A Perversion of Power

Now more than ever it is critical that we set the record straight on energy use in the United States—to tell the truth about the progression of solar energy and to present the facts that the mainstream media has largely ignored or underreported: that fossil fuel is the real dinosaur in the energy industry and that much of the world is seeing the light about solar power. We must get our elected officials to recognize the true value of solar power and to embrace the opportunity to build on this clean form of electricity generation and spawn a new breed of entrepreneurs and businesses that will employ millions and pull us out of dark times.

The Solar Ascent is kicking in around the globe, and we need to be leaders of this movement. Our next step is to clear from our heads the fog of misinformation from the fossil-fuel industry, assess the landscape clearly, and urge others to do so, as well. This means getting our friends in the news media to start reporting facts on all sides of the energy debate.

Working in the solar industry in the months following the Solyndra scandal at the end of 2011 really felt like slipping through the looking glass into a crazy, upside-down world. I’d been working with others for about a decade to realize solar’s potential. Sungevity, the company I’d helped build, had just doubled in size and we’d had a banner year, as had most of our competitors, selling solar solutions to mainstream Americans. Yet in the months following Solyndra’s crash, from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everyone started worrying that we wouldn’t make it. “Sorry about that solar thing”; “Shame it didn’t work out,” they’d say, or, “Would’ve been nice to have clean energy.”

What the hell is up? I was thinking. We’re winning! Solar is the fastest-growing source of energy on Earth because it’s the only source of energy whose costs are declining rapidly. All the others, including natural gas, are going up in price—no matter what the gas industry says. Although there is currently a surplus of natural gas in the US market due to the lower cost of fracking, it won’t last because when you’re dealing with a finite energy source and consuming it in the vast amounts that Americans do, it’s impossible to keep costs low over the long term. And no matter how much the industry touts the wonders of fracking, when its technology causes earthquakes—as fracking did in March 2011 in Youngstown, Ohio—costs and other ramifications are sure to mount.

On the other hand, sustainable solar energy is swiftly becoming earth-shattering in much more figurative and economically beneficial ways. Solar prices are coming down; and if we stay the course we’re on, they’ll continue to drop. Globally, solar is the fastest-growing industry, valued at more than $100 billion. And in the United States, it’s the fastest-growing job-creating sector. Solar grew nearly 7 percent as an employment generator while the economy flatlined—a tenth of that growth from August 2010 to 2011. Things are good, and they’re getting better. The solar industry is admittedly still just under 1 percent of the whole energy picture, but it’s growing fast. Solar is David against King CONG’s Goliath, but we’re armed with a mighty, badass, solar-powered slingshot. As my Aussie friends like to say, “From little things, big things grow.”

And what are some of these “big things”? For starters, the cold hard cash being pumped into the industry is where the smart money is going. Just before Christmas 2011, Google invested $94 million in four large-scale solar photovoltaic projects, edging the total amount the search giant invested in clean-energy projects toward $900 million. Not to be beaten, and always one to place a bet when assets are artificially depressed, investment guru Warren Buffett dropped almost $2 billion on California’s Topaz Solar Farm, which will sell solar electricity to Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), the local utility company, and generate electricity for about 160,000 homes. Globally, investment in renewable energy was up to $260 billion, from $243 billion in 2010 and $186.5 billion in 2009. Solar got half of that. Indeed Bloomberg New Energy Finance recorded the trillionth dollar of investment in clean energy since its records started in 2004.

So, though the Solyndra scandal was the big solar-energy industry newsmaker in 2011, several more-significant events point to the globe’s movement from dirty, centralized electricity production to clean, local power. Some of them were as significant as a sea change, though the weatherpeople in the mass media may not have spotted them, one being the economic aftermath of Japan’s devastating 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami, which caused a meltdown at the country’s Fukushima nuclear power plant. This proof of the risks of nuclear power drove yet another nail into the coffin of nuclear energy in the United States.

Nukes are all but done here because what banker today could legitimately finance a nuclear power plant? No one will finance one unless the money comes from socialized governments willing to take on the risks with public funds. I’m not saying nukes are completely dead; in February 2012 Southern Company, an electricity generator, announced plans to build two nuclear plants in Georgia, but this construction is possible only because it is being prepaid by consumers at the rate of $3 per month. This mandatory way of capitalizing the plants will be augmented by Department of Energy loan guarantees that are 20 times what Solyndra got. The point is really that one of the biggest pieces of financial news that has yet to be clearly reported is that there’s little chance that new nukes can compete with clean electricity from solar panels.

At the same time that the media was missing this big shift in the markets away from a nuclear renaissance, reports showed that major economies throughout the world were moving to clean-energy sources, but this trend was rarely addressed in mainstream outlets. For every negative Solyndragate scoop, there should have been three times as many stories on how advanced economies were getting their juice.

Germany now gets a whopping 20 percent of its power from clean, sustainable energy, including solar power, and the country has become a laboratory for the kind of electricity supply that the world will benefit from in years to come. At age 41 I’m old enough to remember when fossil-fuel industry-sponsored experts told us that no more than 5 percent of the electricity grid could possibly come from renewable—so-called intermittent—resources. Then, when innovative people pushed the envelope, the numbers were raised to 10 percent and then to 15 percent. Now in Germany—one of Europe’s few strong economies—more than 25 percent of energy comes in the form of wind and solar electrons on many days. The rest of Europe didn’t want the Germans to hog the solar spotlight, and now many other places have at times adopted a higher density of clean electricity in their grid than even Germany—such as Denmark (more than 30 percent), Spain (35 percent), and Portugal (50 percent). Italy installed more than enough solar power for a million homes in 2011, despite its fiscal worries.

In Crimea, Ukraine, a Vienna-based developer, Activ Solar, built the world’s largest solar park, a project of more than 100 megawatts in capacity—one-tenth the size of a nuke—and worth about 300 million euros (US $387 million), according to reports. The Perova plant consists of 440,000 solar panels, spans 500 hundred acres, and will generate enough peak-load power for the electrical needs for all of Simferopol, Crimea’s capital.

And what do these nations get through the adoption of clean energy? Not blackouts and higher electricity bills but rather employment and price stability. Germany in particular has benefitted from this, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, becoming a center of excellence for the export of hightech products, and providing lower-cost electricity for its population than energy that comes out of the conventional grid—all while shutting down the bulk of its nuclear-power-plant fleet.

In spite of the staggering advances Germany has made, politics is besieging it. The country is experiencing a backlash against renewable energy, led by fiscal conservatives in the German parliament who believe that the incentives for solar power will cost too much in the future. The debate is sure to wax and wane, and even at this high-tide mark there’s going to be some flux. Although the conservatives are reducing the rate of payments for solar power, the benefits of solar incentives have already taken effect, and the German population understands this. More people support it politically because they’re making money from the shift. So no matter what changes the Bundestag wants to make, there’s no turning back.

The German economy is on a positive path. The country is moving from boiling water with stored-solar-power supplies to getting electricity by other sustainable and economically beneficial means. More importantly, 50 percent of Germany’s solar panels are owned by individuals and farms, not big corporate generators. As one writer put it, this is a good thing: “Decentralized power generation, more relocalization and reregionalization of economic activity, the world is getting smaller while more connected and therefore in a way bigger at the same time.”