Pushkin. Here is an underappreciated world historical fact. In the past twenty years, the price of solar panels has fallen not by twenty percent, not by half, but by more than ninety seven percent, and as a result, solar power has gone bananas. The amount of solar power that was installed in the world over the past two days, just today and yesterday, is greater than the total amount of solar power that existed in the whole world in two thousand and four, and the rate of new installations is
still growing. This is very good news for the world. Wildly cheap and abundant solar power won't solve all of our climate problems, but it will solve a lot of them. Solar combined with batteries, will provide a huge chunk of
the world's electricity in the decades to come. On top of that, the spread of solar means that within a few years energy may be free, free energy in the middle of the day in many parts of the world, and that free energy will create new opportunities, new ways to generate and store fuel and heat, new ways to fight climate change. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is what's
your problem. Starting today and continuing over the next few weeks, I'm going to be talking to people who are in the middle of the solar power revolution, people who can tell us how this extraordinary thing happened, this ninety seven percent fall in the price of solar panels, and what it means for the world. My guest today is Jenny Chase. She's one of the world's top solar analysts. She's been
covering the industry for something like twenty years. She's a writer at Bloomberg ne Ef and she's also the author of the book Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon. I talked with Jenny about how solar power got so cheap and what it means for us now. So okay, So, so it's the turn of the century. Solar power is very expensive. It's four dollars per wattch just for the solar panels. When does that start to change? What sort of the first key moment in this story of solar power getting cheaper?
So the first the first moment was probably solar power getting like slightly more expensive. Because the Germans brought in an expanded version of a previous program called a Freedom tariff in two thousand and four. This was the by far the biggest incentive driving the most solar build that the world had ever known. And there was a kind of sucking noise as all the world's solar module stuff going to Germany.
Okay, and so it's great I think for world historical reasons that Germany did this. I wish they called it something other than a feed in tariff. Does it make more sense in German? I hate this phrase feed in tariff? Is it sensible in German? And it's just a bad translation?
No, not really, It's an unspizer for gutungen in German. And does it mean feed in tariff?
Okay? So what is a feed in tariff?
So it means that you get paid a fixed price for the electricity that you feed in to the grid. I see.
So it's basically the German government saying we promise to pay anybody who puts up solar panels a certain amount for the energy those panels produce.
For twenty years. I think it's almost twenty five years. It's twenty years now.
Okay, And so tell me more about this unfortunately named policy that helped kick off the solar power revolution.
Well, basically, for the first time, it was actually profitable to put solar power plants on fields. I mean historically, nearly all solo models have been as stall and rooftops because you just didn't buy the huge numbers of solar modules. You bought small numbers of solar models because they were expensive. And so for the first time there were actually specialized development companies who were rolling solar panels out on fields
and they were raising money from investors. And for the first because the feed in tariff is paid for the lifetime of the system more or less almost then you can do things like get bank debt for it. So banks and Germany also had a support for bank debt
for projects. But for the first time, European banks in particular could get really comfortable with the fact that the cash flows from these solar projects were extremely reliable, and so you could lend money to these projects at quite a low rate of interest.
Germany creates the feed in tariff. It means it's easier to get loans because now the government is promising to give you a stream of income for twenty five years, which is a lender's dream come true. It's a sovereign bond like investment. You start getting commercial development of solar power for the first time in the history of the world.
What happens next and you get manufacturers ramping up, So you get US sunhower and evergreen solar, Chinese Suntech, German Q cells coming in, and they went onto the public stock markets and raised money to expand their factories and also to secure supplies of their raw material, polysilicon.
Huh.
Now, until the Germans started this, this crazy solar expansion, the solar industry had got along just fine using offcuts from the semiconduct to industry huhs for their silicon.
The offcuts meaning just scraps from chip factories. Yeah, okay, So what does it mean for just this raw material, the silicon, once the industry becomes industrialized and starts ramping up after this German policy change.
Well, first of all, polysilicon factories are quite really expensive and they require a lot of technological expertise to do. There's nasty chemicals, there's a point in your where you have to be simultaneously heating and cooling different parts of a reactor. There's all kinds of gases that you're trying
to purify. There's a huge amount of incredibly technical expertise there, and at the time there were only really five companies that are worldwide that could do it, which was fine because they were only supplying the semiconductor industry, right, the demand was not that great, but solar panels use a lot of silicon compared with semiconductors, and so demand just went up.
