Checking in on solar power

11/29/23 • 63 min

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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...

(PDF transcript)

(Active transcript)

Text transcript:

David Roberts

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

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

David Roberts

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...

Previous Episode

Managing a distributed grid

In this episode, Astrid Atkinson, co-founder of Camus Energy, talks about her company’s “grid orchestration” work of helping utilities see, track, and coordinate the distributed energy resources in their territories.

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Text transcript:

David Roberts

One of my favorite things I ever wrote was a 2018 piece for Vox on grid architecture — the basic structure of the electricity transmission and distribution networks. It was about how a top-down system, with one-way power delivery from big power plants to passive consumers, might evolve into a bottom-up system, driven by local distributed energy resources.

Thanks to all-star illustrator Javier Zarracina, it even has awesome animated illustrations.

One person who read that piece was Astrid Atkinson, who at the time was a senior software engineer at Google. She had managed a team that shifted Google search from a top-down system to a massively distributed system, back before the term “the cloud” existed and there was no template available. She and her team had to develop the principles and best practices of getting reliable performance out of millions of unreliable, loosely coordinated machines. By doing so, they radically expanded the scale and speed of what search could do.

She thought, wouldn’t it be cool if the power grid could make the same shift? Unlike some people, though, she didn’t just blog about it — in 2019, she left Google to co-found and run Camus Energy, a software company that helps utilities see, track, and coordinate the distributed energy resources in their territories. The company calls what it does “grid orchestration.”

Atkinson has been a thought leader in pushing for a new grid architecture. (See Camus’ white-paper series on “the rise of local grid management.”) So I was super-excited to geek out with her on this stuff. We talked about the conceptual shift from centralized to distributed and the drivers making that shift inevitable, plus getting more out of the grid we’ve already built through coordination and efficiency, and how the utility sector can evolve to better manage local resources. I really loved this one.

Okay, then. Astrid Atkinson. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Astrid Atkinson

Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here.

David Roberts

I'm so excited for this. Astrid, I have to tell you just by way of preface that I had a weirdly difficult time preparing for today's pod because I'm just so excited by this whole area, and I'm so jazzed. I have so many things to ask you about, so many things I want to say about all this stuff, and I'm kind of overwhelmed and fried my circuits. But let's start here: Let me describe for listeners what you did at Google and tell me if this is an accurate description. So you were part of a team, I think, leading a team that was shifting the way Google did things away from a model where computing was done on a relatively limited set of high-quality, extremely reliable data centers, tightly centrally controlled, to a model where computing is done not on a small set, but on thousands, millions of distributed computers living all over the place, any one of which might be unreliably connected or off periodically or weak or otherwise glitchy.

So basically, moving from a model of tightly coordinated, central control, limited number of entities, to loosely coordinated millions of entities, somehow getting aggregate reliability out of massively distributed, individually unreliable machines. Is that more or less accurate?

Astrid Atkinson

Yeah, that's about right. So my role was in the site reliability engineering team at Google, which is a function that nobody's ever heard of outside of the kind of tech industry. But you can think of reliability engineering as being basically Google's systems engineering function. It's the entity that's kind of responsible for pulling all of the pieces together bet...

Next Episode

A note to subscribers on Volts' third anniversary

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The first Volts post went up on Dec. 7, 2020. Believe it or not, that was almost three years ago. I want to mark Volts’ third birthday with a few reflections, a couple of fun announcements, and a request. I hope you will indulge me.

Volts is subscriber-supported

There have been a lot of new subscribers since the last time I sent out one of these notes and it occurs to me that some of you more recent arrivals — or some of you who have only heard the pod through Apple or Spotify or whatever — might not know what the basic deal is around here. So here’s the short version.

I left Vox to start Volts three years ago with three goals in mind.

First, I want to be useful. Clean energy is getting tons of attention these days and lots of people are curious about it, or want to get involved, or are involved and are curious what’s going on in other parts of it. I want to arm those folks with ideas and information. I’ve read and seen enough dire warnings about climate change; I want to show what people are doing about it, and by proxy, all the things you can do about it. The clean-energy transition is a vast puzzle made of many, many smaller puzzles, and they all need people working on them.

Second, I want to keep myself (and my subscribers) from spiraling into climate doom, and I’ve found that the No. 1 best way to do that is to highlight all the clever, thoughtful, ambitious, good-hearted people out there trying to help. It’s like Mr. Rogers said: when you’re feeling down about looming fascism and climate chaos, look for the helpers.

And third, I want to remain independent, to do this work without being obligated to or constrained by any big media organization, or the hedge-fund bros who own so many of the media organizations, or advertisers, or think tanks, or NGOs, or wealthy patrons. I don’t want to owe anything to anyone except you, the readers and listeners.

So I don’t take advertising and I have no sponsors. Volts operates, and I survive, entirely thanks to the income I receive from paid subscribers. This is, I have been reliably informed more than once, a bonkers way to do things from a financial perspective, but I’m a stubborn old Gen Xer and this is how I wanna do it.

But I’ll be honest: while the number of Volts subscribers has risen with gratifying consistency — there are more than 53,000 of you now and I love each and every one of you as individuals! — the number of paid subscribers not kept pace.

So this is my once-annual direct ask to everyone reading or listening: if Volts has helped inform or inspire you over the last three years, consider paying to support it, and me, so that it can continue. A subscription is $6 a month or $60 a year (or you can make a one-time donation). For the price of one night out with your family or friends, I’ll give you a whole year’s worth of podcasts! It’s like a dollar a podcast! That’s an amazing price for a free podcast.

Why should you pay to subscribe? The main reason is simple: pay if you find the work valuable, you want me to be able to continue doing it, and you’re in a financial position to do so. Pay so that those who aren’t in a position to pay can still benefit from it, so the ideas and information can reach the broadest audience.

But just to sweeten the pot a bit, let’s discuss some changes in the works!

Ch-ch-ch-changes

We’re giving Volts a few little upgrades in the coming year.

Why do I say “we”? Because I’ve brought on Sam — a longtime Volts subscriber and climate professional — to advise and help with these upgrades so I can continue to focus on the main work. You’ll be seeing his name around in the comments and on emails coming from Volts. Be nice to him!

I mentioned looking for the helpers. We also want the helpers to find one another. So we’re going to do more to help subscribers connect with, learn from, and collaborate with one another.

We also want to add some benefits for paid subscribers. I’m pretty militant about all the pods and essays being free to everyone — as I said, I want to be as useful as possible — but that doesn’t mean we can’t have some goodies for my beloved inner circle.

So what does all this mean in practice?

All subscribers, paid and free, will receive the following upgrades:

🔓 We’re opening up the comment sections to all subscribers. I know first-hand that subscribers have a ton of knowledge and insight to share. Moving forward, each new podcast will be an opportunity for all of you to share with one another.

🤝 In the same vein, there w...