REVI EW
“In India, it costs less to put up a new solar farm than it does to buy the coal to fire an existing already-paid-for power plant.”
expensive way of reducing carbon emissions;” but a decade later, in 2024, the magazine put out a special issue devoted to solar energy that said, “An energy source that gets cheaper the more you use it marks a turning point in industrial history.” Later he writes, “IKEA Germany even sells balcony power plants ( Balkonkraftwerke ), which can now be seen hanging off homes all over the country.” Besides the rapidly dropping deployment cost, one key advantage that solar and other renewables hold is they don’t require a large fuel supply chain – and the geopolitical friction that comes with it. For solar and wind, the fuel comes to you. “Forty percent of the world’s ship traffic, for instance, consists of moving coal and gas and oil back and forth across the ocean to be burned, a delivery job the sun accomplishes each morning as it moves across the heavens,” McKibben writes. As the recent crisis in the Middle East is showing the closure of bottlenecks like the Strait of Hormuz can swiftly
wreak global economic havoc. As an article in the Financial Times pointed out, countries that have a large chunk of their energy generated from solar and other renewables, as Spain does, can better withstand the shock waves generated by the biggest oil disruption in history. Price is hardly the only economic security issue. Solar panels, by their nature and sheer ubiquity, are decentralized – in stark contrast to the all-eggs-in-one-basket situation of a power plant. A single drone can now knock out an entire power plant and therefore electricity and heat for hundreds of thousands of people, a case demonstrated by Russia’s four years of drone attacks in Ukraine. A country that relies on solar and wind power deployed everywhere is more resilient also to such risks. Finally, solar panels do not emit the harmful emissions of coal- or gas-fired power plants. This eliminates the need for a buffer zone in living near such an emissions-spewing power plant. Life alongside solar panels, or at least the
shade they create, can even have its benefits. The book points out some interesting examples: In France, solar panels were found to increase yields for Chardonnay grapes by as much as 60 percent. In Arizona, soil moisture under the panels was 15 percent higher than nearby unshaded plots, allowing black- eyed peas to grow faster and under less stress. And in Australia, wool from merino sheep improved in both quality and quantity with the shade providing “shelter for the sheep and the grass.” With all these bright points, what’s stopping every country from becoming an “electro-state”, as China is positioning itself to be? (Roughly half of all installed clean energy is within the Middle Kingdom’s borders). Politics, especially on the US right, is a key reason according to McKibben; and that goes far beyond President Donald Trump’s war on renewables. In the late 1970s, US President Jimmy Carter hoped that with dedicated funding, a fifth of the country’s electricity could come from solar power
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