Solar: It's about to be a whole new world.

Many conservatives appear to have an unshakable, bedrock belief that solar power will never be cost-effective. Talk about solar, and conservatives often won't even look at the numbers - they'll just laugh at you. Mention that solar power recently provided almost half of Germany's electricity at peak hours, and they'll say things like "Oh, Germany's economy must be tanking, then." It seems like almost a fundamental axiom of their worldview that solar will always be too expensive to exist without government subsidies, and that research into solar is therefore money flushed down the toilet.

I suspect that many of these conservatives came of age in the 1970s, when solar was first being mooted as the "green" alternative to fossil fuels. They probably saw solar as a crypto-socialist plot; by scaring everyone about global warming and forcing businesses to convert to expensive solar power, "greens" would impose huge a implicit tax on business, causing the capitalist system to grind to a halt.

Maybe some people did support solar for just such a (silly) reason. But far-sighted people knew that technologies often require lots of government support to develop (basic research being, after all, a public good), and they saw that fossil fuels would have to start getting more expensive someday.

And now, after decades of research and subsidies, we may be on the verge of waking up into a whole new world. The cost of solar power has been falling exponentially for the past 35 years. What's more, there is no sign at all that this cost drop is slowing. New technologies are in the pipeline right now that have the potential to make solar competitive with coal and natural gas, even with zero government subsidy. Here are a few examples:

1. Nano-templated molecules that store energy
MIT associate professor Jeffrey Grossman and others successfully created a new molecule [to] "lock in" stored solar thermal energy indefinitely. These molecules have the remarkable ability to convert solar energy and store it at an energy density comparable to lithium ion batteries...

2. Print solar cells on anything
An MIT team led by professor Karen Gleason has discovered a way to print a solar cell on just about anything...The resulting printed paper cell is also extremely durable and can be folded and unfolded more than 1,000 times with no loss in performance.

3. Solar thermal power in a flat panel
Professor Gang Chen has been working on a revolutionary new way to make solar power — micro solar thermal — which could theoretically produce electricity at 8 times the efficiency of the word's best solar panel...Because it is a thermal process, the panels can heat up from ambient light even on an overcast day, and these panels can be made from very inexpensive materials.

4. A virus to improve nano-solar cell efficiency
MIT graduate students recently engineered a virus called M13 (which normally attacks bacteria) that works to precisely space apart carbon nanotubes so they can be used to effectively convert solar energy...

5. Transparent solar cell could turn windows into power plants
...Electrical engineering professor Vladimir Bulovic has made a breakthrough that could eliminate two-thirds of the costs of installing thin-film technology [on windows] by incorporating a layer of new transparent organic PV cells into the window glazing. The MIT team believes it can reach a whopping 12 percent efficiency at hugely reduced costs[.]

And then there are the technologies that are out of the laboratory and being sold to customers. For example, here's this article from the website Grist:

The company is called V3Solar (formerly Solarphasec) and its product, the Spin Cell, ingeniously solves two big problems facing solar PV. 

First, most solar panels are flat, which means they miss most of the sunlight most of the time...The Spin Cell is a cone...The conical shape catches the sun over the course of its entire arc through the sky, along every axis. It’s built-in tracking. 

The second problem: Solar panels produce much more energy if sunlight is concentrated by a lens before it hits the solar cell; however, concentrating the light also creates immense amounts of heat, which means that concentrating solar panels (CPV) require expensive, specialized, heat-resistant solar cell materials. 

The Spin Cell concentrates sunlight on plain old (cheap) silicon PV, but keeps it cool by spinning it... 

[T]he company tells CleanTechnica that it already has over 4 GW of requests for orders. There is 7 GW of installed solar in the U.S., total... 

Maybe this tech or this company will peter out before reaching mass-market scale. But advances in solar technology are coming faster and faster. (Small, distributed energy technologies are inherently more prone to innovation than large, capital-intensive energy technologies.)

As the article says, this could easily be just an illusion. Don't believe the hype. But the point is that there are now lots of companies and academic labs making claims like this, and the rate appears only to be increasing. Sooner or later - and recent trends suggest "sooner" rather than "later" - one of these claims is going to be right.

And on that day, we will wake up into a whole new world.

Cheap solar energy will change pretty much everything. First of all, it will cause a huge boom among essentially all industries in every country (except for competing energy technologies, of course). Energy powers everything. So far, with nuclear technology stalled, we don't have anything cheaper than coal and gas for producing electricity. Our only hope for cheaper energy has been to find better ways to mine coal and gas. With cheap solar, that is no longer true. The Great Stagnation - which many suspect is really just an energy technology stagnation - would suddenly be a lot less scary. 

Mention this possibility to conservatives, and they will of course be skeptical. These days, you are less likely to hear outright denials of solar's cheapness; instead, the knee-jerk conservative response is "Well what about the intermittency? Solar power only works during the day!"

Two things to note about this. First, it's very telling that solar detractors didn't talk much about intermittency a decade ago. They didn't have to; solar was too expensive even at high noon. The fact that detractors are falling back on the intermittency argument shows how much the game has changed.

Second, the problem of intermittency isn't really a big one. Most electricity is used during "peak" hours, which incidentally is when the sun is shining. It's easy to imagine a future in which solar electricity powers the world during the day, and then gas takes over at night. But that will mean solar is the main source, and gas only a sideshow. (And that's even without any breakthroughs in energy storage technology.)

Anyway, it's looking more and more likely that conservatives are going to wake up one day soon, and look around and blink and find that one of their bedrock beliefs has suddenly been invalidated on a grand scale. If they're smart, conservatives will take this opportunity to discard the old belief that solar is the thin wedge of crypto-socialism, and recognize it for what it truly is - a breakthrough technology, being developed by entrepreneurs for profit on the free market.

In other words, exactly the kind of thing they should applaud.


Update: A commenter writes:

Great discussion. I am a conservative and I own a solar energy company. I do not understand your premise on conservatives aversion to solar power. By nature most conservatives I know desire to break free from the control of the energy,environmental, foreign wars and government lobby, and solar allows us to get there.

Good point. Some other good reasons why conservatives should be more pro-solar.

Update 2: I guess I should give a concrete prediction about when solar will actually start being cost-competitive with fossil fuels, without subsidies, in some locations for some customers. My prediction is: around 2020, or 7 years from now. 95% credible interval would be...um, let's see...2014 to 2040. So that's a fairly wide interval.

Update 3: Commenter Kevin Dick provides some numbers regarding current costs:

[T]he US DOE actually tries to calculate the cost of various energy sources using a complicated levelized cost model. See http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm. For power plants coming on line in 2017, their nationwide average estimates in $/MWH are: 

Conventional Coal: 98
Convenional CC Gas: 66
Solar PV: 153  

On average, PV has a ways to go. However, the lowest regional cost of PV is 119, while the highest regional cost of coal is 115 and advanced nuclear is 119.  

So there are probably places today where PV is cost competitive. But the market can surely figure this out at least as well as the government.

If these numbers are right, it means that we are just now hitting the point where solar power makes economic sense in a few places without any government subsidies. That's pretty amazing, if you ask me. I wonder how many of those places there will be in 7 years...