So before the Germans, before two thousand and four, you could get silicon for about twenty five dollars a kilogram. What's the price go up to after when everybody's trying to get into the solar panel So.
The spot price went up to over four hundred kilogram.
Oh wow, So it went up by like, I don't know, almost twenty x exactly. So there is this thing people love to say about commodities, right, which is the cure for high prices is high prices, which basically means if there is a high price on some commodity thing, more people will will make it, we'll pull it out of the ground, whatever, and that increased supply will drive down
the price. And that happens here, right, More polysilicon factories come online, so the price of the raw material falls, and then demand for solar panels grows, but not as much as people expected. So there is this collapse in the price, right, this first big decline where between two thousand and eight and two thousand and nine the price falls from four dollars a WoT to two dollars a WoT. So what does this first big decline mean for the industry.
It has a little wobble, But the German market expanded because of course Germany still had its feet and tower, no cap and suddenly you've got two dollars what modules rather than four dollars of what modules. So developers in
Germany were basically going catching the US market. There's this blot called Jiga Shah, who some of you may have heard of, who since about two thousand and three had been running a business called San Edison that sold commercial rooftop solar in America to enterities like Walmarts.
And I should mention so Jigger Shaw, this guy you're talking about, he actually was on this show. He now runs an office in the US federal government that's basically in charge of lending out money to energy transition companies, companies you know, trying to make clean cement and that sort of thing. So what's he doing back at this time?
So At this time, he was convincing companies like Whole Foods and Walmart to sign twenty year power purchase agreements with his company so that he could put solar power on their roofs.
So it's again this idea of finance, this idea of if he gets some institution like Walmart that everybody trusts and everybody thinks is going to be around for twenty years to promise to buy solar power for twenty years, presumably, then he can get the financing to build the panels. Now I mean, is that the basic idea exactly?
And then he would go to the financiers and say, look, I'm selling this power to Whole Foods under a twenty year power purchase agreement. This is not risky. Lend me some money. And he had to do some convincing to very and find the right person in each division, but he did, and he was able to offer these retailers solar power at prices which were reasonably attractive to them.
So it worked, it worked, and I think he did very nicely in two thousand and nine because just like because this company also had fixed PRICEE power purcuse agreements in place, and suddenly modules were much cheaper than they'd expect.
Huh ah, huh, So his margins go up the cheaper modules are. He's still getting paid the same for twenty five years. It's great for him. So clearly the rise of Chinese manufacturing of solar panels is a big part of this story, is it? Where does that happen in the story.
It's been happening all along. I mean one of the companies that did an IPO in two thousand and five with Suntech, which is the Chinese. Essentially it's using technology developed in Australia at the University of New South Wales, but it's it is a Chinese company went by a Chinese person. And yeah, so the Chinese are there from the beginning. But around this time, the polysilicon price is
coming down as well. So the polysilicon price is coming down to the sort of sixty dollars a kilogram range from four hundred dollars a kilogram.
Okay, So this time where it's like twenty eleven something, it's.
About twenty eleven twenty eleven, module prices have dropped to one dollar or what one dollar?
Okay, so they've fallen in half again. They went from four to two and out of one. And you mentioned polysilicon. Silicon prices are coming down. That's because what people are building more and more of these factories. There's an economy of scale. It's that's the sort of classic industrial development.
What you're starting to get then, is Chinese companies figuring it out. So there were hundreds, I mean pretty probably literally one hundred Chinese companies attempted to make polysilicon. But making polysilicon is hard, and most of them failed, and some of them were extremely random companies. Then again, the largest polysilicon maker in China these days, Tongway, started as a fish food maker.
So fish food, and then they decided to pivot to polysilicon.
No, they still make fish food.
Aha, how'd that happen? Is there some genius there? They make a million different things? Or do they just make fish food in polysilicon?
They do just make fish food. No, now they make polysilicon fish food sold a wafers, cells and modules, U huh. But they still get about ten percent of the revenue for fish food.
Amazing. So with two thousand and eleven or so, China's kind of not just solar panel industry, but the raw materials, the polysilicon part is coming online, and you're getting this kind of manufacturing ecosystem for which China is famous in a lot of industries, right, Like they don't just make one thing. There's often a region where lots of different manufacturers are making sort of components for each other, and there's kind of a whole value chain in one place.
