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Transcript for Season 5, Episode 1: The Surprising Success of Solar Power
[SFX: SOUNDS OF CASINO]
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Alright so, we’re in the Bellagio in the casino area. There are slot machines all around us, very bright lights, everything is extremely electric in every form of the word, like… [FADE DOWN]
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: It’s 3 pm on a friday, and the slot machines and casino games at the Bellagio are packed. The slot machines are loud, and their lights flash constantly. they’re impossible to ignore… which is the whole idea.
All 2,300 of these machines run pretty much all the time. Combine that with the hotel’s nearly 4,000 air-conditioned rooms, the big-screen TVs in the sports betting parlor, its two heated pools and four hot tubs, it’s more than 20 restaurants, bevy of ballrooms, and the famous bellagio fountains out front – and you’ve got a massive electricity bill.
If you’re the kind of person who worries about energy use and climate change, Las Vegas might feel like a nightmare.
But this power-hungry hotel isn’t as deeply extravagant as it might seem - at least from a carbon emissions standpoint. because a good portion of the energy powering the bellagio and other hotels owned or operated by MGM doesn’t come from fossil fuels. It comes from the sun.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: I mean, this is just highway, right? Highway and desert.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: I wanted to see exactly where this power was coming from. conveniently, it was close by. About a 30 minute drive from the Bellagio, out in the Mojave desert, is a massive solar farm.
Nathan Smith: Really close, this is 640 Acres. It’s one square mile. So it's big, but they make them a lot bigger.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: That’s Nathan Smith. He works for a company called Invenergy, and he’s the site manager for this solar array.
The array generates about 90 percent of the daytime power needed to run all of mgm’s properties on the strip, or about 40 percent of the total power these hotels need every year.
And MGM helped build it.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Obviously, we’re next to some pretty loud machinery. What am I hearing right now?
Nathan Smith: You're hearing the magic. So obviously, the panels take the DC power. It comes in the cable assembly cab line that we have right here, which is the red and black cables… [FADE DOWN]
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: The MGM solar array has a peak output of about 100 megawatts. Henry Shields, MGM’s vice president of research and analytics, put that in perspective.
Henry Shields: What does that mean? Well the best way to think about it, is the amount of electricity that comes in a year from a solar field that is rated at 100 megawatts is the equivalent of approximately the usage of 25,000 average homes in Southern Nevada. So we are managing an amount of energy that is equivalent of that.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: And that scale is reflected in its size.
Henry Shields: You could probably arrange and fit all of our hotels in what– the physical geographical area. I would not be surprised.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: It just keeps going and going, it’s row after row of solar panels…
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Large as it is, this one-square-mile field of solar panels is just a tiny part of a much larger project… one of the most ambitious projects humans have ever embarked on: transforming the world’s power supply from one that runs on fossil fuels, to one that runs on energy from the sun, wind, nuclear power, and other emissions-free sources.
[THEME MUSIC IN]
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Right now, over 80 percent of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels. That's coal, gas and oil.
Which is why, in 2016, more than 190 countries came together to sign a pledge to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by the year 2050. The pledge is called the Paris Climate Agreement.
There are many ways to get this done. Technologies like electric vehicles, nuclear power, green hydrogen and carbon removal may all play a part. And we’ll be getting into each of them later in the season.
But today, we’re talking about solar power, because solar energy holds some important lessons. for decades, the technology crept forward in fits and starts. lots of people said it would never work. Then, in the past decade, it’s grown at an incredible rate, with an eightfold increase in large scale solar projects since 2014. Solar panels are everywhere - on household roofs, on top of factories, in the Nevada desert. Solar has become one of the cheapest forms of energy we’ve ever had – it is now competitive with fossil fuels — and its success has remade the energy market.
So, how did solar power succeed? And what lessons are there for the other technologies that we’re gonna need in the global energy transition?
I’m Arielle Duhaime-Ross, and this is season five of The World as You’ll Know It.
[MUSIC OUT]
Greg Nemet: This is just an audio podcast, right? We're not using the video part.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Nobody's going to, like, analyze what books are in your bookshelf, everything's fine.
Greg Nemet: Good. That's easy.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Could you just introduce yourself? Maybe tell me who you are and what you do?
