Can The Rise In Solar Power Balance Out Clean Energy Cuts?

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. Since President Trump returned to office, his administration has been aggressive in rolling back clean energy initiatives. Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill ended tax credits for solar panels and electric vehicles. And according to reporting from The New York Times this week, the EPA is moving to cancel $7 billion in federal grants that were intended to help low and middle-income families install solar on their homes.

But that isn’t the whole story because Texas, California, and other states are bringing so much solar and battery power online that in March, fossil fuels generated less than half the electricity in the US for the first time ever. And internationally, solar has gotten so cheap to build and install that it’s fundamentally transforming many countries’ power grids.

So despite all the clean energy rollbacks on this side of the pond, where exactly does solar adoption stand in the US and across the world right now? Do we still need the defunct solar tax credits? And is it enough to have a meaningful impact on our climate? Climate activist Bill McKibben has written all about this in his new book, Here Comes the Sun– A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization. Bill is based in Middlebury, Vermont. Bill, always welcome back to the show. Nice to have you.

BILL MCKIBBEN: It’s always good to get to talk with you, Ira, over the years.

IRA FLATOW: Thank you. All right, let’s get into it. Is this rapid world adoption of solar surprising to you?

BILL MCKIBBEN: It’s what we’ve been hoping for, for a very long time. But it’s happening very fast. You’ll recall that June 2023 was the month that climate scientists really started freaking out about this sudden spike in temperatures. They said we were seeing the hottest temperatures in the last 125,000 years. And every month since then has been the hottest August, the second hottest June, whatever.

That same month, June 2023, was the moment when human beings started installing a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, which is like a coal-fired power plant’s worth of solar panels every day. It took us from 1954 until 2022 to put up the first terawatt of solar panels in this world. The second terawatt came within about two years. And the third will happen before this year is out.

So this is a tremendous surge finally. And it’s the first thing in the 35 years or so that I’ve been working on the climate crisis, that we have anything that’s scaling fast enough to potentially make some kind of difference in how hot the Earth eventually gets.

IRA FLATOW: So solar is then the fastest growing energy right now.

BILL MCKIBBEN: Fastest growing energy right now and the fastest growing energy source in the history of energy. Look, we miss it somewhat because much of the growth is concentrated elsewhere. China is the great example. In May, China was putting up three gigawatts’ worth of solar every day, three coal-fired power plants’ worth of solar.

We have petro states in this world, but China is the first electro state that we have on planet Earth. And there’s so much capacity there that it’s leaking over into its neighbors and trading networks. Pakistan next door, people there last year, without any guidance from the government and relying mostly on TikTok videos for technical help, put up the equivalent of half the country’s electric grid in solar panels just on rooftops. If you go look at Google Earth for Lahore or Karachi or Islamabad, it’s like watching mushrooms spread after a rain.

IRA FLATOW: And states here in the United States aren’t doing too badly. I’m talking about Texas and California. We’ve seen tremendous growth there, right?

BILL MCKIBBEN: Start with California, which is the place that took this most seriously. California has put up enough solar panels and, crucially, enough batteries over the last couple of years that they’ve hit some kind of tipping point, Ira. Most days now, almost every day, California produces more than 100% of the electricity it uses from renewable sources for long periods, which means that at night, when the sun goes down, the biggest source of supply to their grid is usually batteries that have spent the afternoon soaking up excess sunshine.

The bottom line– and this is the most encouraging statistic I’ve heard in those decades of working on climate– is that California, fourth largest economy on planet Earth, is using 40% less natural gas to produce electricity this year than it did two years ago. That’s the kind of number, that if we spread it around the world, would make a difference in how hot the Earth gets.

And it’s not just California. As you point out, Texas is now putting up renewable energy and batteries faster than any place else in the country, not, obviously, out of any ideological commitment or any deep concern for climate. They’re doing it because the economics and the desire for a stable grid are outweighing even the best efforts of the hydrocarbon lobby in Houston to convince the state legislature to do otherwise.

