the year is 2050 and the world is more
polluted unequal and dangerous than ever
before mega cities from New Delhi Lagos
Mexico City face suffocating smog over a
billion people around the world lack
access to reliable electricity and
climate change is serving up droughts
floods and heat waves with alarming
regularity much of the disastrous state
of the world is due to the solar power
revolution sputtering out see way back
in 2020 solar power had already become
the cheapest source of electricity on
the planet from Chile to China solar
farms sprouted more than any other kind
of power plant new homes came with sleek
solar roofs and in the developing world
standalone solar systems offered
villagers their first taste of
electricity and yet sometime in the
2030s the once unstoppable momentum of
solar power hit a screeching halt today
at the mid-century mark fossil fuels
exert a stranglehold on the global
economy coal and natural gas are still
burned to produce a majority of the
world’s electricity and run its
factories oil runs most of the world’s
cars and trucks and nearly every single
ship and plane further polluting the air
you know we thought that the rising
popularity of electric vehicles might
actually reduce air pollution and yet
over a billion petroleum fueled vehicles
still share the roads with electric ones
and the supposedly clean electric
vehicles cause substantial air pollution
every time they charge up with the
electricity generated by fossil fuels
scientists tell us it’s only gonna get
worse already droughts from Africa to
the Middle East have left hundreds of
millions in a persistent state of water
scarcity and famine and rising sea
levels have spurred waves of mass
migration from the floodplains of
Bangladesh but this is just the
beginning
before the end of the century Miami and
New Orleans will be under water New York
will be the new Bahrain of heat waves
for climate change is speeding up the
white ice sheets at the globe’s poles
have largely melted leaving behind
darker ocean water that reflects less
sunlight and heats the Earth’s surface
even faster and vast stores of
greenhouse gases once trapped in the
permafrost that since melted are
escaping into the atmosphere from
Siberia in the bottom of the ocean like
a runaway train the changing climate
can’t be stopped not today not for
10,000 years this vision of 2050 is what
the world is headed toward and it’s
terrifying but in my new book taming the
Sun I lay out a roadmap for a brighter
future yes I argue that solar power
today is on track to sputter out but
with urgent investments in innovation
from governments around the world solar
could actually break through the ceiling
that it’s currently headed for and
achieve its sky-high potential because
every hour the Sun beams down more
energy than the world uses in an entire
year the problem is that it’s really
inconvenient to tap into this energy
source look sunlight varies widely
depending on what time of day it is or
what season it is in some places it
scorches the terrain and others it hides
behind the clouds it’s a diffuse all
over
it’ll take human ingenuity to tame this
troublesome energy source familiar
silicon solar panels have recently made
dramatic strides they’ve fallen in cost
and they’ve advanced by increasing their
investment more investment went into
solar last year than any other power
source on the planet so you might think
hey if solar keeps falling in cost
widening its competitive advantage over
fossil fuels well then surely its growth
will continue unabated right wrong and
to see why let’s look at California see
California is a state where solar
already meets most of the states or many
of the states power needs
at lunchtime here’s an example of a
spring day last year or in the middle of
the day around noon when the Sun was
right overhead Solar was meeting most of
that state’s electricity needs that sent
the price of power in the bottom graph
plunging below zero the power markets
were literally paying you to turn off
your power plant but then as the Sun set
wiping out solar output the price spiked
reflecting the high value of power at
dinner time not lunch time well the next
solar panel is only gonna give you lunch
time power reflecting the dwindling
value of solar the more of it you have
the less valuable it becomes
and the swiftly eroding value of solar
could well undercut the gently declining
cost halting its momentum and reducing
its economics to none what are we gonna
do about this well unfortunately it
looks like Soler’s rise could stall on
current course and speed around the
world countries are failing to
proactively invest in the power grids
needed to accommodate the rising share
of intermittent solar power India for
example is struggling to connect at
sun-drenched deserts with its energy
hungry cities in Europe we’ve already
seen solar begin to saturate as some of
the early adopters rolled back their
public incentives around the world if we
see a slowdown solar could fail to
follow an exponential hockey stick
instead following a logistic s-curve and
hitting a ceiling we’ve seen this movie
before
once upon a time nuclear energy was the
great hope for clean abundant energy for
all and then nuclear after a building
boom for two decades peaked and never
came back
solar power today at 2% of global
electricity is right where nuclear was
in the 1970s it could have a decade or
even two of growth and then it too could
hit a ceiling unless we act now that’s
why I argue it’ll take three kinds of
innovation for solar to avoid hitting
that ceiling the first kind of
innovation financial innovation is one
that I’m relatively optimistic about
even if governments do not make many
investments right now see even though
familiar silicon solar panels might hit
limit decades down the line there’s
plenty of progress to be made right now
with fire
innovation we’re going to be able to
source the trillions of dollars of
capital needed to continue Soler’s rise
in the near term see bloomberg forecasts
a shortfall of two and a half trillion
dollars in that top graph above what
investors are currently willing to pay
for solar to plug that gap the bottom
chart tells you that the biggest most
deep-pocketed investors institutional
investors could provide enough
investment to meet that two and a half
trillion dollar shortfall but they need
to be comfortable investing in solar
they currently invest in the auto
mortgage and oil and gas industries
because you can bundle together assets
into a diversified portfolio I’m
confident that the industry will come up
with the innovations to enable those
investors to do the same for solar
projects and it won’t just be the
developed world in the developing world