That happening in China at this point.
This is probably when it's starting to appear. So in Jiangsu Province, if you want to buy encapsulant or silver paste, then you can talk to somebody twenty kilometers away instead of talking to somebody in another country. And this is starting to be very convenient.
Like clearly the price has kept falling by a lot from one dollar, Like why does the price keep coming down after two thousand and eleven.
So, solar panels are a manufactured commodity, and they they have something called the experienced curve, which probably a lot of things have, but then they're difficult to notice, particularly I they're not very commoditized. So Moore's law is a special sort of experienced curve. But the experience curve just means that every time you double cumulative experience that we have as a species doing something, we get a certain amount better at it, And in the case of solar panels,
it's probably about twenty eight percent better at it. And that comes from having a better recipe to get your solar models more efficient, and you slicing your wafers more thinly, all kinds of little tweaks you make to use less material and to make your machines through output more energy and to make the thing more efficient.
Uh huh. So I mean, in a way, is like the big story of technological development in human life, certainly since the Industrial Revolution a couple hundred years ago, right, you know, people make these incremental improvements one after the other, and things get cheaper and cheaper. And you're saying, that's basically how the price of solar panels fell all the way from four dollars a WAT to less than ten
cents a WAT, which is where we are now. So I want to kind of take stock, like just what does this wild decline in the price of solar panels, Like, what does it mean for the world.
I think it's basically really good news. So the power only only supplied about six percent of the world's electricity last year. But it's growing and nobody and you couldn't stop solid now if you wanted.
To, just because it's so cheap. Like, yes, there are subsidies for it in various ways, but even without subsidies, in many cases it would be the best option.
Is that the case exactly? And there are places where I mean, I love talking about Pakistan right now because Pakistan probably has about twenty gigawatts of relatively new solar panels, most of which the normal grid, that the traditional grid has no idea about where they are or whether they exist.
Huh. So it's just people like going to the store buying solar panels and putting them up in their backyard or on their roof.
And it's factories who are putting solar panels on their roofs. I mean, they're probably not just going to the store. They're probably buying the re bulk. It's farmers putting them in instead of to run their irrigation pumps instead of these or generators. I actually only know about this because I can see it in Chinese customs data. And then when you go to Google Earth and look at Lahore or Karachi or is Lamabad, you can see that all
the roofs have solar panels on them. A lot of the activity in the developing world increasingly is outside government programs. I mean, there are some countries which in the developing world too, that have government supported billoms, like Vietnam also built about twenty gigawats of solar into nineteen and twenty
twenty under a probably slightly badly calibrated government program. But increasingly it's actually the businesses and individuals that are buying solar themselves because it's just less effort than trying to go through the government than trying to get support.
In a minute, what the world will look like in the relatively near future when solar energy is free in the middle of the day in a lot of places. Give me the big picture for like, where we are twenty years ago solar twenty yeah, twenty ish years ago, twenty five years ago. Certainly twenty five years ago, solar power was like, if you're a rich hippie in Marine County, maybe you spend a crazy amount of money to put solar power on your roof to feel good about yourself. Right,
it was a kind of fringe thing. Where are we now?
The sun is one solar power was the by far the largest source of new installed capacity last year, so of any generations. Now people hate it when you compare capacity, but about four hundred and forty four gigawatts of solar panels were installed last year worldwide. Okay, And bearing in mind that the whole power grid after that is about nine three hundred gigawads. So if we keep adding half a terror what a year, and we'll do more than that this year is going to be about six hundred
gigawads this year. I mean, adding half a terror what every year to a nine point three terror what grid, you pretty quickly get to real amounts of contribution. And this is why I'm pretty sure that by twenty thirty power will basically be free whenever it's sunny.
Power will basically be free whenever it's sunny in around the world pretty much twenty thirty is soon, especially in like energy terms, like twenty sol.
Is fast, like most energy infrastructure is really slow to build, but solar is really fast and the only way. And we're already getting to the point where in California, even in Germany on a sunny day, the wholesale power price goes very low or even negative and what you have.
So the most likely thing, the most sensible thing to do in response to that, is to hand free power at that time to the customers so they can actually increase their demand at that time and then charge them more later when the sun's gone down.
