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josh buermann (buermann@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 21:20:42 JST josh buermann

There's such a constant stream of what amount to penny stock scam press releases about clean tech that get passed off as "#climate news", with a cottage industry press passing it off to the public -- much like the bullshitters barreling into TED talks to console liberal guilt with their vaporware -- that it completely swamps out any good reporting on how solar panels or wind turbines or batteries have improved, and why, and who to credit for giving us a chance.

In conversation Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 21:20:42 JST from mastodon.social permalink
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  josh buermann (buermann@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 21:20:36 JST josh buermann
  in reply to
  
  It's hard to read about Reagan administration energy policy -- which was considerably worse than this passage can adequately capture -- and not suspect they understood the risk of climate change, saw the numbers from Carter's program, and went on the war path against any possible future that wouldn't burn the world down. A powerful faction in that administration were just as nuts as the current goonsquad in the Freedom Caucus.
  In conversation Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 21:20:36 JST permalink
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  1. Reagan at the 1980 debate "I just happen to believe that free enterprise can do a better job of producing the things that people need than government can. The Department of Energy has a multi-billion-dollar budget in excess of $10 billion. It hasn’t produced a quart of oil or a lump of coal, or anything else in the line of energy. " DOE’s mandate was mainly to support research and innovation and it was not in the business of producing energy. In fact, most of the agency’s budget goes to nuclear weapons... The conservative movement that Reagan led rejected government planning. They also rejected conservation and, for example, repealed the 55-mph speed limit that Nixon had enacted... Industry experts spoke of a “scorched earth” vindictive campaign against solar. Despite the early uses in the military and the independence enabled by off-grid systems, PV seemed to fly in the face of conservative thinking. Solar advocates were characterized as left-wing ideologues.... Reagan appointed a dentist, James B. Edwards, as Secretary of Energy with orders to shut down the DOE. He fired Dennis Hayes of SERI and by 1985 cut its budget to one fifth of its 1981 level. Second, in October 1985 Saudi Arabia flooded the oil market with excess production causing the price of oil to collapse and subsequently stay low, a 20-year body blow for alternative energy... Nemet, Gregory F.. How Solar Energy Became Cheap (p. 76).
    https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/050/097/528/991/200/original/8009f4e32a75eb9e.png
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  josh buermann (buermann@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 21:20:37 JST josh buermann
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  Check out how successful Carter's tiny #solar demand subsidy program was before Reagan killed it.
  The program -- a big multi-firm university-lab joint project -- brought costs down by a third in three years.
  In conversation Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 21:20:37 JST permalink
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  1. TABLE 4.1 US Block Buy Program Nemet, Gregory F.. How Solar Energy Became Cheap (p. 74). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.
    https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/049/958/189/105/693/original/335596e7a42383a6.png
  HistoPol (#HP) 🏴 🇺🇸 🏴 repeated this.
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  josh buermann (buermann@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 21:20:38 JST josh buermann
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  Maycock's observation in '75 that silicon panel costs were a function of experience "has had a clear policy implication: R&D is insufficient. Policymakers could 'buy down' the cost of PV in the same way that Texas Instruments’ electronic products had used 'forward pricing' -- take losses early to scale up manufacturing and achieve cost reductions and profits later."
  #solar
  In conversation Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 21:20:38 JST permalink
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  1. In 1975, Maycock plotted the cost of PV as a function of experience (Maycock and Wakefield, 1975) (see Chapter 4) and that concept has been used in PV ever since. It has had a clear policy implication: R&D is insufficient. Policymakers could “buy down” the cost of PV in the same way that Texas Instruments’ electronic products had used “forward pricing”—take losses early to scale up manufacturing and achieve cost reductions and profits later. The “Block Buy” programs from 1975 to 1985 implemented this concept (Christensen, 1985). The learning curve was also a justification for the over $200 billion spent on PV subsidies in Germany (Unnerstal, 2017). Remarkably, over forty years later we are still on Maycock’s figure. By 2018 the industry had accumulated 500 GW of production volume and cells were selling for $0.20 per W, which is $0.06 per W in 1975 dollars, or $56 per kW. PV has traveled down the most optimistic of Maycock’s learning curve projections, as we are now at the far edge of his Nemet, Gregory F.. How Solar Energy Became Cheap (p. 48). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.
    https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/044/718/261/180/639/original/689ad52b2e9604fd.png
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  josh buermann (buermann@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 21:20:39 JST josh buermann
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  I suspect the answer to the book's title, "how did solar get so cheap?" is mostly efficiencies of scale, which means the lack of demand was the main thing keeping solar expensive, and the failure to keep buying more solar to make solar cheaper was a simple and epic failure.
  Which jives with a story where the market-dominating tech hasn't fundamentally changed in forty years and "Leading companies in Japan, Germany, and the US lost their solar business in part by investing in alternatives."
  In conversation Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 21:20:39 JST permalink
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  1. One of the surprising attributes of solar’s evolution is that it still uses the same material and general design of the technology from 1954. Crystallized silicon has maintained over a 90% share of PV production, despite a wide array of different materials and configurations. The concept from the innovation literature on “dominant designs” provides another insight on why solar has been so successful (Suarez and Utterback, 1995). The idea is that technologies are amenable to scale up once a dominant design is established, which is defined as “stable core components that can be stable interfaces” (Murmann and Frenken, 2005). Solar’s overall design has been remarkably stable—in part since 1954 and especially since 1985— despite the emergence of many competing materials, designs, and combinations with at least some attributes that are superior. Repeatedly, silicon has held off competitors—even in the 2007–08 period when silicon prices spiked. The continued room for improvement, when so many times it has been declared a dead-end, echoes the Moore’s Law in computing (Farmer and Lafond, 2016). Silicon-based microchips have similarly induced hand-wringing about the end of 50 years of increases in the density of processing power, but which still has not arrived (Nagy et al., 2011). Leading companies in Japan, Germany, and the US lost their solar business in part by investing in alternatives Nemet, Gregory F.. How Solar Energy Became Cheap (p. 46).
    https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/044/602/348/625/420/original/013de730567a5ee6.png
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  josh buermann (buermann@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 21:20:40 JST josh buermann
  in reply to
  
