The Great Energy Showdown: Solar Takes All?

Sara's back for the launch of Season 7 of Energy vs Climate!

For our first episode, David, Sara, and Ed discuss whether solar will be the big energy winner. Has solar energy already won? What’s driving its rapid ascent? And what does it mean for energy production and policy here in Canada?

Show notes & references available on episode page.

About Your EvC Co-Hosts:

David Keith is Professor and Founding Faculty Director, Climate Systems Engineering Initiative at the University of Chicago. He is the founder of Carbon Engineering and was formerly a professor at Harvard University and the University of Calgary. He splits his time between Canmore and Chicago.

Sara Hastings-Simon studies energy transitions at the intersection of policy, business, and technology. She’s a policy wonk, a physicist turned management consultant, and a professor at the University of Calgary and Director of the Master of Science in Sustainable Energy Development.

Ed Whittingham is a clean energy policy/finance professional specializing in renewable electricity generation and transmission, carbon capture, carbon removal and low carbon transportation. He is a Public Policy Forum fellow and formerly the executive director of the Pembina Institute, a national clean energy think tank.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] David Keith: I think solar will win in global primary energy. I think it will dominate global primary energy in the latter half of this century. 

[00:00:10] Ed Whittingham: Hi, I'm Ed Whittingham and you're listening to Energy versus Climate, the show where my co-host, David Keith, Sara Hastings-Simon and I debate today's climate and energy challenges.

On September 10th, the three of us recorded a live webinar. Just the host this time on what might be the most important and disruptive trend in global energy transition. The rise and rise of solar power. We ask whether solar has already won, what's driving its rapid ascent and what it all means for energy production and policy here in Canada.

And most importantly, this marks Sara's first show back after being away all of last season for breast cancer treatment. We're thrilled to have her back and kicking off the episode with a primer on the pretty stunning growth of solar to date. Now here's the show without any further ado, Sara, you're back.

Uh, we're so glad for it. As listeners know, you were away all of last season. While, treating breast cancer something you've been pretty open about and you know, people want to know, how are you doing now? 

[00:01:13] Sara Hastings-Simon: Well, I thanks everybody for all the well wishes and support. I decided to be really open about it because it was someone being open about it that helped me to get screening and, and, uh, detect the issue before it became even worse.

So I'm doing pretty well. I'm still, in treatment. There's parts that continue for quite a lot longer than I think I ever realized. Um, but, but on the whole, I'm, I'm getting stronger and I'm really looking forward to being back with you guys. So happy to be here. 

[00:01:40] Ed Whittingham: Well, that's great. And, and did the time away from teaching and the general energy wonky, uh, give you any sort of extra perspective on, on the work we do or, or just on life generally?

[00:01:53] Sara Hastings-Simon: Yeah, I think it's unavoidable, right? When you sort of confront something like this, you start to think about, uh, about life and, and it's, uh, finiteness to some extent. Part of it also shows how I think we all have our individual ways of, uh, approaching things. So I did my own reading and, and found quite an interesting book on the whole history of, uh, development and industrial policy behind the, chemotherapy drug that I was taking.

So that was quite fascinating, um, to learn about, you know, the discovery of it from this. Spark, uh, in the Pacific Northwest and all the various challenges that were faced with government agencies having to collect enough of it and communicating between different government agencies and all these parts.

So I think it's interesting how we often look for sort of similar ways to connect with whatever it is that we're going through. And I guess for me that's through, uh, industrial policy and trying to understand where, where things come from. 

[00:02:45] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. So not a full break from the Energy wonkery, but, uh, just a, a little bit of a tangent and, now that you're back and, you know, uh, you, David and I have had a chance to huddle and sort of look at the upcoming season, uh, what are you most looking forward to?

I. 

[00:03:00] Sara Hastings-Simon: Well, I don't wanna spoiler too much, all the things that we're going to be talking about, but. 

[00:03:04] Ed Whittingham: Then people won't show up. 

[00:03:05] Sara Hastings-Simon: But I guess to some extent it's really just how there continues to be so much to talk about, right? And, and so many things going on and so much change and. You know, despite all of the many, many challenges and the, you know, easy way, it is on a day-to-day basis to feel like you know, things are all kind of going in the wrong direction.

When I take a step back and look at some of the energy and climate challenges, I do feel some optimism around, you know, steps that we've made, at least compared to, to looking backwards. So that, that's kind of refreshing in a way. 

[00:03:39] Ed Whittingham: Well, that's great and uh, I share your optimism, but I'm afraid that not enough people do these days, I guess with all the, the things that are going wrong in the world.

But let's, let's talk about something that I think is optimistic and it's a pretty big question today. We're talking about has solar one compared to other forms of electricity generation, is it dominating, uh, those other forms? What drove its spectacular rise and, uh, whether it can really. Power a the bulk or a, a, a very significant chunk of electricity in the future.

Or, you know, as always, are we gonna suffer from grid bottlenecks or land constraints or just plain old physics getting in the way. Uh, and at the end of that we will, as we always do, zoom into Canada and discuss the implications for our local grids here. But to, to mark, uh, Sara's triumphant return, she's gonna open with a global primer on the growth of solar to date.

And we're gonna take the first 10 minutes or so after that, David's gonna weigh in with a few comments around where solar is headed. And just before we get to q and a. I'll bring us back to that discussion about implications for Canada and, uh, before we turn the floor to Sara, David, anything that you wanna 

[00:04:51] David Keith: say upfront?

Just totally great to have Sara back. I'm excited and I'm excited. We're gonna do a bunch of, uh, group chats like this. Alright, Sara, over to you. 

[00:04:59] Sara Hastings-Simon: Great. So I did my homework, um, because of course things are constantly changing in the solar space. I teach a class actually when I'm usually back on campus on the principles of solar, and it's a great class, but the only problem is that every year I have to go back and update, uh, a big chunk of slides because so much has changed.

Uh, doesn't, doesn't quite happen in a lot of other sectors. So, so when we talk about solo domination, I mean. Off the top. I guess I, I will acknowledge, at least when I think about solar domination, it's really about the growth and it's about where we're going to get to rather than the idea that solar is somehow dominating the power sector today.

