Solar is saving Texas right now
Solar power is saving Texan tushies right now. German ones, too. And perhaps, one day, tushies ‘round the world.
The heat waves searing the United States and Europe have generated huge demand for energy, as air conditioners work overtime. Texas, for instance, has busted records for energy demand at least 11 times this summer. Europe is simultaneously attempting to wean itself off Russian-produced natural gas, increasing demand for other fuel sources.
Solar power, meanwhile, has been heroically filling the gaps.
That’s because there has been an enormous ramp-up in solar investment in recent years. This has been driven by multiple factors, including government incentives, customer demand and especially technological advancements that have made solar astonishingly cheap. Sundrenched Texas has nearly triple the solar capacity this summer than it had last summer.
This has turned out to be a lifesaving investment. The additional power provided by newly installed solar has (so far) probably prevented rolling blackouts this summer.
If there’s any possible upside to the insufferable heat roasting the West, or to sky-high fossil-fuel prices, it’s this: Recent events might finally help change the reputation of renewables. Maybe governments will, at last, see the virtues of transitioning to clean energy faster.
Renewables have gotten a bad rap. Many voters still perceive solar and wind as an expensive indulgence, foisted upon them by tree-huggers. In reality, these technologies have become extremely competitive on price. As I’ve noted before: It’s cheaper to build and operate an entirely new wind or solar plant than it is to continue operating an existing coal plant.
In fact, investment in renewables has (modestly) helped keep a lid on painfully high energy prices lately, says Ethan Zindler, a BloombergNEF analyst.
Coal- and gas-fired plants must pay for the fuels that power them, and those fuels have become extremely expensive. By contrast, the marginal costs of renewables are close to zero: Once the wind farm or solar array is installed, wind and sunshine are free.
Politicians also sometimes malign renewables as unreliable. They (falsely) blamed wind turbine failures for outages during Texas’s extreme cold snap last year, even though the main power failures came from thermal sources (gas, coal, nuclear) that hadn’t been winterized.
There are, of course, times when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. But it has become quite easy to forecast those periods and plan around them. Battery technology is steadily improving, too, enabling storage for later use.
Besides, in the summer, peak energy demand is pretty wellmatched with peak solar generation, as University of Wisconsin at Madison professor Gregory Nemet notes. People crank up the AC most when it’s sunny out.
Economic forces are already making the transition away from fossil fuels inevitable. The only question is how quickly that happens and how motivated governments are to accelerate the shift. Politicians could, for instance, fund more R&D into battery technology, offer more incentives for renewable investments or put a price on carbon.
There have been some recent legislative and court setbacks in the United States that make such interventions more challenging. And voters haven’t exactly put two and two together yet: There’s a cosmic irony to the fact that as the world burns, many complain that fossil fuels should be cheaper.
But we always knew this transition would be painful and politically fraught, because we can’t switch everything overnight.
People drive to work in the cars they have. They’re stuck with whatever heating or cooling technology they have already invested in. When there’s a major shock to fossil-fuel supply or demand and right now, unfortunately, we have both, consumers can’t just switch seamlessly to electric vehicles, heat pumps and rooftop solar. Instead, they must absorb these costly shocks, which effectively makes them a little poorer.
In the near term, it’s reasonable for politicians to try to reduce oil and natural gas prices, to limit their constituents’ suffering. But our leaders should also be pushing aggressively for more clean energy, which has so far kept today’s heat and energy crisis from being even worse, and which might, one day, prevent us from enduring this expensive agony again.