Home ›› 13 Nov 2021 ›› Opinion
Now that the dust has settled on the COP26 Glasgow meeting, can we say anything has changed? The powers-that-be tell us there are pledges for 85 per cent reduction in deforestation, reduced methane emissions in 80 countries, and an end to financing of overseas fossil-fuel projects by some countries. There was even a call for more US-China cooperation, despite one leader slagging off the other’s no-show. Alas, all a little vague with no enforcement mechanism to ensure compliance. Essentially, “the check is in the mail” or more “blah, blah, blah” as Swedish climate crusader Greta Thunberg reminded us yet again. One meme doing the rounds may have put it best, “Number of years leaders have been coming to COP26, number of years GHG emissions have dropped – 0.”
Undoubtedly, we are better off for all the agreements, but are we any safer? Is a coming 2.6-degree rise in average global temperatures better than a 2.8-degree rise, when low-lying island nations, at-risk river deltas, and even coastal cities such as Miami will still be swamped, precipitating a migrant crisis unlike we have ever seen? None of us have a crystal ball, but it is well past time to heed the warnings.
Nor do any of us have a magic wand, but some solutions are certainly within our means. Let’s hope that green thinking becomes green reality before it’s too late. Of course, we have had photovoltaic (PV) solar power since Bell Labs engineer Russell Ohl first cut up a piece of baked silicon and shone a flashlight on it in 1939, his colleague Walter Brattain and inventor of the transistor exclaiming, “this was the first time that anybody had ever found a photovoltaic effect in elementary material.” Wind power? — that’s been around since forever.
When the historians look back at the start of solar power in a couple of centuries as we do today at the origins of steam power during the Industrial Revolution, they will wonder why the world was so slow to follow Germany’s lead. Enacting the Renewable Energies Law (Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz or EEG) as part of a SDP-Green led-coalition, Germany introduced a novel economic incentive to encourage people to install rooftop solar panels for home use and to sell any excess electricity back to the grid — a so-called “feed-in tariff” (FIT). Signalling to the world the beginning of a renewable, clean-energy, millennium, the EEG bill was passed on February 25, 2000, in Berlin’s newly refurbished Reichstag. Some have called it solar’s Big Bang.
In the first month, applications were received for 35 MW, while the following year broke all records for grid-connected solar installations. Based on an earlier model in Aachen, Germany’s EEG included a feed-in tariff (in $/kWh), a payback period (e.g., 20 years), and a system limit (in kW). With a revised EEG in 2004 to provide more incentive, installations quadrupled in one year from 150 to 600 MW, while Germany’s solar industry grew into a multi-billion-euro industry, employing 25,000 people. By 2008 there were more PV-related jobs than in the coal industry, making Germany the global leader in solar with over 50 per cent of all installations. By 2016, there was over 35 gigawatts of installed solar. Germans are serious about the future and even have a word for “energy transition” — Energiewende.
Although green energy is still a small percentage of worldwide power generation (77 per cent derived from coal, gas, oil, and nuclear), some believe the world can run entirely on renewables given the political desire to remake our old-world infrastructure, using feed-in tariffs, carbon taxes, and the elimination of fossil-fuel exploration and extraction subsidies. In a 2009 Scientific American article, Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi calculated that there is enough energy from renewables to meet a projected 11.5-TW global load in 2030 from a mix of hydroelectric plants, wind turbines, geothermal plants, tidal turbines, wave converters, rooftop photovoltaic, and concentrated solar power (CSP) and PV plants. A joint 2021 US-China study published in Nature Communications noted that wind and solar power alone can power most of the world’s energy needs. The alternative is to build more coal-fired plants, at least 10,000 to cover our growing energy requirements. Or add more natural gas to the mix — a.k.a. methane.
Unfortunately, most governments continue to hamper efforts to rewire the grid, beholden to the past. Spain is one of the sunniest regions in Europe with 100 times more sun than Germany, but the Spanish government made a mess of its solar power strategy, actively discouraging rooftop installation. Spain originally supported solar power with an overly favourable subsidy for utility-scale farms (both PV and CSP) and a large financial investment, but the premium rate on offer racked up huge deficits, which eventually totalled more than €30 billion (~ €6.5 billion per year). By 2013, the Spanish government decided to discontinue the subsidy, effectively killing the domestic solar market and prompting investors to sue for breach of trust. When it had been originally announced in 2007, Spain’s solar-power buy-back at around €0.68/kWh was the world’s most generous “with few strings attached.” After the government bailed, the breakeven time stretched from 10 to 31 years.
In 2015, the Spanish government announced a further tax on feedback solar and household charge storage (such as a Tesla Powerwall), prioritising monopoly control of electrical distribution, disparagingly known as the “sun tax” (impuesto al sol). A world leader in wind power and CSP — both distributed through utility companies — the authorities claimed that a toll was needed on intermittent household users, essentially blocking rooftop solar from being grid-connected. As one Spanish economist noted, “Two years ago, if a taxpayer put a solar panel on his or her roof and recouped the investment, the electricity produced would be cheaper than that provided by a utility. So why aren’t there more solar panels in our cities? Because the electricity companies are writing the rules.”Encouraging independent power users is not in the interest of the private utility companies, who are generously underwritten by beholden governments. As such, other countries with much less sun than Spain have taken the lead in solar power, although Spain’s so-called sun tax on self-consumption was repealed after a change in government in 2018, prompting a consumer-based surge in new installations. Getting the balance right is never easy, but others would be wise to follow the German model, building from the
bottom-up.