  If we do manage to stop burning fossils in time it will largely be because of contingent, uncoordinated developments.
  The most optimistic story of human civilization is a Mr. Magoo cartoon.
  #climate #solar
  In conversation Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 21:20:40 JST permalink
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  josh buermann (buermann@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 21:20:40 JST josh buermann
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  The US is expected to install 32GW of solar capacity this year, about... less than quarter the rate of China, which installed 62GW in the first five months. Pretty easy to believe we'll be capable of producing a global TW a year by the end of the decade.
  Fossil firms are gonna run out of excuses for operating pretty quickly at that rate.
  https://www.pv-tech.org/china-adds-61-2gw-of-solar-pv-capacity-until-may-this-year/
  
  In conversation Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 21:20:40 JST permalink
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  josh buermann (buermann@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 21:20:41 JST josh buermann
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  I keep looking for a history that might provide some insight into what the big hurdles were and how they were overcome, aside the hurdle of finding the investment, and it's weird how there's not long form articles plastered everywhere telling the story like there is for chip manufacturing, but they never cross my desk.
  UNSW Sydney's Martin A. Green's brief "How Did Solar Cells Get So Cheap?" has some good leads I need to follow up on. Any others?
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511930090X
  
  In conversation Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 21:20:41 JST permalink
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  josh buermann (buermann@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 21:20:41 JST josh buermann
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  Every VOX "explainer" hand-waving away all the interesting odds and ends of engineering history with the phrase "learning-curve".
  
  In conversation Tuesday, 12-Sep-2023 21:20:41 JST permalink

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