So the one sort of sobering statistic I'll start with is that in 2024, 7% of the global energy generation, so actually the electricity produced not the capacity of, of, uh, power sources, but the electricity produced, 7% of it came from solar. Now you can look at that and be pessimistic and say, well, 7%, that's not very much.

But if you go back not very long ago in 2012, that number was zero, uh, 0%. So there was some solar, but it, it rounded down to zero. So we're basically sort of at, I think the, the beginning of this domination in growth, turning into potentially we're gonna debate domination in, um, generation. Um, but we're, we're at the beginning.

That said, the growth is just, you know, staggering, right? And tried to come up with the best ways to, to say just how much solar is growing other than just saying, wow, it's growing by a lot. One, one interesting stat is, is thinking about just how quickly that growth is accelerating. So. It took, if we, if we go from say, the time of the first commercially available solar cell in the 1950s and fast forward all the way to 2022, it took, you know, around 70 years to install the first terawatt of capacity of solar.

The next tarot was installed in the following two years. So in 2023 and 2024, we globally installed as much solar as we ever had in the history of solar. And if you go back even further, of course, you know the theory behind how a solar panel works goes all the way back to 1905. So I think that's actually also kinda interesting too.

And we talk about how fast solar is growing this idea, you know. Can energy transitions be fast? It always depends when you start the clock and so, you know, it's not totally untrue to say, well, it's been somewhat slow. You know, it took us six to eight years to get here, but, but I think we are now here and there's really no sign of slowing down.

So in the first six months of 2025, um, we had 380 gigawatts. So a little bit more than a. Third of a terawatt of new solar capacity, and that was already 64% higher than during the same period in 2024. So 20 23, 20 24. We installed more solar than we ever had before. And on this year we're on track to. Be above 2024 by another 64%.

And so, you know, if you kind of continue this sort of trajectory between 2024 and 2030, solar is expected to account for 80% of the growth in global renewable capacity. So it's really clearly dominating over winds and hydropower and others. And that will get it to the point that by the end of this decade, in five years, solar PV would be the largest renewable source.

Um, you know, more than both wind and hydropower. And so how did we get there? Let me just quickly jump to that. I mean, at a top line, basically, the costs of solar have fallen by 90% in the last decade and more than 99% since the 1970s. So, you know, this just massive, massive cost declines again. I did a little bit of back of the envelope to try to figure out, uh, you know, how that compared to something else we might think about and be more familiar with, which is computers.

And it's actually pretty similar. I mean, it depends on what's in that 99%, but if you look at the first, um, personal computer, which was available, um, actually the year that I was born you get about a 99% cost decline, in terms of the cost of the same amount of computing power. And both of those.

We're really advanced through something people often refer to as deployment led innovation. And so this is a little bit different. It's not just learning by doing. Um, so let me just explain a couple of the things that drove that. There were really two parts of the solar cost decline, and there's some interesting work that's been done on this by Jessica Trans and others, um, back in 2018 where they really tried to decompose different drivers of cost decline of solar.

And there's really kind of two periods for that. So there's like the early period of the kind of 80, 1980s to mid 2010s where the biggest cost decline actually came from increasing the efficiency of solar modules. So if you have a solar module and it's, you know, 20% efficient at converting. The sunlight to power and you make that 23% efficient, you actually, you know, redu basically reduce the cost of solar generation in that way.

And so the biggest part during that time was really, um, about, you know, kind of doing a better job with. Manufacture with, with making these solar panels. And a lot of that came from, um, r and d funding, both, you know, a bit of private and, and some government. And then after the early 200, two thousands, however, it was really the scale economies that became more significant, uh, in, in cost reductions.

And so there you get things like, um, policies that stimulate market growth. So, subsidization or, uh, regulations that. Lead to a lot more solar being deployed and there you get some of this, you know, kind of learning by doing. But actually in the case of, of solar, a lot of also scale economies. So basically bigger and bigger factories means lower and lower costs.

[00:10:55] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. Well, I just want to, so that's interesting, those two studies, and I immediately think of Greg Nemet, whom we had on the show a few years ago, a professor at University of. Wisconsin who talked about sort of the baton passing that happened around solar and that speaks to your scale issue. A bit analogous to wind, like what really caused wind prices to fall, uh, in the early days.

And it was originally because of. Efficiency gains like growth in the length of blades or taller towers that allow you to get to better and more consistent wind. Since then there's been, you know, some benefits from, you know, enhanced algorithmic planning that, uh, dictates when they're online or offline, but.

Really it's So what you're saying, just bringing back to solar, it's that factories in China in particular, and thinking of Greg Nimitz's baton passing across countries, is that factories in China are printing solar, like their pieces of paper right now, they're just churning them out. Is that kind of the right conclusion?

[00:11:58] Sara Hastings-Simon: Yeah, I think so. I mean, or like their computers. Um, I mean, Jenny Chase from, uh, BNEF, you know, talks about, it's, it's not necessarily great to be in the solar, uh, module production business, right? Printing these solar panels is not necessarily a, a high margin business. And indeed, you know, you just make these factories bigger and bigger.

You get more efficient, you get less waste. There was some benefit that the solar industry got, um, sort of spillover from the, um, computing industry. So, you know, some of the techniques and, and, uh, costs coming down for the silicon in general there. That kind of helped that. But there was, I think it is interesting that there really were these two parts though, right?

It, it's not just that we started making a lot of it and you got this big economies of scale. You actually had to early on do some r and d to, you know, get better at making these things. 

[00:12:48] David Keith: Yeah, I, I personally don't buy the computer analogy very much. Computers benefit because you're printing in 2D and so when you decrease the feature size, you get a, a square, uh, in, in the number of of parts.

And so I think the, the way that computer lithography works and the challenge of the really big litho graphic systems feels to me kind of deeply different, I think. I think to me, the analogy is too. Other things that are complicated to manufacture, but you fundamentally manufacture at one place in a repeatable way at giant scale.