IRA FLATOW: But most of the solar panels in the world come from China, right? They’re the–

BILL MCKIBBEN: Yep.

IRA FLATOW: –the champion of solar panel makers. What about the tariffs imposed on China now? Is that going to cut back the use of them?

BILL MCKIBBEN: That’ll definitely divert a lot of those panels to other places, who will get the benefit of the cheap energy they provide. For climate purposes, we need to convert everyone. And of course, what President Biden tried to do with the Inflation Reduction Act was to make America a producer of solar panels, too, with some success. The biggest solar panel factory in the US now is, in all places, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district in Georgia.

So they did their best. But the scare that all of this put into the fossil fuel industry motivated them to do everything they could to game our political system. You’ll recall, about this time last year, then-candidate Trump telling the fossil fuel industry that for $1 billion in campaign donations, they could have absolutely anything they wanted.

The industry came through with about a half billion dollars in donations, advertising, lobbying during the last election cycle. And that proves to have been plenty because they’re getting every possible thing that they could from the Trump administration. I don’t think that it will be enough to reverse the momentum, certainly, not in the rest of the world.

But of course, the problem is that it comes at a crucial moment. We have very limited time to deal with the climate crisis, as you know better than just about any journalist on the planet, because you’ve been covering it so faithfully for so long. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change told us a couple of years ago that to stay on a path, anything like the one we set in Paris, we’d need to cut emissions in half by 2030, which, by my watch, is four years and six months away, not leaving us a great deal of margin.

So along with everything else, in this country, we’re going to have to make the case again for renewable energy. We’re having a big nationwide day of action on the fall equinox, September 21, that we’re calling not Earth Day, but Sun Day. And the point of it, Ira, is to drive home something that I think really needs to get through people’s heads.

This is no longer the Whole Foods of energy– nice, but pricey. This is the Costco of energy. It’s cheap. It’s available in bulk. It’s on the shelf, ready to go. We live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. That is an incredibly liberating notion, for all kinds of reasons, right down to the fact that even human beings are going to be hard-pressed to figure out how to fight a war over sunshine. If we can get this done, then we live in a different world on the other side.

IRA FLATOW: Speaking of the Costco of energy, are we going to see the day soon when you might be able to go into a big-box store and say, I’ll order some solar panels, put them on my roof? Because it’s not that easy. Right? In other countries–

BILL MCKIBBEN: Yep.

IRA FLATOW: –you can do that. Right? You can’t do that here yet.

BILL MCKIBBEN: Absolutely. In Germany, for instance, you can walk into whatever the equivalent of Best Buy is and walk out with a few hundred euros’ worth of solar panel that are designed to be hung over the railing on your porch or veranda. This is called balcony solar. And last year, a million and a half Germans did just this– put up that big panel off their balcony, plugged it into the wall, and in many cases, were providing 20% or more of the energy that they were using.

That’s illegal everywhere in this country, except the state of Utah, where the deep red legislature this year unanimously passed enabling legislation saying, if you’ve got an apartment here, go ahead and put it up. We’re going to need a lot more of that kind of thing. Rooftop solar, in general, for people’s homes is three times more expensive in America than it is in Australia or the EU.

A little bit of that is the tariffs on the panels, but most of it is the fact that you have to get all these permits, and they come from 10,000 different jurisdictions. Each city and town has its own set of rules. And that is the thing, more than anything else, that delays and drives up the time. If you’re in Australia, you can call up on a Monday and say, I want solar panels on my roof, and by Wednesday, they’re up there and producing energy. And as a result, 40% of the homes in Australia have solar panels on the roof.

IRA FLATOW: Is there any way to streamline all this permitting?

