Checking in on solar power

In this episode, longtime solar industry analyst Jenny Chase, author of Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon, catches us up on the current state of the global solar industry and looks to where it’s going.

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David Roberts

Jenny Chase went to work for the London-based startup New Energy Finance in 2005, straight out of university in Cambridge. She founded its solar analysis team and helped establish some of the first reliable indexes of prices in the solar supply chain, as well as some of the first serious industry models and projections.

The solar power industry barely existed then. Now solar is the cheapest source of new power in most markets and the International Energy Agency expects it to dominate global electricity by 2050. Throughout that heady transition, Chase has run and grown the solar analysis team, even after the company was bought by Bloomberg and became Bloomberg NEF in 2009. It has become one of the most respected teams in the business and a widely cited arbiter of industry data.

In 2019, Chase wrote a book summarizing what she learned over her years analyzing the industry. It is called Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon, but the title is somewhat misleading — it covers solar power finance but also solar power history, technology, and policy. It is leavened here and there with droll bits of biography or advice from Chase and contains an incredible amount of information in a highly compact and readable package, just over 200 pages.

A heavily updated second edition was released this month. Also this month came Chase's yearly “opinions about solar” Twitter thread, which is highly anticipated among a certain kind of energy dork [waves].

I figured it would be fun to have Chase on the pod to talk about the current state of the solar industry, whether anything but standard-issue solar PV is ever going to flourish, and what the world needs to help balance out increasing penetrations of solar.

Okay then. Jenny Chase from Bloomberg NEF. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Jenny Chase

Thank you so much for inviting me, David.

David Roberts

I read your book over the past week and it's just delightful. I really recommend it to anyone. I feel like the title is a little well, I guess it does say without the jargon, but I just feel like the word finance is going to scare off some readers. But it's really just a nice, extremely approachable introduction to this whole thing of solar in the markets and how it's funded and how it's proceeded over the years. So I really was charmed by it. I noticed actually that it had a little bit of kind of autobiography in the first few chapters and I thought it was really kind of funny.

I had never really thought about it, but you and I have some parallels in our history. We sort of snuck into what was at the time a relative backwater in the world right around 2004, I think, both of us, and then just kind of hung around.

Jenny Chase

Absolutely. And I can't get another job, so I'm stuck doing solar at Bloomberg NEF now.

David Roberts

Same, we've been doing this for so long now that I couldn't really do anything else, but we just kind of planted ourselves and stuck around until the area we were in suddenly became huge around us.

Jenny Chase

It's a pretty good place to be planted, though. I mean, back in 2004, I was looking at this industry, and I started specializing in solar in late 2005. And I was like, "One day this might be 1% of global electricity supply, but, you know, that's worth working on. Even 1%, it's worth working on if we can make it clean." And last year, it was 5%, and it isn't done growing.

David Roberts

Same, I started covering climate change during the George W. Bush administration. I was like, maybe someday someone will do something about this. Maybe someday we'll pass legislation. And then here we are. PV dominates the world. People are targeting net zero. How things change.

Jenny Chase

Yes.

David Roberts

So I want to ask you, you have been following now the solar industry. I mean, honestly, one of the coolest, most fun, most sort of, like, optimistic of all the dark things happening in the world. I know so many people who basically are pinning, like, 98% of their hopes for the future of humanity on this market that you follow. So what a fun thing to be following. But here I'll start with a very big, broad question. A big part of the history of solar that you recount in your book, and I've written on this before, too, and there's been academic papers on it is a series of public supports.

Basically, you get the German feed-in tariffs. You get huge Chinese manufacturing subsidies. Spain had a little period of insane feed-in tariffs for a while. So it was definitely public policy that brought solar from obscurity, where it was when you first started following it, to borderline ubiquity now. And I just wonder, could solar survive now? Could solar PV would solar PV survive and thrive now without public supports?

Jenny Chase

Oh, absolutely. You couldn't stop solar if you wanted to stop solar, David, at this point. Those subsidies, yes, they were needed in the early years. They drove growth. They drove companies to actually make these things. But the thing about humans is that when they make things, they get better at making things. And that has been an incredibly powerful story. Solar modules cost over $100 per watt in the 1970s, in today's money. By the time we started in 2004, they cost about — it was about $4 a watt. Stayed that way for about four years because there was very strong demand, again, driven by subsidies, and then started falling again.

And, you know, last week they were 12.8 U.S. cents per watt. And I am super annoyed that didn't get into the book, because, of course, I had to lock down the book four or five months ago.

David Roberts

What was the cutoff price that you managed to squeak into the book?

Jenny Chase

I think it was 24 in the end. And I hope anyone reading the book realizes that I knew that was not the final price.

David Roberts

Well, this is the insane thing about this market, about this whole technology, is it's such a moving target. And the reason I started with that question is that I think to people in our industry at this point that has sunk in. It's clear that this is a juggernaut, that this is the cheapest thing going now and that you couldn't stop it if you want to. But I honestly don't know if that alone just that basic fact has penetrated this sort of general public consciousness. I feel like people generally still see solar as kind of a nice liberal extra whipped cream on top kind of treat you get with some extra subsidies.

But it really is the cheapest source of energy now, which is such a fundamental break from when we started, that I just feel the need to repeat it.

Jenny Chase

I mean, it is. I would slightly clarify that by saying it's the cheapest source of bulk electricity generation in many countries. There are some countries in northern Europe where it actually pro