Huh. So let's talk about that in a little bit more detail. So there is this thing that is already true in California among other places, right, which is in the middle of the day, because of the growth of solar there is more electricity being generated than people are using, right, great, amazing, And so one option is you could just essentially not take that electricity, right, you could just not use it. But you're saying that's not what's going to happen. Tell me more about that.
Like, some of that will definitely happen. I mean, we call it curtailment when you literally turn off the solar panels to stop them doing any damage to your grid. And you can do that. It's super easy. It's actually way easier than it is for fossil fuel plants. What makes most sense is to offer three your extremely cheap power to people in the hope that they'll actually use it.
You know, if as an individual you might turn your air conditioner on to make your house really nice and cool, so you can turn it off in the evening and your house will stay comfortable into the night. You might do your laundry, and if you're in an industrial company, you can do a lot more. So. If you have a meat freezer, you can chill it to minus twenty seven degrees celsius and then let it warm up to
minus nineteen. When power is expensive, you can charge your electric car, I mean especially if you can charge at work. You can heat your water for a shower later. There were all kinds of things that we can do to shift when we use power into the daytime. And of course, if you've got batteries, you can charge your batteries.
Yes, So what's happening with storage, right, that's the sort of complementary piece of this that everybody always talks about what's happening with storage.
So storage is definitely growing. I just looked at the new energy storage market outlook from my colleagues, and a new build energy storage grew seventy six percent. They estimate that it's grown about over seventy percent from twenty twenty three to twenty twenty four.
So it's growing. That's good, and it's basically lithium ion batteries and kind of batteries that are in electric vehicles.
It's mostly just lithium ion batteries, you know, because electric vehicles have driven them down the experienced curve as well. And electric vehicles, laptops, phones, these are actually quite They're getting more and more affordable, and so I think we can probably assume that by twenty thirty you have batteries charging and discharging every day to absorb some of that daytime solar power.
And the question is how much?
Question is how much are yeah?
And what does that turn on? I mean, is it just how fast do lithium ion batteries get cheap? Is that the key unknown question?
It does. But I think what people don't realize when they talk about solar and batteries being the answer to everything, But first of all, they may be write in climates
that are not very seasonal. So if every day you have a long day and then a similar length night, then it may actually be fairly feasible to run your civilization on solar and batteries in places like northern Europe where I am, then you're going to hit the problem that the biggest battery you can imagine will not hold power from summer to winter, and the economics of that would be terrible because the first bunch of batteries you put in that charge and discharge every day, their cost
per cycle is whether to be low because they have a lot of cycles. However, your next wave of batteries isn't necessarily needed every day, and if they're cycling every two days, for example, that it actually doubles the cost per cycle.
The less you use it, the more expensive it is, sort of per unit of service is providing you.
The economics are building a battery, the cycles once a year are almost impossible. I mean, you might be able to do something like feel a huge tank with the chemical fuel, or feel a huge big tank hot of salt, like you could. What you could do is make a big tank of salt molten and then use that heat in the winter, because salt is relatively cheap, so you could have a lot of it to make hot.
So you could build essentially like a giant salt cavern under the earth, spend all summer heating it up, and all winter using the heat to whatever makes demon spin a turbine that's that's.
A treat more to heat your home. I mean, that would be the probably the easiest way of doing it. But exactly malta salt is kind of a pain to work with as well, because it tends to if it gets above about two hundred, if it gets below about two hundred and seventy one celsius, as I recall, it freezes, and so if you've got any pipes that it's meant to be going down, your pipes are now full of just non molten salt.
Yeah, So is the sort of medium term unsolved problem long duration storage for these reasons, like you clearly see a very short term path to free power in the middle of the day. It sounds like you're pretty optimistic about kind of overnight charging, like you when you can charge in the day and discharge overnight, like lithium ion will do that. But once you get to the sort of seasonal problems, is that where we don't really have a clear answer.
Is it a lot less obvious what the answer is, which is why as a solar analyst, I say a lot that we should be building wind as well. I mean, because the great thing about wind, especially in a climate like Northern Europe's and a lot of others around the world. Is it blows at night and in the winter.
Uh huh, it's a good compliment. So wind has gotten cheaper, but not nearly as much cheaper as solar. Right, it didn't win clearly in the way that solar won. Why not?