BILL MCKIBBEN: There sure is. The National Renewable Energies Lab a few years ago came up with an app, which they call Solar App Plus. And happily, since they’re now under attack by DOGE, they managed to spin it off into a non-profit. And so far, California, Maryland, and a few weeks ago, New Jersey, have mandated the use of this Solar App Plus for rooftop installers. And it means that in essence, they can get an automatic permit right away.

And that’s a big step towards speeding up this process. One of the things we’re doing at Sun Day is encouraging lots and lots and lots of other jurisdictions to do the same thing. We can’t get much done in Washington at the moment for obvious reasons, but that leaves lots and lots of states, legislators, and city halls and county boards where we think we can get reason to prevail.

IRA FLATOW: As I drive around, I see more and more farmers installing solar panels. And I’m reminded of on our show, about 25 years ago, when people started installing wind farms. I talked to a rancher in Oklahoma who was telling me that he’s making more money on his ranch from his limited wind farm, his turbines on there than he is from raising cattle. [LAUGHS] And that seems to be taking place with solar now.

BILL MCKIBBEN: For farmers, it’s often the difference between making a profit and not because for two reasons. One, you can get a good steady price for energy, many, many locked in many years into the future. But you can also– and this is a beautiful part of this story– do what’s called agrivoltaics. You can grow food and produce electrons on the same field.

And in fact, in an overheating world, Ira, shade is becoming an increasingly important commodity, including for farmers. I just was looking at the studies from a bunch of trials from Europe. They were finding things like increase in yields for wine grapes of 60%.

I spent some time in Vermont last year with people who are taking many of the solar farms in my home state and planting pollinator-friendly plants in between the rows. These are attracting orders of magnitude more pollinators than you’d find in a cornfield. And as a result, the farmers in the neighboring orchards are reporting that fruit set is up 30%, 40%, just because there’s suddenly all the pollinators that we desperately need. They’re figuring out how to deal with the biodiversity crisis at the same time that they take on the climate crisis.

So there are beautiful possibilities here. The only caveat, again, is that we have to seize them quickly. We’re going to run this world on sun and wind in 40 years, just from sheer economics. But if it takes us anything like 40 years to get there, then the planet we run on sun and wind is going to be a broken planet.

You know the science that’s coming out every week now about what’s happening with the ability of the Earth’s atmosphere to hold devastating amounts of moisture that pour down in the kind of floods we’re now seeing. We have to do this more quickly than economics alone will dictate because we’re deep in the midst of this climate crisis.

IRA FLATOW: And you’ve anticipated my last question here, Bill. Because you write in your book that the rate of international solar adoption in the last two years is exponential. But is it enough to make a noticeable difference on the actual effects of climate change that we’re experiencing now?

BILL MCKIBBEN: If we do what we’re capable of doing, then the answer is yes. It’s not going to stop global warming. That’s no longer on the menu. But remember, each tenth of a degree Celsius that we raise the temperature moves another 100 million human beings out of a climatically comfortable zone. So what we can do is arrest the rise in temperature somewhere short of where it’s currently headed. And degree that we can do that is an extraordinary gift to the people who will come after us.

That’s why this moment is so powerful. We have finally, in our hands, a tool that allows us to deflect what otherwise is the kind of apocalyptic course that we find ourselves on. By God, Ira, we need to seize it and seize it as fast and as hard as we can.

IRA FLATOW: Bill, remind us when Sun Day is coming up.

BILL MCKIBBEN: Sun Day is coming up on September 21. Sunday.earth is the place to join in.

IRA FLATOW: There you have it. Bill, as always, thank you for taking time to visit and share with us your new book. It’s a terrific book.

BILL MCKIBBEN: Thank you for talking– and more to the point, Ira, I just want to say, thank you for paying serious attention to this for decades. Very few people did for a long time, and I’ll always be grateful for your leadership on all of this.

IRA FLATOW: You’re welcome. As we say, if not now, when? Bill McKibben, author of the new book, Here Comes the Sun– A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization. That’s out August 19. And you can read an excerpt on our site, sciencefriday.com/solar.

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