you’ll also see financial and business
model innovation around the world in
sub-saharan Africa and South Asia in
particular you see energy poverty over a
billion people who lack any access to
electricity business model innovation
though pioneered by entrepreneurs and
startups is bringing electricity to many
folks for the first time here’s how such
a model might work the pay-as-you-go
system a customer gets a solar system
installed largely for free and then pays
monthly payments using mobile money the
firm manages to raise the capital for
the upfront cost on public financial
markets and then the customer ultimately
pays off that solar installation through
monthly payments and has a valuable
asset to his or her name so that she can
then raise credit that’s a hugely
economically empowering concept still
financial innovation alone is not going
to prevent solar from hitting its limits
existing technology will hit that
ceiling
that’s why technological innovation is
paramount around the world in
laboratories researchers have developed
breakthrough technologies here’s one of
them it’s known as perovskite solar
power I used to work on this technology
as a researcher at Oxford University
under dr. Henry Snape a pioneer in the
field perovskites could one day an able
colourful transparent flexible highly
efficient and dirt cheap solar coatings
they could be ubiquitous you could see
them on skyscrapers all over cityscapes
still though they would only
instantaneously convert sunlight into
electricity so be really cool if we
could convert sunlight harness it and
produce portable fuels well there is a
technology that does that it’s known as
artificial leaf technology and already
in laboratories at small scales it does
ten times better than natural plants do
photosynthesis if we had artificial
fuels at scale we could then take solar
energy split water and produce hydrogen
fuel that hydrogen could then combine
with carbon dioxide off of a smokestack
and it could produce carbon containing
liquid drop-in replacements that compete
head-to-head with petroleum you know I
see in the future solar refineries not
oil refineries that sort of a range of
needs from industry to transportation
finally the third kind of innovation we
need is systemic to continue Soler’s
rise that involves reimagining energy
systems so that solar energy can be most
productively used and stored no matter
what it’s produced or how much it
fluctuates one way to do this is to
build continents spanning grids now
China wants to build a super grid all
over the world because it realizes that
the Sun is always shining somewhere now
that may not be feasible but regional
super grids are indeed feasible and
promising in addition to being large
smarter grids can enable consumers to
adjust their electricity demand
on-the-fly
to line up with the availability of
solar electricity now the most intuitive
way that you were probably thinking
about in order to buffer the
intermittency of solar is batteries
here’s a flashy Tesla battery
installation out in the field but let me
tell you if you relied only on batteries
to buffer Soler’s enormous volatility it
would be prohibitively expensive that’s
why it’ll take a diverse range of
low-carbon electricity resources in
order to buffer Soler’s intermittency
now if you link the electricity system
to other systems heat desalination
transportation you add more flexible and
productive uses of energy to accommodate
the rising share of unpredictable solar
you
example electric vehicle fleets could be
intelligently dispatched so that they
charge up only when solar energy is
available on the grid and then
discharged when they need to help the
grid supply energy when the Sun Goes
Down
that could be a powerful concept now all
of this is going to take innovation and
I argue that the United States could be
a leader in enabling solar power to
continue growing and be a shining
example for the rest of the world for
how this works yet China is on track to
replace the United States as the leading
funder of energy innovation by 2020 and
unfortunately president Trump’s budget
request would slash renewable energy
research and development funding by
two-thirds that would be a catastrophic
blunder on the contrary I urged the
United States to increase its funding
for technological innovation and also to
fund systemic innovation upgrading its
infrastructure reforming its energy
markets so that we can in fact serve as
that shining example now if all of this
happens let me lay out a brighter future
for the world the year is 2015 and even
though it faces grave challenges the
world is in control of its own destiny
nightmare scenarios of economic and
humanitarian catastrophe are off the
table solar power is the linchpin of a
clean energy revolution that’s kept
climate change at bay and it’s lifted
the world’s destitute out of darkness
for the first time in history fossil
fuels are on the wane now let me tell
you today’s solar technologies barely
resemble those quaint silicon solar
panels manufactured by China in the
opening decades of the 21st century by
2030 industrial printers were printing
out the churning out rolls of solar
coatings in a range of colors and
transparencies a decade later it was
cheaper to solar coat your house than to
paint it and solar technologies also
allowed us to store the sun’s energy in
the form of portable fuels so today
petroleum fueled electric vehicles are a
distant third place choice behind
hydrogen and electric vehicles that
means that even though urban Denton
complain of ever increasing congestion
local air pollution peaked in 2040 and
it’s declined ever since this panoply of
fascinating solar technologies is the
result of farsighted technology bets
made by the United States over three
decades ago and because of that we’ve
profited handsomely you know back in
2013 the u.s. replaced Saudi Arabia as
the world’s largest producer of oil
twenty years later it dethroned China as
the world’s largest producer of solar
products the combined market value for
which exceeds that for oil today now to
cope with the massive fluctuations of
solar power on the grid countries have
invested in continents panning power
grids not only our grids bigger they’re
smarter they send signals to batteries
and billions of Internet connected
devices to adjust their electricity
on-the-fly to adjust to electricity
supply few would dispute that solar
energy is one of the most important
advances of the 21st century maybe even
the most important for it may not have
ensured victory against global
challenges such as climate change but
taming the Sun sure did give the world a
fighting chance
thanks so much
[Applause]
[Music] you