So yes, it's true that very early on there was this connection with the Silicon supply line, but that's way in the past. They're not really divided things, and I think it's really that the ability to make the solar modules and the ways that economies of learning have worked for that kind of very centralized production.

And then separately, of course, it's all the really extraordinary learnings in. Shaking down the cost of installation and cleaning and so on. So the overall, you know, the, the very kind of cheapest projects that went in last year, say some in the Gulf are around half a dollar, 50 cents an installed watt direct current, and that's, module prices are only a piece of that.

That's the overall project. Call Austin. There's been a huge amount of learning on how to make the racks cheaper, how to automate the installation, how to do the cleaning. Uh, how to do the interconnects and all those things. Again, I think the key thing is they're not very site specific. So once you do that innovation in one place, it applies everywhere.

And in that sense, it's deeply different than, uh, some of the ways that hydro works or, uh, geothermals likely to work, which is I think why solar is likely to win. 

[00:14:27] Sara Hastings-Simon: Yeah, no, I, I totally agree with you there. And I think the computer analogy for me is less about the similarity in the way the costs come down, but more just the idea that, you know, it is amazing what solar has done, but it's not the only technology that we're familiar with that has had that kind of cost reduction.

And, and I also very strongly agree on the, um, what you're saying about the manufacturing. And I forgot to look up the reference. Uh, we'll put it in the show notes, but, um, you know, there's. There sort of a, was a theory put forward. And actually I'm doing some work on it with a colleague at you Calgary, Sean McCoy, um, and a student of ours, um, looking at, you know, can you, can you actually look at technologies and try to figure out, you know, are they more like solar or are they more like, you know, nuclear or something that hasn't seen these kind of cost declines.

And one of the big features, the original paper, you know, talked about sort of qualitatively this idea of on the one hand level of complexity. And in particular, you know, it's sort of. Well, you can say a solar panel is of course, complex at a molecular level, but, but then it gets, you know, it, it gets printed, it gets made in a machine, not printed, but made in a machine, um, and, and built.

And then, um, and then it's very, very simple, right? As you say, like when you go see a big solar plant, it's impressive because it, um, a big solar installation, I should say. It's impressive because it spans a large amount of space, but it's also striking how simple it is, right? It's just a bunch of sticks with these panels attached and a bit of wires.

Between them all. Um, and compare that to, you know, touring a natural gas plant, which is fascinating. I got the chance to do that to, uh, to a plant here in Calgary. And it's like, there's just so much going on. There's tubes and, and things everywhere. And so that on the one hand, that level of complexity. And then on the other hand, again, along, I think what you were saying, they talked about this idea of customization, right?

So again, you know, a solar plant, and the terminology is confusing here, but a solar installation somewhere, um, is, you know, takes the same panels whether it's being made, you know, anywhere around the world. And they basically are installed, you know, more or less in the same way. And there's very, very few things that have that level of, you know, just standardization that the same thing is gonna work, you know, essentially everywhere.

[00:16:42] David Keith: Part of it is, is about the plant that makes the plant. So the point is that that not only is solar modules are obviously modular, but the machines that make them are modular and there's just not, for reasons that maybe aren't obvious or maybe I can't, we don't know. There's not. A bottleneck in the same way there are safer gas turbine blades.

He's incredibly special, you know, with crystalline specialized steel with ceramic coatings, and there's just a very few extremely specialized factories in the world that make these things, and for various reasons, it's very slow to rebuild these factories. It's just really different than the waste solar is.

[00:17:18] Ed Whittingham: I will one, offer, one caution. When we say that solar is is simple because I've said the same. I said it's just steel, glass and wires. I remember having this conversation with Don Farrell when she was running TransAlta. She's just been in the news recently because she's been tapped by the Kearney government to head up the new major projects, uh, office that will implement all those nation building projects.

But I said that, I said, well, surely then it defies the bathtub curve relative to. A coal plant or a combined cycle natural plant and of years can see I'm tracing with my finger a curve that, uh, is a u and that U is the decline over the majority of the life of that assets. And it's expensive at first, and then it's expensive at the tail end.

And she said, why would you say that? Because even without those moving parts, it, it, it features roughly the same cost curve, opex curve. And of course in this province now we've got so much debate of around, uh, end of life what we're going to do with all those solar panels once they hit their end of life.

But we'll save that for the part three of our conversation. Maybe David, turning to you because you just said. Solar is likely to win, but maybe you could define that, like where will solar win and how will 

[00:18:38] David Keith: solar win? When I say that, I think solar will win, I'm making a prediction. And as you know, predictions are hard, especially about the future as Yogi Berra said.

But here's, here's my prediction on Justine. Obviously, I think solar will win in global primary energy. I think it will dominate global primary energy. In the latter half of this century, and I want to spend some time saying why. So first of all, by primary energy, I don't just mean electricity. I mean all the energy that, that, that goes commercially to drive our civilization.

And I think at this point in my view, it's really likely that that solar will win. So first of all, to me, win means winner takes most. If you look at energy history, it's never winner takes all. There's always niches. So wind doesn't. Means solar's 99%, but wind means solar will be by a large margin, maybe like two thirds the biggest.

So if you had to make a specific guess, I'd guess that by late this century, good chance solar's two thirds or something of global primary energy, a really big ion. So I wanna say a little bit about why, first of all, just to give you a sense of where things are now. So some of the cheapest projects we've gone in the last while, like Alfra and Abu Dhabi.

Half a a, a, uh, 50 cents per watt DC that has A-A-P-P-A purchase power purchase agreement price of something like a buck 30 a kilowatt hour, which just to convert it would be the equivalent of about $3, $3 70 cents. This is a US dollars, per gigajoule. Thinking about that in terms of say, gas supply and it's an unfair comparison, uh, but in a way that favor solar.

Henry Hub gas prices. Now the North American, uh, trade prices at around three, but in India markets, in Europe markets and in China markets, we're looking at more like 10 for imports are vary. Some of those are a little bit lower. But of course that's for gas. But what we ultimately want mostly is not heat.

