it to transmit more power and leak less of it. In this episode, TS Conductor CEO Jason Huang and researcher Emilia Chojkiewicz speak to the great potential of reconductoring, if balky utilities can be convinced to deploy the new technology.

Even if greenhouse gas emissions halted entirely right now, we would continue to feel climate change effects for decades due to existing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — and warming could accelerate, as we reduce the aerosol pollution that happens to be acting as a partial shield. In this episode, Kelly Wanser of nonprofit SilverLining makes the pitch for solar radiation management, the practice of adding our own shielding particles to the atmosphere to buy us some time while we step up our greenhouse gas reductions.

(PDF transcript)

(Active transcript)

Text transcript:

David Roberts

One of the more uncomfortable truths about climate change is that temperatures are going to rise for the next 30 to 40 years no matter what we do, just based on carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere and the reduction of aerosol pollutants that are now shielding us from some of the worst of it. That's going to bring about potentially devastating changes that we do not yet well understand and are not prepared for.

How can that short-term risk be mitigated? One proposal is to add particles to the atmosphere that would do on purpose what our aerosol pollution has been doing by accident: shield us from some of the rising heat. No one credible who advocates for solar radiation management (SRM) believes that it is a substitute for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, it would be a way to buy a little more time to reach zero carbon.

My guest today, Kelly Wanser, is the head of a non-profit organization called SilverLining that advocates for research and policy around near-term climate risks and direct climate interventions like SRM that can address them.

I've long been curious about — and wary of — solar radiation management, so I was eager to talk to Wanser about the case for SRM, what we know and don't know about it, and what we need to research.

Okay then. Kelly Wanser of SilverLining, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Kelly Wanser

Thank you very much, David. I am a fan and it's a pleasure to be here.

David Roberts

Awesome. Well, I have wanted to do a pod on this subject forever. I'm going to try to be focused, but I sort of have questions that are all over the place, so let's just jump right in. The way I'm approaching this is, I think, to average people off the street, and maybe I even include myself in this. The idea of reaching up into the atmosphere and fiddling with it directly, thinking that we can dial in the temperature we want, strikes me as crazy. And I think that's probably a lot of people's intuitive response. Obviously, you have thought your way past that, going so far as to found an organization designed to advocate for this stuff.

So maybe just tell us a little, to begin with, your personal background and how you came to advocacy for geoengineering, which is not a super crowded field.

Kelly Wanser

I'll say first that you're actually not in the business of advocacy for geoengineering and it will give you some context for how I came to be doing what I do.

David Roberts

Sure.

Kelly Wanser

Really it was about — I was working in the technology sector in an area called IT infrastructure, and that's the sort of plumbing of data in the Internet and was looking at problems like how you keep networks operating. And I started to read about climate change, and I was very curious about the symptoms that we were starting to see in the climate system and where the risk really was. And I started to get to know various senior climate scientists in the Bay Area and other places, and I asked them the question like you might ask, how would you characterize the risk of runaway climate change in our lifetime? And this is maybe twelve years ago.

And they said, "Well, it's in the single digits, but not the low single digits."

David Roberts

Not super comforting.

Kelly Wanser

Yeah, I mean, my original degree was economics, so I thought, well, if you had those odds of winning the lottery, you'd be out buying tickets. If you had those odds of cancer, you'd be getting treatment. So that seemed like a really high risk to be exposed to. And then they told me about another feature of what was happening in that carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for a long time, keeping things w...