By South China Morning Post | Created at 2025-01-29 02:31:29 | Updated at 2025-01-30 06:47:19
1 day ago
Imagine that our world was in the middle of a global pandemic. Now imagine that, in the middle of this pandemic, one country was producing abundant supplies of a proven vaccine but other governments were choosing not to use it. Not only that but imagine that some of those governments instead complained about supposed overproduction and imposed tariffs on imports of the cheap vaccine.
Many adjectives might be used to describe such a situation, and perhaps “crazy” would be the politest of them.
Yet this is the situation we find ourselves in now regarding solar power. The only sure-fire way to arrest climate change involves changing our energy system away from fossil fuels towards non-polluting alternatives. Of these non-polluting choices, solar power is one of the cheapest, costing on average about half as much as new fossil fuel generation.
It can be deployed at any scale from household rooftops to giant solar farms, and brings with it benefits including greater energy access in the poorest countries, energy independence, and freedom from the fossil fuel price roller coaster. It is far from being a complete solution to climate change – but it is one heck of a start.
Solar panels are now cheaper than they have ever been, mainly because Chinese companies have invested copiously in large state-of-the-art factories. Innovation plus competition plus economies of scale lead to record high output and record low prices. But use is lagging behind supply. On current estimates, fewer than half of the solar panels that could be produced between now and 2030 will be deployed. The mismatch between supply and demand has brought prices lower.
At the 2023 United Nations climate change summit in Dubai, governments agreed that the global capacity of renewable electricity generation should triple by 2030, as a crucial step towards reducing fossil fuel use quickly enough to keep global warming below the Paris Agreement ceiling of 1.5 degrees Celsius. And all governments know, because it is absolutely no secret, that the fastest-expanding renewable energy technology is solar.