Greg Nemet: Yeah. My name's Greg Nemet. I'm a professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and I work on low carbon innovation
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Greg Nemet is who you call to understand how solar energy went from being a pipe dream to something regular people install on their roofs all over the world. His 2019 book is called How Solar Energy Became Cheap.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: I remember you asked a bunch of experts between 2008 and 2011 across the industry to predict what might happen with solar. And you wrote in your book that they were actually all wrong, every single one. What did they miss?
Greg Nemet: They were all wrong. And just to be clear, they were wrong on the high side. Like they all thought solar was going to be more expensive than it turned out to be. Like they would say, ‘well, it can only get up to 30% efficient and then that's it. We're done.’ Or, ‘We've got the wafers that you make the solar panels on only so thin and we can't get them any thinner.’
What did they miss? You know it's turned out there's an array of incremental innovations that have allowed us just to keep on going and the cost to continue marching down this learning curve in cost. We talk in terms of the cost of solar in these units of dollars per megawatt hour. What's a megawatt hour? It's pretty close to the average monthly electricity consumption of a single family home in the U.S. So one month, one megawatt hour. And the cost of solar in 1958, you'd be paying $300,000 a month for your electricity.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: In today dollars, right?
Greg Nemet: In today dollars, yeah.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Okay.
Greg Nemet: So you'd be paying millions a year for electricity if you use those panels. And then today, you're getting down to like $30 per megawatt hour.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: So… how did it all happen?
Greg Nemet: First of all, no one country did it. It was a relay race of one country building on the distinct contributions of the countries before it. No country that ever had a lead in solar managed to sustain that lead for more than like ten years. No company that was ever the biggest solar company in the world ever stayed that way for more than a couple of years either. And so if I would just sum it up, I would say the U.S. created the technology, the Germans created a market for it, and the Chinese made it cheap.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: The ability to produce an electrical current using light was discovered by accident in the 1830s. Fifty years later, inventor Charles Fritts put a crude prototype of today’s panels on a New York City rooftop. But it took an Einstein – the Einstein – to figure out exactly how solar cells worked.
Greg Nemet: Albert Einstein put a theory together for that, and that's actually what he won the Nobel Prize for this paper on the Photoelectric Effect. So he had this theoretical foundation that allowed the scientists at Bell Labs to start to turn that into an actual device.
Archival: “Turning sunlight into electricity. Scientists at the Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill, New Jersey, demonstrate a solar battery which converts light into power. A small amount, yes. But a big first for science.”
Greg Nemet: And in 1954, they did a big press release, The New York Times covered it on the front page, about the first efficient solar cell, and it wasn't a serious device, but within five years it gets put on a satellite. And the first customer is the U.S. Navy. And that's a response to this idea that the Soviets were getting ahead of us on the space race that we needed to compete. And then, from then on it was a pretty quiet period. Solar had some false dawns for the next twenty years. But then, president Nixon, Project Independence, energy for the first time becomes an important national priority.
Archival – Nixon: The sudden cutoff of oil from the Middle East had turned the serious energy shortages we expected this winter into a major energy crisis…
Greg Nemet: And so a lot of money goes into energy research and a lot of it goes to nuclear power, some of it goes into turning coal and natural gas into liquid fuels, but a little of it goes into solar.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: It was the 1970s and the U.S. government had begun to pump real money into new solar research and development.
They were also looking for new talent. People like Paul Maycock.
Greg Nemet: Paul Maycock. So he worked at Texas Instruments in the 1960s and early 1970s, and he got asked to run the new solar program in 1975 as part of Project Independence.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Maycock looked around at solar manufacturing and thought, “Ok, clearly these things aren't always going to be this expensive.” So he made a calculation about the future cost of solar that turned out to be incredibly prescient.
Greg Nemet: They knew at Texas Instruments that as they built more calculators, the cost came down. And this is this idea of the learning curve. And so he put together this projection in 1975 that said, if we keep building more and more solar, the costs will come down. And he calculated how much we would need to subsidize solar to get it to be competing with fossil fuels. And by around 2015, the cost will be lower than the cost of fossil fuels. And that’s really what we’ve done.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: In 1979, the Carter administration installed 32 solar panels on the roof of the White House, maybe the most potent symbol of the country’s energy aspirations. but neither the panels nor these aspirations lasted very long.
