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Thread with my latest for @climate @BloombergNEF: on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, a reflection on solar, nuclear power, experience curves, and better than "too cheap to meter" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/the-energy-revolution-that-started-in-1954-is-reaching-its-crescendo?sref=JMv1OWqN 1/
2/ as I sat writing this column at home, I could gaze out the window at a day that would have made its founders proud.
DC area has its cleanest air in at least 25 years, thanks to decades of local, state, and federal policies and a wet, windy spring https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/the-energy-revolution-that-started-in-1954-is-reaching-its-crescendo?sref=JMv1OWqN
DC area has its cleanest air in at least 25 years, thanks to decades of local, state, and federal policies and a wet, windy spring https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/the-energy-revolution-that-started-in-1954-is-reaching-its-crescendo?sref=JMv1OWqN
3/ Bicycles abound; there’s almost no car traffic. Birdsong awakens us, sometimes far too early. There is, of course, a global pandemic element to the quietness, and pandemic-induced shutdowns are really not the way to way to get clean air. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/the-energy-revolution-that-started-in-1954-is-reaching-its-crescendo?sref=JMv1OWqN
4/ There is, of course, a global pandemic element to the quietness, and pandemic-induced shutdowns are really not the way to way to get clean air. The same way an economic collapse is really not the best way to get cheap gasoline. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-12/don-t-get-too-excited-about-cheap-gas?sref=JMv1OWqN
5/ There’s another thing I can see that Earth Day’s founders would be delighted by. On my roof, barely visible through a skylight, is a solar-power system that will more than meet my power demand for the day. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-12/don-t-get-too-excited-about-cheap-gas?sref=JMv1OWqN
6/ It’s a small thing now, but it would have been an unimaginably big deal in 1970. Five decades on from the first Earth Day, an energy resolution that started low and slow is now worldchanging in real time (h/t @AlexSteffen) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/mar/17/society
7/ It all started 16 years before the first Earth Day, in 1954, when Bell Laboratories unveiled the first photovoltaic cell. They called it the “solar battery,” and the ads for it are charming. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/the-energy-revolution-that-started-in-1954-is-reaching-its-crescendo?sref=JMv1OWqN
8/ “The same kindly rays that help the flowers and the grains and the fruits to grow,” reads one, “also send us almost limitless power.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/the-energy-revolution-that-started-in-1954-is-reaching-its-crescendo?sref=JMv1OWqN
9/ But the early marketing also contained a strong dose of realism: “There’s still much to be done before the battery’s possibilities in telephony and for other uses are fully developed.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/the-energy-revolution-that-started-in-1954-is-reaching-its-crescendo?sref=JMv1OWqN
10/ Much to be done, indeed. Photovoltaics were wildly expensive, complex to produce, and tiny. There wasn’t even a commercial application for them until 1962 with the Telstar 1, the "first privately sponsored space-faring mission" https://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/telstar.html
11/ Other uses followed—power for weather stations, pipeline monitoring systems, off-grid homes, marijuana farms in Humboldt County—until developments in the mid-1970s made it possible to start tracking PV cost improvements. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/the-energy-revolution-that-started-in-1954-is-reaching-its-crescendo?sref=JMv1OWqN
12/ Make no mistake, they still weren’t cheap. The earliest data BloombergNEF has on solar costs shows that panels went for more than $100 per watt in 1976. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/the-energy-revolution-that-started-in-1954-is-reaching-its-crescendo?sref=JMv1OWqN
13/ a few years after the first Earth Day, a pioneering solar homeowner would have had to spend tens of thousands just on panels, not to mention the costs of engineering, installation, and power equipment. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/the-energy-revolution-that-started-in-1954-is-reaching-its-crescendo?sref=JMv1OWqN
14/ What a difference four decades makes. Last year, one PV panel cost $0.23 per watt—a 99.3% decrease. Entire systems now cost less than what the PV module alone cost just seven years ago. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/the-energy-revolution-that-started-in-1954-is-reaching-its-crescendo?sref=JMv1OWqN
15/ To put that in context, let’s look at another energy revolution underway prior to Earth Day No. 1: nuclear power.
16/ In 1954, just a few months after Bell Labs brought its Solar Battery to market, Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, gave a speech to the National Association of Science Writers in New York. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1613/ML16131A120.pdf
17/ There’s a key section, one that’s been bandied about often since:
"It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter"
https://public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov/2016/06/03/too-cheap-to-meter-a-history-of-the-phrase/
"It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter"
https://public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov/2016/06/03/too-cheap-to-meter-a-history-of-the-phrase/
18/ Needless to say, the harnessing of the atom didn’t give us energy that’s “too cheap to meter.” Building a new plant now costs tens of billions of dollars, meaning that newly built nuclear power has a hard time competing in many power markets. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/the-energy-revolution-that-started-in-1954-is-reaching-its-crescendo?sref=JMv1OWqN
19/ But the PV module has fulfilled Strauss’s vision and then some: it gave us energy that’s so cheap, people are being paid to use it. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/the-energy-revolution-that-started-in-1954-is-reaching-its-crescendo?sref=JMv1OWqN
20/ Negative prices are a feature of a properly functioning energy market. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-02/what-the-coronavirus-pandemic-means-for-renewable-energy?sref=JMv1OWqN
21/ Perhaps you noticed on Monday that prompt month West Texas Intermediate physical futures, the US oil benchmark, closed trading at -$37.63 a barrel. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-19/oil-drops-to-18-year-low-on-global-demand-crunch-storage-woes?sref=JMv1OWqN
22/ Those are cases where the market must pay someone to take product away in order to balance supply and demand. It’s happening now in electricity, too, thanks to solar and wind power. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/the-energy-revolution-that-started-in-1954-is-reaching-its-crescendo?sref=JMv1OWqN
23/ Clear skies over Germany meant that intraday wholesale power prices were negative earlier this week. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-20/smog-free-skies-allow-germany-to-break-record-for-solar-power?sref=JMv1OWqN
24/ n the U.K. on April 19, electric vehicle charging platform Ohme said that its customers were paid 69 pence to add 130 miles of charge to their vehicles. https://twitter.com/OhmeEV/status/1251958391188205569?s=20
25/ This is bigger than the market havoc of the pandemic. It’s just the beginning, really, of an energy world with more and more moments of being better than too cheap to meter. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/the-energy-revolution-that-started-in-1954-is-reaching-its-crescendo?sref=JMv1OWqN
26/ People will get paid to charge. Services will crop up, on-demand, to use free or negatively-priced electricity. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/the-energy-revolution-that-started-in-1954-is-reaching-its-crescendo?sref=JMv1OWqN
27/ Fleets of electrolyzers will use renewable electrons to produce hydrogen and help reduce emissions in steel, cement, and glass production that are right now a tremendous environmental challenge. https://about.bnef.com/blog/hydrogen-economy-offers-promising-path-to-decarbonization/
28/ We will end up with PV configurations (like this cow-friendly, morning-and-evening-optimized vertical PV array) that would have seemed ridiculous even 10 years ago, much less 50. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/03/30/french-german-alliance-for-vertical-pv/
29/ and today's weirdness is tomorrow's feature, not a bug. Here's hoping that on Earth Day 2070, we look back on today's energy technologies and they seem as quaint then, as 1970 does now https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/the-energy-revolution-that-started-in-1954-is-reaching-its-crescendo?sref=JMv1OWqN /end
