0 9 2
equipment suppliers started to build large-
scale infrastructure.
At the time, solar panel manufacturers
cut silicon by hand, using equipment repur-
posed from the microchip industry. Then,
in 2003, this laborious and costly process
was abandoned, thanks to the Meyer Burger
diamond wire saw, which automated the
cutting of photovoltaic wafers. (The Meyer
Burger company joins Otto Rohwedder, who
applied the same technique to bread, in the
pantheon of slicing.) Similar improvements
in obscure solar subfields like wafer-pulling
and chemical vapor deposition have their
origins in Green Party subsidies. “German
ratepayers paid something like $220 billion
to fund solar,” Nemet says. “If you ask them
why, they say, ‘It’s our gift to the world.’”
By the mid-2000s, European vendors
were selling packaged assembly lines that
transformed raw silicon into finished solar
panels. As the German subsidies tapered
off, Chinese industrial firms began com-
missioning these push-button factories
at scale. “China had the right vision,” said
Eicke Weber, a German solar entrepreneur,
in a 2017 interview with Nemet. “When the
world talked about 100 megawatts, the Chi-
nese talked about 1 gigawatt.” By 2010, 90
percent of solar-panel assembly equipment
was being sold to China, and you may thank
the Communist Party for underwriting mass
production and encouraging manufacturers
to sell below cost. In 2018, President Don-
ald Trump retaliated with tariffs, but by that
point the capitalists were paying attention.
Even the president’s hostility toward renew-
ables can’t halt investment in a device that
turns sunshine into money.
Ah, but what a mundane revolution! There
is nothing very memorable about a state-of-
the-art solar farm. Last December, I visited
Great Valley Solar, a 200-megawatt-capacity
installation in California’s Central Valley that
was completed in 2018 at a cost of $190
million. Its acres of dull blue panels, lying
silently amid a patchwork grid of almond
orchards and cattle ranches, did not roar
with majesty like a large hydroelectric damor intimidate with fearsome height like a
nuclear cooling tower. I spent half an hour
standing in the mud with a notebook, star-
ing through a chain-link fence as I struggled
to find exciting descriptive terminology. My
final note read, “Smells like manure.”
Finished with that reporting, I drove to
the center of Great Valley’s 1,600 acres
to find a converted shipping container
painted Institution Beige, where Jadine
Woo, the facility coordinator, monitored
the plant’s output and matched it to the
voltage of the electrical grid. On a Thursday
afternoon, with no appointment, I walked
into her office as if it were a coffee shop.
Woo, a friendly woman in her mid-fifties,
greeted me with enthusiasm. If I had tried
this stunt at a nuclear plant, I’d have been
ventilated by a sniper.
“It’s unbelievable what these little cells
can do,” she told me. Woo casually referred
to this facility as “the farm,” and like a vint-RENEW
GOOD NEWS HAS BEEN RARE THIS PAST
decade, so here’s some: Since 2010, the
cost of generating solar electric power
has dropped by 80 percent, and gigantic
photovoltaic plants, some spanning thou-
sands of acres, are transforming the eco-
nomics of green energy. “Even from five
years ago, it’s a really different story than
today,” says Gregory Nemet, an academic
who last year published a book called How
Solar Energy Became Cheap. “This isn’t
just cheap. It’s dirt cheap. In sunny places,
it’s the cheapest way humans have ever
invented to make electricity.”
If this cost collapse had occurred in
a single year, it might have been hailed
as the breakthrough of the century. But
it happened gradually, and incremen-
tal improvements in crystalline silicon
manufacturing don’t generate buzz. At
the beginning of the 2010s, solar was a
science project, accounting for less than
1 percent of the world’s installed power
capacity. Now that number is 9 percent and
growing fast. More than $1trillion has been
invested in new solar installations in that
time. Solar power routinely wins compet-
itive power auctions, with bids as low as
4 cents per kilowatt-hour. At that price, a
solar plant isn’t just cheaper than a coal
plant; it’s cheaper than coal itself. “We’re
reaching a phase where it’s cheaper to
build a new solar power plant than it is to
operate an existing coal one,” says energy
investor Ramez Naam.
The story of bargain solar begins in Ger-
many in the early 2000s, when the Green
Party pushed through a surcharge on
electricity bills to fund the development
of clean energy. That quadrupled the size
of the German renewables market, and
_Stockholm Central Station absorbs the body heat of its 250,000 daily commuters and shoots it underground to help
heat a nearby 13-story office building.
ChartgeistBYJon J. Eilenberg