It's easy to turn gas into heat, but turning gas into some product or into power or shaft power, uh, you've got the conversion losses that are more than 50% for gas turbines. And so it's. That gives you a sense of, of how already solar is competing. Now, of course you viewers will be screaming, but solar is intermittent.

It's only during the day. That's absolutely true. But, but I think there are a bunch of ways that there really is a path to manage daily variability and. We'll get to that. And I think, we'll, we'll get to the Canadian side too. I think especially in places that have very good insulation in, in, in near the tropical belt, we really aren't looking at much seasonal variability.

It's really just al variability and there really are ways to manage it. So give you a little more sense of why I think it will win by comparing it to some of the other primary energy technologies. So first of all, solar versus wind. Again, I don't think it'll be winner takes all. There's places where wind is really great and they're anti-correlated, but I think there's some basic ways.

One of them is land use. Solar produces an average of something like 10 watts per square meter can be a little bit better on annual average basis of a power wind power is more like half a watt per square meter over the wind turbine array and wind turbines have. Environmental and climate impacts.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't do wind, but to give you a sense of scale, you can power all of our civilization on something like half a percent to 1% of the global land surface area with wind power. If you want to cover all of our civilization, you basically have to cover the planet with wind turbines and you have big environmental impacts.

So I think there's some way in which it just doesn't scale. So that's, that's versus wind versus hydro. The absolute cap, if you get all the hydro in the world, is a few terawatts. And so you're just not gonna grow it very much. You know, current primary power is something getting up towards 20 terawatts.

There's no version of the world where hydro grows significantly. Of course, people like me hope we dismantle hydro plants and it shrinks solar versus biomass. Just to say it, the land use and environmental constraints are incredible. Biomass is less than half a wat per square meter, uh, into primary energy in a useful way.

There's just no version of it. And I keep going back to land because. Land is the one resource that doesn't change. Technology can keep improving and, and innovation can say, as we've seen a battery shift you from needing a lot of cobalt to not needing it. There's lots of ways we can do that, but there's no innovation that makes more land on earth.

We may get off planet, but there's a fixed amount of land on earth, or pretty much a fixed amount of land on earth, solar versus geothermal. I think we can come back to this in detail, but I think there are a bunch of reasons. That make it very hard for me to imagine a similar scaling of geothermal.

There's some inherent well drilling costs. There's a very well developed technology and also inherently low energy per well that has, uh, uh, consequences for how that will scale even if the rest of the system gets very cheap. I think the one. Exception is nuclear. So to me, if it's not dominantly solar, it's dominantly nuclear.

I, I've long thought that the likely outcome for the world is, is some combination of those two. I think nuclear obviously has the advantage of even higher energy density, so even smaller land footprint. And it's dispatchable right now. The cost of adding new capacity are much cheaper, uh, for solar than nuclear, but I think.

If solar doesn't end up winning late this century, it's 'cause nuclear won. But I think, uh, at this point it's very likely that solar wins and, and I think the other part of it is. Really something about the structure of how easy it is to do big projects. It just doesn't take very long because they're so similar place to place.

And, and a related piece is, of course what solar wants to make is direct current power, which naturally connects to what electrolysis or batteries want to either store power or make products. And those are places where we see innovation chugging along and. Every reason to believe it will chug along for some of the same reasons that we believe innovation will work for solar.

So I think when you put those together, I really do think it's likely that you will see solar be the cheap way to do things that have high energy costs, and that will drive long-term industry to places where solar is cheap. 

[00:24:47] Ed Whittingham: David, I, I'd like to go back to a couple of the, uh, comparisons that you did. Get it with Hydro, get it with Wind.

There'll be a different story when we talk about wind here in Canada. We'll put forward a different story, but solar versus geothermal. And solar versus nuclear. So one thing I think about geothermal is that's going in its favors, frankly, the US and the US absolutely. Losing the solar battle. Not that it was ever really in the battle.

China's just dominating exports. But given the involvement of drilling wells and hydraulic fracturing. Creating loop symptoms and suitable geology. That is one area where I could see the US really taking a step forward and carrying that baton in the way that California carried the baton for solar panels going back a couple decades.

And there are companies like Yor that are making a lot of gains, and as I say, it ties into. What is left of the Trump Climate Administration strategy because it really makes use of the know-how in the oil and gas industry. So maybe you said it's hard to imagine, uh, scaling in a similar way in low energy per, well, maybe you could expand on that.

[00:25:57] David Keith: So there's some. Ice calculations that Nate Lewis did. I've redone them a few times, but yeah, if you look at the actual total energy you extract per well over a lifetime for geothermal wells, it's surprisingly small in terms of like the number of giga drills you get over a lifetime. That has something to do.

And of course every well has, has. While drilling costs can go down, there are gonna be costs associated with completing those wells and with managing that perforation through the earth that I, I just don't see kind of going away in the same way because of the way geology varies. Geology is variable in a way that land surface is not so that again, you're not likely to get that kind of standardization.

And then you've got the fact that when you drill down there, what you get is low grade heat. And low grade heat is just not very valuable. And in, in, in some deep ways. A part of this is really the Carnot efficiency of going from low, low grade heat to anything you want. You can't move low grade heat around efficiently.

These are kind of deep basic reasons of, of physics and energy science that have absolutely nothing to do with what the US policy happens to be. Now, I don't disagree with you. There may be a big US push on geothermal, but so what? I think these things are shaped by large scale forces of what. Is actually technologically easy and hard and how that evolves because of the physics of the problem, 

[00:27:11] Sara Hastings-Simon: David, as you started with.

Right. It's not winner takes. All right. So, ed, to your question, you know, I, I do think there will be an important role for geothermal, uh, in addition, but when you talk about, you know, you sort of think about the. Bulk of the energy, where is that going to come from? And there, i, I, you know, agree with David. I think it's very hard to see anything beating solar, you know, on a cost basis.

You know, part of also when you think about that land use, it goes back a little bit, I think to the basic physics of this energy is coming to the earth first in the form of the, the sun, right? So like the wind essentially is a form of sun energy that's been converted through, you know, the sun acting on, 

[00:27:49] David Keith: 0.3% efficiency or less. 