Greg Nemet: Things got really quiet and the U.S. really took its eye off the ball on solar. And with the Reagan election in 1980, the budgets got cut by 90% in the next couple of years. And so it really scattered the knowledge around and the people that had put in a lot of tacit knowledge in their own heads about how solar worked, had to go find work elsewhere or work in other sectors.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: The Reagan administration removed the solar panels from white house in 1986. But solar power didn’t die. It was just passed, like a baton, to other countries, including Japan.
Greg Nemet: Part of what happened in Japan was that Japan was potentially going to be the largest economy in the world. That was the idea in the 1980s. These large electronics conglomerates like Sony and Sanyo and Panasonic, they started incorporating solar into their consumer electronics, like calculators and toys and small lanterns that, you know, we're all pretty familiar with.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: You’re talking about an earlier history here, but my first interaction with with a solar panel was definitely on a calculator. Might have been on a watch, too. So, yes, this, this is stuff that many of us have interacted with, whether we realize it or not, from an early age.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Small electronics raised the visibility of solar. But Nemet says it was Germany that first put its full weight behind solar as a widespread energy source. And it started with a major policy shift.
Greg Nemet: This was probably the most consequential policy in the seventy year history of solar. They made it a priority and said, ‘We want to have a renewable energy law for wind and solar.’ And they passed that in 2000, that was the policy window. And in 2004 they really jacked up the subsidies for solar.
And so If you installed solar, you got compensated for twice what you pay for electricity. And it was guaranteed for 20 years and so it was like a no-brainer to do it.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: This really drove people to install solar panels. And the demand created a whole new market.
Greg Nemet: Equipment providers started to make equipment just for the solar industry. In the past, solar had used second hand equipment from the computer industry. But now the market was big enough that we could design equipment just for solar, and that allowed it to become a lot cheaper. And then the Chinese got involved.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: When China, this growing economic powerhouse, prioritized solar, things really took off. Between 2008 and 2013, Chinese manufacturing dropped the cost of solar panels by 80 percent globally.
And Nemet says that none of that would have happened if a single country had a monopoly on the technology.
Greg Nemet: No one owned it. The U.S. did the first part, the Germans did the second part, and then the Chinese figured out a way to connect the two together. And so I think it's really been this kind of relay race because each country that played a role here contributed something quite distinct.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: So panels got cheaper, and they got more efficient.
Greg Nemet: So what's changed is it used to be you put it in 1,000 watts and you only get, say, ten watts out and now we're getting 300 watts out. So for the same amount of sunshine, you're getting two or three times as much electricity coming out, and less of it just getting absorbed by heat from the panel.
[MUSIC IN]
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Which brings us back to the Nevada desert. Surrounded by mountains in the distance, the desert terrain was a perfect backdrop for row after row of solar panels. All of them, engineered to soak up the sun’s rays as efficiently as possible and turn them into energy. Standing in the sun, Henry Shields told me why MGM had decided to go solar.
Henry Shields: The primary reason was we wanted to control our own portfolio of electricity, and we wanted specifically to increase the share of renewable electricity that we were using.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: MGM wanted to make sure it could reliably and predictably estimate the cost of energy for its hotels.
Henry Shields: The market for buying electricity can be very, very volatile. So there's a natural hedge on that basis where we have the volume of power coming from this site that we know its terms and are settled, as opposed to dealing with what we can't control out in an open marketplace.
[MUSIC OUT]
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: What you're saying is basically like, we know how much the energy from this solar array is going to cost for the next few years, that's not changing. But you have wars, you have environmental crises, you have – the stuff that would influence the price of oil, for instance, that could fluctuate.
Henry Shields: Yeah. I think that's a very good way to say it. The world, and energy perhaps in particular, has been very volatile. And so that presents an element of risk to anybody that has to buy energy and that is everyone. And so one advantage we've got is at least some surety for this part of what we're going to be buying for the next few years.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: The energy that's being produced here is daytime energy, right? So what about nighttime? Las Vegas is a nightlife kind of place. What's the plan for that?