Wind is heavy engineering, it's not bulk manufacturing. That said, there have been huge improvements in wind, in wind turbines, and in wind maintenance, and in fact in financing for wind and wind havings are just getting bigger. I mean one of the things you can do with wind turbines, as as the materials to make blades get better and better, you can make wind turbines bigger and it's windier high up.
So wind has gotten cheaper, but it seems like building, you know, gargantuan blades, gargantuan turbines. It doesn't have that beautiful commodity race to the lowest price element that solar panels have that dead simple They don't have to move once you make them. You can make a little one or a big one just by adding more. Like I love how commodified solar panels are. I know it's a
terrible business. To be in. But it's the same reason, right, it's a terrible business to be in because it's this amazing, cheap, relatively simple thing that that is quite different from a turbine the size of a giant building that is a thousand feet up in the air, or whatever it really is.
I mean, solar panels are the first major eeditacy generation source that isn't doesn't evolve anything moving.
Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah, nothing to get stuck. You've been doing this job, You've been following the solar power market for twenty years. When you look ahead another twenty years from now, what do you think will be going on?
Ah, that's such a hard question. I mean, I think we will. I'm actually relatively optimistic about us having us achieving a worldwide energy transition. I think that in twenty years nations that are currently developing will have substantial economies running substantially on solar power and batteries, and I hope they also have air conditioning and ways to make to protect themselves from the effects of extreme climate change, because
we will also have increasing the extreme climate change. So I think the developing world will be substantially solar power at least the bits of bit of the sunny and realize that's not actually the whole developing world. I hope there is a I hope there's there are much more widespread transmission grids around the world because it's often sunny and windy in one place when it's not sunny or
windy in another place. And if the more we can we can run big power lines to smooth that out and sell each other power, the easier this whole energy transition will be and the less gas will need to burn.
Sometimes there's there's a project now where they want to build solar panels in Australia and run a wire to Singapore to send the energy to Singapore. Right, I love that one. I love that idea. Is that Is that a real thing or is that just like silly?
It's a really big cable. I mean, like, I hope they've figured this all figured out, But that is that's a four thousand kilometer cable.
Uh huh. I mean there's cables. I know they're different kinds of cables, but like they ran a cable across the Atlanta for Telegraph whatever one hundred and fifty years ago or something.
Yeah, I mean that's that's a good reason to think it is possible. It's I think it's technically possible. I suppose part of me wonders whether whether Singapore went decided it's easier to buy power from, for example, Indonesia, which is closer. Yes, I mean Australia was just so far away from Singapore.
Yes. I mean that's why it's sort of so thrilling to consider it, right, this idea of like, well, we got sun down here, they need power up there. Let's just build a big cord.
I mean, also with a solo analyst, I prefer the idea of running tables east to west. I mean, if we just put a big cable all the way around the world, we're sorted.
Right, because it's always sunny somewhere, so.
We're sunny on about half the world at one time.
Yeah, it's funny. I didn't even think of that, of course. Well, so a couple of things. We haven't talked about the grid. We're talking about wires and plugging things in. We haven't talked about moving power just from one place to another place not so far away. You know, I understand that the grid is in many places, including in the developed world, not optimally efficient and is a sort of binding constraint in some instances, like tell me about the grid.
Well, grids are actually pretty efficient. There's so as you move from quite a centralized power system with large power plants in a couple of locations to a decentralized system where you've got wind farms and solar farms all over the place being connected, you need a lot more grid, okay, And we estimate that investment in the grid has to be about sixty percent of the investment in the actual solar and wind farms themselves by twenty thirty to stick
to a their zero pathway. So investment in the grid needs to be substantial. We need to like bolster the short range grid because literally, if you're trying to feed too much electricity at one point in the at one time, it gets stuck and you can't get it all swhere, and then some of your farms don't get paid.
And also, just to be clear, we're electrifying, right, We're not only switching the source of electricity from fossil fuel to solar power, but we're also taking things like stoves and cars that have been previously directly powered by fossil fuel and powering them with electricity, So we just need more wires. However, we're getting the electricity or more room in the wires pretty.
Much, yes, yes, But building grids specifically, for example, a solar plant is quite tough because the utilization of the grid will be.
Quite low because the solar plant is not providing electricity all the time exactly.