[00:27:52] Sara Hastings-Simon: Exactly. And so that's the, and that's the issue, right? So like, there, there is a sort of nice basic physics as you were saying to it all. And nuclear is a bit the exception because, you know, of course then you're, you're sort of making, maybe your own sun or at least your own, uh, nuclear, bonds here.

But, but every, all the others, whether it's wind or biomass. You're converting them all through some process from the original Sun Energy. And so, you know, we're probably better off getting the sun energy and just using it directly. 

[00:28:19] David Keith: And let me say more what I mean by, by low grade heat ed.

If I give you a, a infinite source, any amount you want of, of 3000 degree uh, centigrade heat. You're, you're the richest human in the world. Like, you just have like, basically infinite, cheap energy. You, you know, you can make contracts for things that will turn that energy into, into power and products, and you'll be the king of the world if I give you an infinite source of heat at a hundred degrees c.

Yeah, maybe you'll be a little richer than you are now, but it's just not gonna do much. You're gonna like heat your neighbor's houses and you know, you can't even make a generator that will be competitive. Or barely based on that. And that's just, it's just the carnal law. You know? There's some intermediate, yes is true that if you drill very deep, you're getting hot enough that you're just barely starting to make it.

But it feels like you just gotta turn a bunch of knobs to 11 and they barely cross. 

[00:29:06] Ed Whittingham: How do you compare, David, when you know again, solar dominating primary energy supply, the grid bottleneck issue because solar, it is going to be there. There are optimal solar locations, there are suboptimal solar locations.

And the one comparison, the one difference compared to big centralized power, whether it be combined cycle natural gas and put aside the climate problem for a second. Or advanced nuclear, which it feels like, and I know people are always saying this you know, no matter where you are in history, advanced nuclears is 10 years away.

But with China now producing nuclear $3,000 per watt, it seems like we are on the cusp. And that is that ist as location specific provided. Of course, you can get the plutonium to where you need it. 

[00:29:52] David Keith: Sure. So, first of all, I mean, just to be g clear, nuclear power by some measures has got almost 10 times cheaper.

If you compare the current cost of the Chinese builds to the cost of the worst US builds of, of two decades ago. It is actually roughly a factor of 10. But that, so it's so that you can sort of cherry pigs comparisons to get what you want. Uh, I don't know what you mean by a advanced nuclear. I mean, what China's doing is basically the Westinghouse AP 1000 design.

Its variance, and that is. Increasingly becoming a global standard, which is really exciting and I think it is a good design. And, and I'm really kind of optimistic about it, but I think the issue is really ability to build those things at speed and the cost of doing it. And, and the fact that the proliferation risks are, are unavoidable.

You, you build those supply chains and you've made ways to make weapons for grid. I think there's two answers. One answer is, is that there's more ability. If you set markets in place, there's more ability to have demand shifting than I think we think. I just came back from a really exciting set of meetings in India.

I was in Delhi and coachee, uh, last week and. India, as many people know, has had this kind of revolutionary change in the way they did finance by having government set up a kind of uniform payment architecture that was really a, a system, a standard that everybody could play into. They are very seriously talking about doing the same for electricity in a way that would really leap far ahead of what we have in North America.

Really allowing much more effective markets between supply and demand. And you know, you can already see, say in India where there's very cheap solar power going in. There are people really thinking about how to make demand variable. So that's true for water pumping, for agriculture and a bunch of other uses more than you think so.

So obviously it's involve storing heat, storing cold, shifting demand around. So I think there's just more of that than you think. Once you make the market do it. And the second thing is. And, and I, I was always skeptical about this too. I think batteries really are on a path. They get cheaper as well. I mean, there are, the Chinese are now built some very large grid connected battery storage.

The cheapest one I found is just over a hundred dollars a kilowatt hour. That's not the cost of a battery. That's cost of a whole installation on the grid. This is an installation that's got, uh, half a gigawatt of peak power. That just is something I couldn't have imagined a few years ago. And it's real.

And you look at now the progress towards, for example, sodium ion batteries where they're gonna be commercialized for vehicles, but it looks like they're going to be even better for grid storage. There's a bunch of other battery chemistries that seem like they'll work. I think it's gonna be slower, but the point is, once you're down to about a hundred dollars a kilowatt hour, you're, you're.

In spitting distance of where you can actually start to manage di variability at a reason, at a competitive price. 

[00:32:37] Sara Hastings-Simon: Yeah. And we see that happening, right? More and more solar projects that are getting built in the US are basically just being built with batteries from the start. Right? Whereas that was not, not common before.

Um, you know, the, the transmission thing, I think it's also a different question talking about where you're, depending on where you're, you're looking at, right? So we have different issues. Say in Canada compared with, say, India, or, I saw a really striking set of graphs, um, I think it was Ember that published them a couple days ago that was looking at what happened over the last year or so in across Africa in terms of solar.

And so, you know, sort of as a knock on effect from the. Uh, putting this big tariff on Chinese solar panels. Those panels have had to find another place to go. And one of the places that they have found is, many African countries, both, you know, South Africa, the ones that were already doing solar installations, but perhaps even more striking was like just the, it's not even a hockey stick graph.

It's like a literally straight up in the graph of places like Algeria and Botswana and others. You can't even imagine what a difference that is in terms of solar. And there, you know, you don't. You can also, especially in, in countries that are getting a reliable amount of sun on a regular basis, um, and are, say, building up from perhaps a less reliable electricity system, then solar panels are a great way to, you know, move forward your electricity system because you don't have to build out necessarily a lot of really expensive and hard to maintain infrastructure.

I think there are some similarities there with, you know, what happened with the mobile phones kind of leapfrogging. Whatever we call wired phones. Uh, exactly. Because you don't need those, that kind of infrastructure in place. It is a very different story, depending, you know, in terms of variability, if you're trying to replace.

Power that's already not particularly reliable. Then getting some local solar and potentially some batteries is, is a huge opportunity there. And that's just one example of, you know, where the geopolitics plays in. Right. So we've talked about why solar, you know, I think we sort of kind of agree why solar is.