Henry Shields: Fair question. Solar photovoltaics run when the sun is shining and so sun comes up, sun goes down. We have to fill in the power that we use around the daylight, for example overnight, by other purchases on the open market. As we progress and add more and more renewable energy. We'll have to manage that disparity between daylight and evening hours. There are ways to do that. Like, for example, through battery storage or through other renewable means, like the wind doesn't stop blowing when the sun goes down, etc. And those are some of the things that we're thinking about for our next steps.
[MUSIC IN]
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Over the last few years, the U.S. government passed two major pieces of climate legislation: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill and the Inflation Reduction Act - the IRA. You’re going to hear a lot about these two initiatives over the course of this season, because both of these laws created major incentives for climate technology development.
As with the Paris Agreement, the U.S. government is planning on some changes to our energy supply. In a 2021 study, the Department of Energy laid out a roadmap. It outlined specific steps for how 45 percent of all U.S. electricity could come from solar by 2050.
Nathanael Greene: What we need by 2050 – so this is, like, the real full build out – is about half a percent of the land area of the United States. Half a percent, 0.5 of a percent.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: That's less than I would have assumed
Nathanael Greene: Yeah.
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Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Nathanael Greene is a Senior Renewable Energy Advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council. He’s spent the last 30 years making the case for green energy in the U.S., particularly wind and solar. He said that the amount of land affected by these technologies will depend on how we decide to expand them.
Nathanael Greene: And solar is going to become more efficient. So it'll get, you know, probably only go down. You can also say, well, by 2050, we could be impacting, if we're not careful about it, we could be impacting land that's like the size of Texas with all the wind and solar. Or if we're smart about it, we could be impacting the size of, like, Arizona.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Right.
Nathanael Greene: Still not tiny, but there's a huge choice there on how we do this.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: In 2023, solar accounted for just under 4% of total U.S energy generation. At the same time, the solar industry has been growing with 2023 marking the largest amount of solar installation in a single year in the U.S. How exactly would you describe the growth of solar over time in the U.S.?
Nathanael Greene: I mean, it's hard to describe it as anything other than pretty phenomenal. But the challenges, we need it to be really phenomenal, if that makes sense.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Extra phenomenal.
Nathanael Greene: Extra phenomenal. Super phenomenal. They installed 33 gigawatts last year, But what we need to be on track is something closer to 60 gigawatts a year.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Cheaper solar has definitely driven its expansion in the U.S. but there are still some hurdles to clear.
Nathanael Greene: The two biggest ones that we've identified are growing local organized opposition. And then, the grid itself.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: That first problem - local opposition – needs a bit of explaining. Big solar projects – the kind where a huge field might get covered in panels – are still pretty new. And that means that there can be some pushback.
Nathanael Greene: Part of what we're seeing is just a natural reaction from communities across the country to something new coming into their neighborhood. So that sort of just general human resistance to change, especially fast change, I think is part of what we’re seeing.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Some people really worry about solar farms being eyesores. And then there’s the environmental impact to plants and animals. But Greene says that local opposition isn’t always just about property values and the local environment.
Nathanael Greene: The other thing we're seeing, which is much more insidious, is as solar starts to eat the lunch of the natural gas CEOs and the coal CEOs, they are putting a lot of resources into trying to stop it. The level of misinformation is pretty stark. The good news is, like if you look at the polling, most people, you know, across the political spectrum come to clean energy with a very positive feeling like they want more of this stuff. You know, again, liberal or conservative, you know, Republican, Democrat. They want more of this.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: According to Greene, the commercial market has grown quickly, with large companies like Google and Walmart investing significantly in renewables.
Nathanael Greene: It has a potential to have a real sort of disproportionate impact in a good way, because when those type of customers go to a utility and say, ‘I want solar,’ or, ‘I want wind. I want clean energy. And not only do I want it, I want it 24/7. I want it to be able to really drive my data center 100% clean. That’s important to me and my customers expect this of us.’ That pushes not just the build out of more wind and solar, but it also pushes the whole grid that connects it.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: The grid.
Remember how Greene said there are two major issues blocking solar’s growth? The first is opposition from local groups and fossil fuel companies alike. And the second, according to Greene, is our very own electric grid.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: The U.S. grid is not straightforward. You can't just send energy across the country from, say, Missouri to California. Can you explain how the grid works?
