In the midst of a summer of record-breaking temperatures, solar power is generating record-breaking quantities of electricity and “steadily displacing energy production from coal, oil, and gas,” reports Bill McKibben in a July 9th article for The New Yorker. Excerpted from his forthcoming Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, McKibben’s article makes the case for a profound energy paradigm shift, as solar continues its “exponential rate of growth” worldwide.
McKibben traces the growth of solar energy back to 1954, when Bells Labs researchers first developed a practical photovoltaic cell, “a silicon-based device that managed to convert about six per cent of the sunlight that fell on it into usable energy… The Times’ reporter described a ‘simple-looking apparatus made of strips of silicon, a principal ingredient of common sand. It may mark the beginning of a new era, leading eventually to the realization of one of mankind’s most cherished dreams—the harvesting of the almost limitless power of the sun for the uses of civilization.’ The sun, the article noted, ‘pours out daily more than a quadrillion kilowatt hours of energy, greater than the energy contained in all the reserves of coal, oil, natural gas and uranium in the earth’s crust.’”
Fast forward to 2023, “when scientists reported that the earth’s temperature had suddenly begun not just to climb but to spike—the days around the solstice were the hottest ever measured, setting off a run of record-smashing heat that continues to this day. But June, 2023, also seems to be the month when people started putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels every day.”
A monumental transition was underway. But it wasn’t—and still isn’t—widely recognized.
McKibben points out, “One reason we missed some of that revolution is that so much of it is taking place in China. By some measures, as Bloomberg’s David Fickling worked out, seven Chinese companies that I’d wager most Americans have never heard of—Tongwei, GCL Technology Holdings, Xinte Energy, Longi, Trina Solar, JA Solar Technology, and JinkoSolar—produced more energy in 2024 than the seven global giants at the heart of Big Oil. In 2020, China set a goal of producing twelve hundred gigawatts of clean power by 2030; it hit that target in early 2024, six years ahead of schedule.”
Meanwhile, solar has become ubiquitous, increasingly more affordable and popular. “A 2023 poll by the market research firm Glocalities, of twenty-one thousand respondents in twenty-one countries, found that sixty-eight per cent favored solar energy, ‘five times more than public support for fossil fuels.’ And surveys conducted by the communications and research firm Global Strategy Group in the fall of 2024 found that eighty-seven per cent of Americans—and almost eighty per cent of people planning to vote for Trump—favored the clean-energy tax credits in the I.R.A. ‘Solar power remains the most popular source of electricity in America,’ the Global Strategy Group partner Andrew Baumann said, ‘with broad support across the political spectrum.’
If we can make the transition affordable and easy, the will is there,” McKibben concludes.
Read the full article.