Is likely to win from a physics standpoint and a, um, you know, sort of pure energy standpoint. But I think there's also some really strong reasons why from a geopolitics standpoint, it's come so far. And I mean, China is, you know, really dominating the world in all kinds of ways in producing the solar, but also installing it and.

You know, I think a big part of that for them and and for other countries that are looking at that opportunity is, of course energy is, you know, independence, right? And not relying on, uh, imports from other countries not being subject to the kind of price volatility that can happen with l and g, um, and others as well.

And so there's a big, um, kind of additional pressure in that direction. And when you think about something, you know, like the US. And whether or not you say, okay, they've lost on solar because they're not manufacturing it there, it's, you know, yes, there is still vulnerabilities if you are completely reliant on a single country for solar manufacturing.

I don't think that's a, that's a good idea, but it is a different kind of. Energy security question when you're talking about installing infrastructure that's going to last for a while versus needing to purchase fuel, that is immediately, you know, going into a power plant and burning up and you have to buy the fuel again the next day.

I don't wanna make it sound too simple, because of course if you're gonna grow your solar power plants, you're going to need to continue to install more solar, but it doesn't have the same kind of, sort of very short. Term energy security threats that relying, you know, entirely on another country for the fuel.

Um, you know, does, 

[00:36:28] David Keith: yeah. I mean, if we're saying not, not at all. I mean, China, yes, China's dominating and building cheap solar, but I don't think there's some intrinsic reason why that's true. If, if for some reason there was a geopolitical block people that the underlying knowledge of how to build cheap solar is there and there'd be some prices will go up for a while until someone else.

Some outta country figure out how to do it cheaply. In that sense, it's completely different from a resource like, you know, really cheap gas or oil, which is actually geographically tied to a place. 

[00:36:56] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. And, and with the, sorry, with the China issue, we have that supply chain risk when we depend on China.

We also have the tariff risk. And you're right, David, I think another country could pick it up, but in the meantime, I think it would be highly damaging to the solar industry and perhaps at a critical time. But going back to China, given that it's installing, you know, gigawatts of new solar, that 50% of its vehicle fleet rolling off of assembly lines today is electrified.

Whether it's four wheels or two wheels. Are we seeing China becoming the first electro state and at a time when the US is moving back, it's retrenching becoming a petro state. And what does that say for that, that competition to, to produce and own primary energy use. What does that say about the the, the China US War?

[00:37:48] David Keith: I, I think some of this is more that you're right to say it, it captures the zeitgeist, but I don't think that the US is really becoming more a petro state. And, and yes, it's true, uh, stunningly that Chinese electric vehicle sales are now 50%, more than 50% of all cars in China for by, by new sales. That's a big deal, and, and I think that's an important shift, but.

I don't really see, it sounds like the US is slowing down substantially in development of solar installations because there's a big demand for new power. 

[00:38:21] Sara Hastings-Simon: Yeah, I think China is becoming, I think it's fair to say China is becoming an electric, the first electric state, right? And there that is, it is electrifying.

Its source, its use of energy much faster than anywhere else. But I agree with you, David. I don't think it's a reversion in the us It's a, in, in Canada too. It's a slowdown, right? And so. I agree. It's a little bit of an overstatement, but it is a diverging paths in terms of like China's going quickly in one direction and the US is, is going very slowly towards it and it is that, you know, you mentioned it, but it's, that I think has a lot to do with that resource.

Like where is the resource for fossil fuel? And that's only in certain places versus the solar, which you know, is. Sort of everywhere with some, you know, we can get into to that a little bit. But, but it is, I think that is also going to be hard to sort of get away from. 

[00:39:12] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. And I guess it's the, the, so yes, to your point David and Sara Chi, uh, so the US is installing massive amounts of solar and I heard Jesse Jenkins.

We had on the show last season, say on Ezra Klein about decarbonization along with Jane Flagal, is that 95% of new electricity going into the United States is some combination of solar, solar, and batteries and wind as well. However, you look at actual exports of, say, solar panels or solar equipment, I think the us, you know, produces.

Something minuscule, like tens of millions on an annual basis, whereas you have the China producing now tens of billions, so it is entirely seeded that part of the supply chain while and, and sure it's not a petro state, but if anything, it's doubled down on oil and gas as being that winner in primary energy.

[00:40:04] David Keith: Yeah. Uh, agreed. I, I think I do wanna switch. We're gonna talk about Canada to distribution. I, I really do think solar looks much better when you're close to the equator. So, I mean, first of all, if you just look at maps of, of insulation, you'll find that. The best places in Canada, which are kind of southern Alberta, Southern Saskatchewan are like 40 depending on exactly how you're doing the installation and how you're thinking tilts and stuff.

On an annual average basis, they're 30 or 40% worse, let's say, than the best places in the world, in the Gulf or in, uh, Western China or whatever. 30, 40% is a big deal if you're competing to make some primary energy commodity. But that understates how bad it is because in Canada you have this huge seasonal variability.

Not picking can out anywhere that's far from the equator. And so managing that variability, that's seasonal variability is really not easy. Whereas managing that di that that is getting batteries that are cheap enough to manage the seasonal variability tells you you've gotta have battery prices that are coming down not to.

A hundred dollars a kilowatt hour, more like to $10 a kilowatt hour or something like that. It's really hard. Whereas if you're thinking about the Gulf States or China with its extremely good solar resource in the west, uh, or India, which has got great solar resources, uh uh, um, in Raden area, for example, or other states like that, they have access both the cheap solar and a cheap solar that doesn't have much seasonal variability.

Which means that managing the, the, the variability is doable with, with technologies that are coming online, both for demand management and batteries. And I think that means that Canada is disadvantaged. 

[00:41:38] Ed Whittingham: Well, it, it, I think it is. I. Completely agree with you, David. It's disadvantaged and solar's not necessarily winning in Canada.

Now I will say, so solar was, it went through this tremendous growth spurt, particularly here in Alberta. When you look at the data from 2019, there was 85 to a hundred megawatts of installed capacity in Alberta that grew to 1800 megawatts by the end of 2023. Now you contrast that there are 5,700 megawatts of wind capacity in, in, in Alberta.