I mean, solar plant output is very peaky. It really does peak in the middle of the day. You can have panels that follow the sun and then it's less peaky, but it's still not a big part of the day. So yeah, I mean, basically we have to build more grid. We have to connect both both local grid and also long range grid just to connect whole regions.
And is that happening, Like is that becoming a constraint already? Like where are we in terms of the relationship between the development of solar power and the development of the grid.
So if you walk into any solar conference all around the world and say, oh, the problem in this market is grid, then everyone will nod and say this person knows what they are talking about, because the developers all know how difficult it is to get Sometimes it's just that they need to get permission to connect to the grid, and because there are hundreds of people trying to get permission to connect to the grid, and the grid has to be quite choosy, and they don't and grids just
a lot of the time they just don't have the manpower to make that decision when you've got when you've suddenly got hundreds of power plants asking whether they can join your wires like this is not necessarily a decision making process that grids were set up to do. So sometimes it is as simple as manpower. Sometimes it's actually a question of building, of their being substantially more grid
built needed. But grid is always a problem, and there are there are thousands of gigawatts of solar and wind projects on the planning table but waiting to get permission to connect to the grid and get built around the world.
So you mentioned that the US is weird in terms of solar power? Why Why is the US weird in terms of solar power?
So the US is much slower to grow than you would expect of a market of its size and wealth and support level, And partly that's because it's got quite a Nimbi problem. It's hard to get permission to build plants. It's also partly because the US is an expensive place to buy solar panels, which again is partly because there's been a trade war between the US and China since
twenty welve. Obama brought in the first import tariffs on Chinese modules, and consistently solar modules in the US are at least double the prices that they are elsewhere.
Oh wow, So so you were saying that the global price of solar panels now is nine point something per what? Not nine cents per what?
You would play at least twice that in the US right now?
Oh wow? So it's like twenty cents a watt instead of nine point four sense per what?
It's putty something since per what I think, although although you might get some that some that are in containers that are port and need to be sold in a great hurry for a bit less.
Uh huh. So is that just because of tariffs that exist in the US and not?
No, that's basically tariffs are also the uncertainty because because the US import strips are quite complicated, if you're a developer, you don't want to take the risk of buying a module that will be stopped at customs, So there's a there's a strong sort of pushed towards just a few name brands, and that also pushes out the prices a bit. But yeah, it's basically the tariffs and the trade war.
Is there is there a US solar panel manufacturing industry that that tariff is protecting.
There wasn't for a long time. There was First Solar, which manufactured mostly in Malaysia, and there is a move to onshore it specifically since the Inflation Reduction Act passed. The inflation of Reduction app is quite is pretty generous for solar installations, but it's really generous for solar manufacturers setting up plants on US soil. And there has been a boom and announcements of solar factories returning to the US. We'll see how they do.
Uh huh. Let's talk about the Inflation Reduction Act the IRA. It's a giant bill. Despite its name, it's much more about sort of subsidizing the energy transition than about specifically fighting inflation. How does that affect the adoption of solar power in the US?
I mean, to me, it feels like somebody is pushing down really hard on the accelerator while the handbrakes on.
So the break is the tariff and the accelerator is the inflation reductory, which.
Is the tariff. And also the difficulty with planning, with getting planning permission to do things in the US, and also the fact that grid is also an issue in the US as everywhere else, and the gas and the gas is the fact that the Inflation Reduction Act will give you loads of money if you've managed to get one of these projects through. There is a reason why one of your fastest growing regional markets is Texas because
there's not a lot of breaks in Texas. There are data center setting up there that will liquase power demand, soldar and wind boom really booming there.
There's not a lot of weight in Texas.
There's not a lot of nim It's a very very it's a market where you can actually build things.
It is interesting, right because politically, solar power has this left valance in the US, has a very sort of democratic leaning valence. Texas is a very republican state, and the fact that solar power is booming the most there is really telling. It really is.
And batteries too. I mean, Texas is building when solar and batteries at one of the most rapid paces of any o region in the US.
So you started covering this field in two thousand and five, right at the moment when it was all starting, and nobody knew it at the time. But when you tell the story, it all sounds sort of clear in retrospect, right, like, solar panels are this fundamentally very simple thing. They don't have to move, The input is pretty straightforward. Why has it been so surprising? Why did nobody see it come in?
I think what we So, there are a couple of things we didn't expect. So we didn't quite estimate correctly how fast demand would pick up, and how and actually how quickly governments would come in and set their own subsidies realizing that the subdy didn't have to be so high anymore, and how fast organic markets would kick off.
