Worldwide solar energy capacity has been growing rapidly. In 2022, it was 150 times higher than in 2006 and more than double the level of 2018 when BC Hydro moved to discourage solar power systems. A tiny proportion of the utility’s accounts was feeding solar power to the grid, but BC Hydro worried about added customers embracing solar, particularly large consumers of electricity.

BC Hydro’s restraint of solar power was a policy disaster because low inflows to the Peace and Columbia Rivers now threaten the utility’s energy production. Three months ago, Minister of Emergency Management Bowinn Ma called the drought a “sleeping giant of a natural disaster.” Before the present-day water problems, output at BC Hydro’s dams had been declining steadily, despite upgrades to generating equipment. Five-year output per megawatt of capacity during fiscal years 2019 to 2023 declined 18 percent from the five-year period ending 20 years ago.

According to the International Energy Agency, utility scale PV is now the least costly option for new electricity generation in most countries. Solar power systems can coexist with wind power generation and with agricultural, industrial, and commercial land uses.

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What can be learned from the world’s most sustainable industrial building in the Netherlands? Climbing out of a triple-glazed window onto the roof of an enormous logistics warehouse in the Dutch city of Tilburg, you are met with an ocean of solar panels – over 13,000 of them to be exact. The building is owned by the Dutch arm of Rhenus, a multi-billion pound logistics firm with 660 buildings and 31,000 employees worldwide.

BBC: Is this the world’s most sustainable building?

Climate journalist David Roberts of VOLTS interviewed Jenny Chase, a solar analyst for BloombergNEF and author of Solar Power Finance without the Jargon. Roberts wrote about her book:

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 at just over 200 pages.

Roberts asked if solar photovoltaic (PV) would thrive now without public supports. Her response, “You couldn’t stop solar if you wanted to stop solar.”

Other comments by Ms. Chase:

• Solar modules cost over $100 per watt in the 1970s, in today’s money. By the time we started in 2004, they cost about $4 a watt. Last week they were 12.8 U.S. cents per watt.

• Solar is the cheapest source of bulk electricity generation in many countries. There are some northern countries where wind is slightly cheaper.

• We built grids for centralized power plants. That made a sense when we had centralized power plants. But to get all this cheap electricity from wind and solar to market, we are going to have to build some more wires.

• Solar buildout is happening fastest in China. It has a very coordinated rooftop program and is building energy megabases as well. Solar modules are super cheap and quite easy to build compared to everything else. Much more like assembling Lego than building a nuclear power plant. China is the reason solar is not a cottage industry anymore.

• One big update between the first edition of my book and the second is that batteries are just a thing now. Over 70% of residential solar systems in Germany and Italy added this year now have batteries attached.

• There are incredibly talented engineers who are working hard to make solar panels more efficient and produce the same output or more output with fewer materials. And so, a big improvement over the last 15 years is from wafers getting thinner, so there is much less polysilicon used per watt. It used to be about ten grams per watt in 2008, and today it is 2.6 grams per watt. It is a cost-saving and an embodied carbon saving. Solar panels are getting cheaper, more efficient, and more dependable.

• Efficiency is about 22% for the typical module this year. We have a roadmap to 34%, supplying a third more power from the same space.

• There is still the possibility that things get so cheap that we can leapfrog over the need to build a centralized fossil fuel infrastructure to bring power to Africa.

• It is cheaper to reach net zero building a mix of solar and wind in nearly all of the world. I mean, there may be a few countries that have so low seasonality that you could just do it with solar, but for most of the world, the lower cost scenario will be at least 50% wind, 50% solar.

• We underestimate the impact of solar in sunny places. Build solar in sunny places, build some transmission, build some batteries, it will all be good.