Overall though, if you look at the picture in Canada, in in procurement across the country, it tends to be wind that's still winning. BC had a procurement recently that nine projects were awarded. All of them were wind. Solar was added later after one of them dropped out. Saskatchewan procures a lot more wind than solar and it's on the order of say, 300 megawatts to a hundred megawatts of solar.

And the, when you come back to one of the reasons for it. Why it's losing is while governments are going for lowest cost instead of best value. And I think in optimal locations like Alberta Solar provides best value because it generates that when we need that power, more likely the way governments are procuring is going for lowest cost.

And, and if you look at that spectacular rise we had in Alberta, it was largely on the backs of corporate PPAs, the Amazons of the world. Buying these virtual PPAs and those have sort of sputtered and especially since, uh, the provincial government put a moratorium on new solar development, they've lifted that, but it, it really checked the growth.

So bottom line is that solar is not winning in Canada and I don't think it's likely to, to, to win. But wind is certainly coming on very strong and continues to. 

[00:43:22] Sara Hastings-Simon: And I mean, I think this comes back to what you mean by winning, right? So again, like strongly agree with the seasonal challenges, I'm, I'm less worried about the overall insulation, you know, given the costs of solar panels becoming so cheap.

I think that, you know, if it was only about having a 30 to 40% less total sunlight, you know, we would, we would be doing okay here in Alberta. But as you say, David, and as. Some work that, uh, I've done with Christina Pearson. We looked at, you know, just how hard it is to meet, you know, close to a hundred percent of Alberta's power with solar, right?

Because it's just. We have those, those short days in the winter. But that doesn't mean that, you know, same with winning doesn't mean taking all, not winning doesn't mean taking none. Right. So there is, yeah, so there's a sort of, loser takes some, I think solar in Canada, which is that, you know, it can contribute, you know, some not insignificant amount to our annual power at a, at low cost.

And, and so I think it's just important to. To note that piece, that it's not, it's not none. Um, until I, I didn't tell you yet, David, about my geoengineering idea, which is we changed the tilt of the, uh, axis of the earth so that we get rid of this, uh, seasonality problem with solar. Um, so you heard it here first e excellent plan.

I, I'm all in extreme. Extreme, uh, terraforming, uh, plans.

[00:44:44] David Keith: I mean, really basic fact you haven't mentioned is of course, if you look at a map of global wind capacity and global solar capacity, they're almost anti-correlated. Like the really great wind sites are basically southern Argentina, completely rocks and you know, and GA's good.

And actually UK is really good. And, and that's, you know, those are kind of listed some of the good places in the world. It's of Australia and, and Solar's really good in the tro broad tropical belt where most people live. And where the big centers of global population or growing global population are, which is another reason I think it will win.

I guess one caveat that's important in the near term, again, it's win or takes most, is the best sites for building things on really cheap carbon free power are sites where wind and solar have daily anti correlations. Namibia has examples like that where you can get, you can build both and without any storage, get very high capacity factors.

And there are definitely businesses going after that who want access to cheap energy. 

[00:45:40] Ed Whittingham: Now it comes back to, uh, coming back to Canada again and policy makers. So if. Really it's wind that is winning and uh, so, and a solar takes most competition globally. Solar is going to play a much smaller role in Canada than if, if your mark Carney's new energies are, and you see solar as winner takes most globally, what do you do about it here in Canada?

What's your solar, solar strategy or is it basically. Do nothing 

[00:46:11] Sara Hastings-Simon: in the great tradition of like everybody puts their new strategy for a new government, just being the strategy that they always like. But couched in those terms, I would say, you know, build a lot of transmission across Canada that's gonna enable, uh, some more solar and some more wind.

Um, you know, I think. I think trying to get into the solar manufacturing business would really be foolhardy, uh, in, in a lot of ways. Right? And I don't know that there's a really serious discussion about that anymore in Canada. Um, but I, but I do think, you know, doing those kind of big things of, of building that transmission and setting out a, um, sort of plan towards and mandate for low carbon power, um, remains good things to do.

[00:46:57] David Keith: Uh, I think, I think Canada's strategy's gotta figure out what the strategy's for. Is the strategy about decarbonizing or is the strategy about the fact that Canada has dec You know, Canada productivity growth has been really slow and Canada has a real economic challenge and we have to figure out things that produce big va value added that grow the Canadian economy.

I think those are different problems and with different answers. 

[00:47:18] Ed Whittingham: Let's get to questions. Alright, I've got one from Phil Duge, of course. His boss at Grid United Skelly. Michael Skelly was on the show, gosh, it's going back, I wanna say fall of 2023. He says, hi, gang. Uh, welcome back, Sara. I recently intended a lecture from a leading US based expert on solar, providing synthetic inertia do, uh, grids as an ancillary liability service. He said Grids, anachronistic grid codes are inhibiting this service. His remarks ause a lot of the common criticism about the technology. Are you folks tracking this? If so, please comment. 

[00:47:55] Sara Hastings-Simon: So maybe just really briefly for, for listeners. So it, so that grid inertia is something that we have on the electricity grid in the way that it has historically operated.

It's like the net word sounds, inertia. It's basically big spinning masses that tend, you know, once in motion to keep going. And without getting too deep into the electronics of it all that, you know, helps to keep things stable on the grid. And so there is a lot of concern that when you take away these big spinning masses, IE you take away your big turbines, um, that are producing power from fossil fuels and you replace it with so-called inverter based.

System. So you have, as David was saying, the solar panel that's producing DC power. You're inverting that to AC power. I'm getting flashbacks from e and m in college. It can can introduce some vulnerabilities in your system because when a shock comes into the grid, it doesn't have this inertia to kind of keep its stable.

That is the challenge and you. Yes, it is completely true that that is a challenge and, and it's a challenge that we've always managed historically through inertia. There is the ability to manage it in other ways, and, you know, power electronics can respond much more quickly than anything that we've ever had.