And we basically underestimated human ingenuity and how easy it is to deploy something that is like a black rectangle that comes out of a factory and you put it in the some somewhere and wear it up.
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. I want to finish with the lightning round, and I want to talk a little bit about a particular part of your book. So in the middle of your book, right after a chapter called how markets set power prices, and right before a chapter called solar after the two thousand and eight crash, there's a chapter called networking and other stuff not taught at state schools. And you're not talking about like energy networks. You're talking about, you know,
going to meetings and introducing yourself to people. And I'm curious, Like, it's an interesting chapter. I want to talk to you about it, but like, what is that chapter doing in the middle of a book about energy financing?
So, Jacob, I wrote this book for somebody like me who is not particularly posh, came through the state school system, which is the sort of government school system, and literally had nobody to tell me things like how finance worked or what you should wear to a meeting. And so I wrote this book for somebody looking for a job in something vaguely green. And this is one of the things that I had to learn. And I think it would have been useful to me to have someone sit
down and say these things. I would have been a little bit less awkward in many many meetings.
So you do in this chapter just sort of give some simple tips, like what are you say your three top tips for networking?
I think you can ask people what they do, and then you can ask them how they make money from it, because they'll give you a much more interesting answer than if you just let them talk about how their business is great, because everyone talks about that.
What's one thing I should not do if I'm at a networking event.
Probably talk too much to somebody who doesn't want to listen.
Uh.
I mean it doesn't have to be very often, but I do sometimes get cornered by people who want to talk about something that is very specific that I and I will try very hard to find it interesting.
But what's your getaway strategy in that setting?
Ah? So this is a tip from from somebody else. If you get drinks, get two drinks, and then if you're stuck in a conversation that you're not happy with, you say, oh, I have to go and find the person who I got this drink for, and then you get away. And if it's a really interesting conversation, you have two drinks.
That is a very that's a very like prepared Do you actually walk around networking events with two drinks in your hands for just such a circumstance. Occasionally, there's a section in this chapter called being female pros and cons? What are the pros and cons of being female in networking settings?
To be honest, I think I've benefited over the years from the fact that people would would rather.
Have a woman on the panel on a panel like Edimon on a.
Panel in like Visible. Like I'm sure that my profile as an analyst has been improved by being a woman, and I'm grateful to that.
And is the converse of that or is the flip side of that it's been improved because there aren't very many women in the field.
Yeah, but there are more than they used to be, which is amazing. So this is working, Like the strategy is working, so there are more and they're also more confident to actually say proper things.
Kem and I ask you a couple of non networking questions. What's one thing you wish more people understood about energy?
I wish people would understand the difference between capex and op X. Uh huh, because like there's a huge difference, but things that have high upfront cost and low running cost that there are ways of comparing them to things that have constant cost.
And just to be cool. CAPEX is capital expenditure. Op X is operating expenditure right.
Exactly, Yes, upfront cost and running cost.
Basically, Huh, why is that such a big deal.
It's the one thing that frustrates me that people will talk about cost, and they'll talk about solar power being free, for example, and not think about the fact that this is a problem, like if the soul of power is not free, is merely paid upfront. And I think if people want to understand energy systems are actually almost any system, you need to have some understanding about comparing upfront costs and later savings.
If you weren't writing about energy, what do you think you'd be doing.
I hope I was writing about sustainable agriculture. I mean what I always wanted was to work in some way towards tackling climate change. Maybe I have trained as a heat pump installer, and I would be going around putting in heat pumps. Maybe I would work for a local planning office processing planning applications for wind farms. That's also a valid part of the energy transition. I think if you want to have hope for the future. You need a new feel climate anxiety, which I think a lot
of us do. It's really important to have something that you can do every day where you think, if I do a good job here, the world is better than if I did a bad job or didn't show up for work.
Jenny Chase is the author of Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon. Next week on the show, I'll talk to the founder of a company that's trying to take that extra solar energy in the middle of the day and use it to solve one of the biggest unsolved problems in the energy transition, generating the heat we need to make everything from steel to clothing. Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was edited by Lyddy Jean Kott and engineered by Sarah Bruguier. You can email us
at problem at Pushkin dot FM. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem? With the introduce so physical st