ner admiring a fine grape, she grew ani-
mated when discussing the efficiency of the
panels. Great Valley should remain oper-
ational for at least the next 20 years, with
minimal maintenance costs. On a sunny
summer day, this plant can provide about
half a percent of California’s total energy
demand. Not an impressive number in iso-
lation, but there are at least a hundred sta-
tions in California, with names like Topaz
Solar Farm and Antelope Valley Solar
Ranch. Great Valley generates no waste,
has no moving parts, and can be upgraded
on demand. Talking with Woo, I realized
that the mundanity of the solar farm was
perhaps its best feature.
Skeptics can point to a history of busted
claims for solar’s growth. In 1979, Jimmy Car-
ter installed photovoltaics at the White House
and stated that renewables would provide
25 percent of America’s power by the year
- Then Reagan ripped the panels out
and defunded Carter’s renewables program.
Utility-scale solar has perpetually seemed
20 years away; industry veterans refer to
these “false dawns” with the mechanical
deadpan reserved for a worn-out pun.
Is the sun going to come up this time? It
looks like it. An enormous number of solar
superplants, some of them 10 times the size
of Great Valley, are scheduled to go online
in the next decade. Vietnam did not have a
single large-scale solar installation in 2017.
Today, with 5 gigawatts of capacity, it gen-
erates more solar power than Australia.
India’s goal was to install 20 gigawatts by
2022—but then the price of solar dropped
below the price of coal, and it hit the target
four years early. China, with 175 gigawatts
of installed capacity, has the most extensive
solar infrastructure in the world.
Despite the ramp-up in investment, solar
power in the US still accounts for little more
than 2 percent of current power supply. But
experts project continued fast growth for
solar in the coming years just using current
technology. “It’s now more profitable to save
the world than to ruin it,” says Hal Harvey, a
policy wonk who specializes in renewables.
To realize those world-saving profits,
we must install a preposterous number
of solar panels. A recent tweet from Elon
Musk proposed that 10,000 square miles of
empty land, converted to a solar superfac-
tory, could power the entire US. In practice,
you wouldn’t do it this way—a single storm
might black out the country—but otherwise
Musk’s math checks out. The real answer is
10,000 square miles of solar scattered in
wastewater treatment zones, barren salt
flats, abandoned nuclear testing sites, and
any other sun-baked real estate you can
find. (One of the nice things about solar is
that it can use land no one wants.)
There remains one vexing problem. As
you may have noticed, the sun only shines
during the day. At night, and in winter, Great
Valley’s output dwindles. Conversely, on a
summer afternoon the grid can’t accept all
the electricity Great Valley produces, and the
excess is “curtailed,” meaning wasted. Thus
the typical solar plant runs at only 20 to 30
percent of its theoretical capacity. To make
more of the energy that can be produced
on a lovely sunny day requires affordable
storage (see page 86). If the cost of storage
could be brought down to $150 per kilo-
watt-hour, the grid could be moved to 95
percent renewable energy, according to an
analysis from MIT.
Solar will never provide all of humani-
ty’s power needs. But even optimists didn’t
predict that the cost of solar power would
be this low until 2030 at the earliest. Imag-
ine if the moon landing had taken place in
1959, or if the smartphone had debuted in
1997—that’s where we are with solar power
today. The floor of the Central Valley needs
photovoltaic carpeting, as do the deserts
of Arizona and West Texas, and maybe
the lowlands of Alabama and Georgia as
well. Alongside the apricots, almonds, and
pecans, there’s a bonanza for a new com-
modity: electrons.STEPHEN WITT (@stephenwitt) lives
in Los Angeles. He is the author of How
Music Got Free._Renewable transportation: Australia refurbished a 1949 diesel train a few years ago into the first ever solar-powered
train. Even better, 100 percent of Dutch national trains run on wind power.
Germans “paid
something like $220
billion to fund solar.
If you ask them why,
they say, ‘It’s our
gift to the world.’”