{"id":89134,"date":"2017-03-27T12:00:02","date_gmt":"2017-03-27T11:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=89134"},"modified":"2017-03-22T18:31:58","modified_gmt":"2017-03-22T18:31:58","slug":"making-solar-big-enough-to-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/03\/making-solar-big-enough-to-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Solar Big Enough to Matter"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Credit Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

21 Mar 2017 – <\/em>Solar energy has become big business. Over the past decade it has plummeted in cost, surged in volume, and, as booming industries do, benefited some investors and burned others. The International Energy Agency has predicted<\/a> photovoltaic solar could provide up to 16 percent of the world\u2019s electricity by midcentury \u2014 an enormous increase from the roughly 1 percent that solar generates today. But for solar to realize its potential, governments will have to grow up too. They\u2019ll need to overhaul their solar policies to make them ruthlessly economically efficient.<\/p>\n

The widespread view that solar power<\/a> is a hopelessly subsidized business is quickly growing outdated. In some particularly sunny spots, such as certain parts of the Middle East, solar power now is beating fossil-fueled electricity on price without subsidies.<\/p>\n

Even where \u2014 as in the United States \u2014 solar needs subsidies, it\u2019s getting cheaper<\/a>. American utilities now are signing 20-year agreements to buy solar power at, and in some cases below, 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. Those prices, which reflect tax breaks, are in some instances low enough to compete with electricity from power plants that burn plentiful American natural gas. Solar will be all the more competitive if gas prices rise \u2014 something many predict<\/a> \u2014 and as more governments impose prices on carbon dioxide emissions.<\/p>\n

The market is concluding that solar makes sense. In part that\u2019s because of technological advances that have made solar cells more efficient in converting sunlight into power. In part it\u2019s the result of manufacturing scale, which has slashed the cost of solar-panel production. And, in places that tax greenhouse-gas emissions, it\u2019s in part because solar produces carbon-free power.<\/p>\n

But much more needs to be done. Ratcheting up solar to produce approximately 1 percent of global electricity has required a lot of technology and investment. Making solar big enough to matter environmentally would be an even more colossal undertaking. It would require plastering the ground and roofs with billions of solar panels. It would require significantly increasing energy storage, because solar panels crank out electricity only when the sun shines, which is why, today, solar often needs to be backed up by fossil fuels. And it would require adding more transmission lines, because often the places where the sun shines best aren\u2019t where most people live.<\/p>\n

The scale of this challenge makes economic efficiency crucial, as we argue in a report, \u201cThe New Solar System<\/a>,\u201d released on Tuesday. The policies that have goosed solar have been often unsustainable and sometimes contradictory. One glaring example: With one hand, the United States is trying to make solar cheaper, through tax breaks, and with the other hand it\u2019s making solar more expensive, through tariffs it has imposed on solar products imported from China, the world\u2019s largest<\/a> maker and installer of solar panels.<\/p>\n

The tariffs are prompting Chinese solar manufacturers to set up factories not in the United States, but in low-cost countries that aren\u2019t subject to the levies. And the Chinese government has responded<\/a> with its own tariffs against American-made solar goods. Those tariffs have eroded the United States share in the one part of solar manufacturing \u2014 polysilicon, the raw material for solar cells \u2014 in which America once had a significant role.<\/p>\n

That solar is now involved in a trade war is a sign of how far it has come. The United States developed the first solar cells in the 1950s and put them into space in the 1960s. Japan<\/a> and Germany<\/a> began putting big numbers of solar panels on rooftops in the 1990s. But solar power didn\u2019t really advance into a real industry until a decade ago, when China stepped in.<\/p>\n

In the mid-2000s, stimulated by hefty solar subsidies in Europe, a handful of entrepreneurs in China started producing inexpensive solar panels, much as had been done in China before with T-shirts and televisions. These entrepreneurs bought equipment from manufacturers in Europe and the United States, built big factories with government subsidies, and got down to business cranking out millions of solar panels for export.<\/p>\n

Today, China utterly dominates global solar-panel manufacturing. Last year, according to the consulting firm IHS Markit, China accounted for 70 percent of global capacity for manufacturing crystalline-silicon solar panels, the most common type. The United States share was 1 percent.<\/p>\n

But now, China\u2019s solar industry is changing in little-noticed ways that create both an imperative and an opportunity for the United States to up its game. The Chinese industry is innovating technologically \u2014 indeed, it\u2019s starting to score world-record solar-cell efficiencies \u2014 contrary to a long-held myth that all China can do is manufacture others\u2019 inventions cheaply. It\u2019s expanding its manufacturing footprint across the globe. And it\u2019s scrambling to import more efficient ways of financing solar power that have been pioneered in the West. The United States needs to take these shifts into account in defining an American solar strategy that minimizes the cost of solar power to the world while maximizing the long-term benefit to the American economy.<\/p>\n

A more-enlightened United States policy approach to solar would seek above all to continue slashing solar power\u2019s costs \u2014 not to prop up types of American solar manufacturing that can\u2019t compete globally. It would leverage, not aim to bury, China\u2019s manufacturing superiority, with closer cooperation on solar research and development. And it would focus American solar subsidies more on research and development and deployment than on manufacturing. As solar manufacturing continues to automate, reducing China\u2019s cheap-labor advantage, it is likely to make more sense in the United States, at least for certain sorts of solar products.<\/p>\n

The United States needs to play to its comparative advantages in the solar sector. That requires a sober assessment of what China does well. There are real tensions between China and the United States, including the tariff fight, doubts about the protection of intellectual property in China, and national-security concerns. But it\u2019s time to put those concerns into perspective, as investors, corporations and governments try to do every day.<\/p>\n

These proposed shifts in American solar policy will upset partisans across the political spectrum. They will offend liberals who have promised that solar-manufacturing subsidies would bring the United States huge numbers of green factory jobs. They will rankle conservatives who see China as the enemy. How will the Trump administration view them? That\u2019s unclear.<\/p>\n

President Trump has spoken approvingly of tariffs against China; as a presidential candidate, he criticized<\/a> \u201cChina\u2019s unfair subsidy behavior.\u201d Yet his nominee to be ambassador to China, Gov. Terry Branstad of Iowa, has called the Chinese president, Xi Jinping<\/a>, a friend and said<\/a> a \u201ccooperative relationship\u201d between the two countries \u201cis needed more now than ever.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Trump argued in his 2015 book, \u201cCrippled America\u201d (since retitled \u201cGreat Again\u201d), that solar panels didn\u2019t \u201cmake economic sense.\u201d But he also wrote that, when solar energy \u201cproves to be affordable and reliable in providing a substantial percent of our energy needs, then maybe it\u2019ll be worth discussing.\u201d<\/p>\n

That time has arrived. A smarter solar policy \u2014 one with a more-nuanced view of China \u2014 is something the new president ought to like.<\/p>\n

Solar isn\u2019t just for the granola crowd anymore. It\u2019s a global industry, and it\u2019s poised to make a real environmental difference. Whether it delivers on that promise will depend on policy makers prodding it to become more economically efficient. That will require a shift both from those who have loved solar and from those who have laughed it off.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/p>\n

J<\/a>effrey Ball<\/a> (@jeff_ball<\/a>) is the scholar in residence and Dan Reicher<\/a> (@dan_reicher<\/a>) the executive director of the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance<\/a> at Stanford.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u70b9\u51fb\u67e5\u770b\u672c\u6587\u4e2d\u6587\u7248 <\/a>\u2013 (<\/em>Click here to view the Chinese version)<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 nytimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

China\u2019s solar industry is expanding in ways that make it imperative for the United States to up its game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[147],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}