Nathanael Greene: Oh, boy.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: In the U.S., there are three major sections of the grid – East, West, and Texas. Inside those, there are a bunch of smaller, regional systems, each run by their own operators. Some have multiple operators in one state, others span multiple states under a single operator. Nothing is uniform.
That system can help prevent a local or regional outage from spreading to a much larger area. But it also has some downsides, because certain regions just don’t have enough power.
Nathanael Greene: Our grid just hasn't kept up with the economic growth of the country and the geographic shifts in the country.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: There's a backlog of solar and other renewable projects waiting to be built and connected. But they’re stuck in a sort of limbo because the grid can’t handle all of them being added at once.
Nathanael Greene: In the United States, we have about 1.3 terawatts of capacity connected to the electric system.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: A terawatt is equal to one trillion watts — enough to power about 700,000 homes… for a year.
Nathanael Greene: We have 2.6 terawatts waiting to connect to the system. These are projects that people have identified. They’ve figured out a location. They’ve said, we want to build this. And most of that is solar, wind and storage.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Wow.
Nathanael Greene: So opening up the transmission system, de-bottlenecking the transmission system, is just hugely important to making our system more resilient and opening it up for all this clean electricity that wants to connect.
[MUSIC IN]
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: The changes utilities and governments will have to make to the grid… they’re substantial. And that can be dispiriting. So I asked Greg Nemet, who studied how solar got cheap, about this major remaining hurdle
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: So, solar has had this huge amount of success. And also we need a lot more of it still, right. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, it's being counted on to produce 45% of the U.S.’s clean energy by 2050. At the moment, it's only producing 3%. Is that a realistic goal?
Greg Nemet: Yeah, it is. I really don't – I don't worry about that. I think there's plenty of resources. There's plenty of capacity to build it. It continues to come down in cost and it's growing so quickly, like 30 or 40% a year that you can get up to those big numbers just with continuing the growth that we're already on. So it's – it does seem like small numbers now and big numbers later. But with the growth that we've had and where we are with the technology, there's really not a reason that it doesn't happen.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: We chose to start this season by looking at solar energy for a reason. It's a major success story for renewables on a scale we’ve never seen before. So understanding that story can help us see the path to net zero set by the Paris Climate Agreement more clearly.
Because, really, we can do incredible things. Solar went from a niche energy source to a true fossil fuel competitor in a matter of decades.
The question now is: can we do that for all the other technologies we’ll need to reach the goals that have been set out for us?
Next week, we’re going to try to answer that question for electric vehicles.
What will it take to electrify the American road trip?
David Ferris: We invest a lot of ourselves in our vehicles. They’re the only technology where we actually enclose ourselves inside it and move around in the world. And with the transition to electric vehicles, as anyone who’s driven one can attest, it feels different, it sounds different, it accelerates different.
Linda Nazar: There’s going to be different batteries for different, you know, shorter range, longer range, aviation, drones, things that’ll want to power a home robot where safety is absolutely critical.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross: I'm Arielle Duhaime-Ross. We’ll be back next week
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The World as You’ll Know It is brought to you by Aventine, a non-profit research institute creating and sharing work that explores how today’s decisions could affect the future. The views expressed don’t necessarily reflect those of Aventine, its employees or affiliates.
For a transcript of the episode and more resources related to what you've heard in today's episode, please visit aventine.org/podcast.
Danielle Mattoon is the Executive Director at Aventine. Bruce Headlam is the Editorial Director at Aventine.
This episode was produced by Alexis Moore with support from Elliot Adler, Lisa Cerda, and me, Arielle Duhaime-Ross. Additional writing and producing from Bruce Headlam. Our Editor is Eric Mennel. Kamilah Kashanie is our Managing Producer.
Original music by Vera Weber and Davy Sumner, with additional music from Epidemic Sound.
This episode was mixed by Marina Paiz. Our recording engineers are Pedro Alvira, Hannis Brown, and Davy Sumner. Additional support from Sharon Bardales and Jade Brooks.
Research and fact checking by Will Tavlin. Creative direction and design by Curt Courtenay and Lauren Viera. Music licensing by Extreme Music and Epidemic Sounds.
Our Executive Producer is Je-Anne Berry. Special thanks to Emerald O’Brien and Xandra Ellin.
I’m your host, Arielle Duhaime-Ross. Make sure to listen to us on the Audacy app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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