So it's not an unsolvable problem at all. It's more of an issue of you know, are our systems, are our markets, uh, set up in a way to integrate those technologies and we, and do we have the right checks and balances in place to make sure that the ones that get chosen are actually going to work? And, and I think underlying a lot of this is that we really had this necessary service, this inertia that we were sort of getting, you know, for free or just came without thinking about it, and now we have to start thinking about it.

So. Without, you know, this is almost like a whole debate that we could have around it, but I think it's really, it's a great example of, you know, yes, this is something that we need to address. It is addressable by technology, but it is gonna require thinking about those markets differently. 

[00:49:53] David Keith: Maybe one, one quick summary, sort of complimentary to what Sara said is there's really, there's lots of timescales for electricity supply.

So all this stuff is in this very short timescale, a timescale that is the frequency regulation timescale, if you like, kind of going from fractions of a second to minutes and that timescale there are problems. It's true that there are some particular problems, as Sara said, that solar uh, uh, raises, but they're absolutely fixable at a pretty tiny cost.

In, in terms of total costs, whereas the costs regarding storage, especially seasonal AAL storage are not fixable at low price. They're, they're inherently hard, whereas the other, the, the short term things are, are fixable with the right regulation, with technology that exists now. 

[00:50:32] Ed Whittingham: Uh. Let's go to Sonya Vedova. Can distributed energy generation work in Canada if everyone puts solar on their houses, businesses, does this create a market challenge to traditional major energy companies?

David, you infamously have called rooftop solar and residences green bling before, and, uh, and equally infamously to a Solar Alberta Association conference. You said that we should just be running high voltage DC lines from optimal solar locations in Arizona to power Alberta instead of building anything here.

So I suspect you have an opinion. 

[00:51:09] David Keith: Yeah, I mean, I, I, if you care, I mean, to be clear, if people want to be low, self sufficient and want to pay for it, knock yourselves out. And if you want to grow all your own food too, that's great as well. Uh, no problem. But it almost certainly isn't cost effective. Persistently both the capital costs and the operating costs of rooftop solar on small buildings.

Residential homes are just not competitive with, with large scale solar, and so people should be free to do them, but I don't think we should give them special incentives. I think there are intermediate cases of solar on large warehouses where those prices actually do get closer to competitive and could make sense and do make sense in some places.

But I think. While there are individuals who really like the idea of total self-sufficiency, I really think that the US national economy was right when it said that the grid was the biggest, the greatest invention of the last century. And I don't think we're gonna move away from it. I think people, most people want to have, be able to just buy grid power and be confidence there and, and I just don't think there's a big market for people putting it on their roofs.

[00:52:12] Sara Hastings-Simon: Yeah, I don't, I don't. Totally disagree. I mean, especially in a market like here in Alberta, right? I mean, if you're, if you're in other places, there's different considerations, but I think as you say, you know, it's, it's something people can choose to do. It's, I would argue better than spending that bling on a, you know, a new granite countertop.

And, and I do think it. Does open up a relationship with energy for people that is somewhat different. That said, I don't think that it's, you know, the start of then going off grid or something like that, but it's, uh, you know, it like, like many of the parts of this energy transition, you know, it's a, it's a small contribution towards something that.

But, but it's all a sum of small contributions, but you're not gonna get there with that alone. 

[00:52:54] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. And you develop a very personal relationship with your own electricity generation. When your inverter goes down and you check, and it's like, why when I'm on this import export contract with a with a utility, am I paying through the nose and you look, oh gee, my solar panels haven't been producing in the last two months.

'cause the inverter wind can't put. I will say though, my installer was very quick and very responsive to getting me a new inverter. And not to say that geothermal is problem free either. This gets back to Don Ferrell's point around the bathtub that even though you don't have a lot of moving parts there, there certainly are the opex.

Martin Volker has a question. This will be our last question. I'm wondering about the pace of the solar revolution after reading. Brett Christopher's the prices wrong. He argues renewables are not profitable enough and profits is the only thing that counts. Just because the energy produce is very cheap, doesn't guarantee build out.

[00:53:46] Sara Hastings-Simon: You know, I, I agree with that challenge, right? I mean, I think we've seen it being built out in some places because there is profitability potential. Um, and, and there are many solar developers, you know, across the US and Canada that have profited. But I think the, the broader underlying point that like.

You can just sit back and say, well, you know, obviously now the market is going to pick solar. Really doesn't acknowledge all the different challenges that kind of come in, in deciding what to build and who gets to decide. Uh, you know, why has Alberta, um, built solar, but Saskatchewan largely, largely hasn't.

So maybe this is also a little bit of a preview for a, a show we're gonna have later in the season where we talk about capitalism and, uh, and, and the energy challenges and climate change too. So, I'll, I'll save the rest of my comments there, but I think it's a very interesting point. I, 

[00:54:39] David Keith: I'd say, again, going back to the big picture, if it's really cheap to make power and you can sell profitable.

Products based on that energy, people will do it and make a profit, and I think that's what we're going to see with solar because of the kind of underlying forces that drive it. 

[00:54:55] Ed Whittingham: Let's leave it at that. Uh, Sara, this is great. I feel like there's some real muscle memory between the three of us that we've been missing the last season.

So, so much fun to have this conversation with you. Part of it. 

[00:55:07] Sara Hastings-Simon: Yeah. It's so much fun to be back. I look forward to more. 

[00:55:09] Ed Whittingham: Great to have you back. Thanks for listening to Energy Versus Climate. The show is created by David Keith. Sara Hastings-Simon and me, Ed Whittingham and produced by Amit Tandon. Our title in show Music is The Windup by Brian Lips.

This season of Energy versus Climate is produced with support from the North Family Foundation, the Consecon Foundation and our generous listeners. Sign up for updates and exclusive webinar access at energyvsclimate.com and review and rate us on your favorite podcast platform. This helps new listeners define the show.

If you enjoyed this episode, check out our show from season two, episode three called Solar in Alberta. What does it look like and how do we manage it? It's an oldie but a goldie. We'll be back to talk the good, bad, and ugly of new energy tech on September 25th. See you then.