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rooftop solar
Climate Hope—and Wisdom—From Abroad
As Trump tacks tariffs onto films from “foreign lands,” we can still be inspired by other countries’ environmental visions, from China’s affordable electric vehicles to Germany’s balcony solar.
May 06, 2025
Every once in a while our mad king hits on an accidentally poetic turn of phrase in one of his strangely punctuated missives. In one of this week’s movie-based announcements (not the one about reopening San Francisco’s notorious island prison, which apparently followed a showing of Escape From Alcatraz on the Palm Beach PBS station) (not PBS’ fault, support them here), he declared that he was henceforth “instituting a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”
It was the last phrase—“foreign lands”—that attracted me; it conjures up European monarchs of earlier centuries dispatching sailors to see if fountains of youth or dragons or some such might be found off the edges of existing charts. (No, as it turned out, just Indigenous people who could be forced to part with their “foreign lands”). It’s a reminder that for Trump, and for many of us, a myopic focus on what’s happening here is a mistake, because we’ve long assumed that we’re at the head of the world. That unconscious supremacy—born in the actual enormous lead we had in living standards in the rubble of World War II—no longer makes much sense. So just a quick survey of what those funny people in other places are up to.
The rest of the English-speaking world seems set to keep moving forward into a working energy future. And the rest of Europe too.
Take China, emerging as Earth’s first electro-state. The Wall Street Journal had an excellent account this week of just how far our economies are diverging. Autos are a key piece of technology, one that produces both a large supply and technology chain, and a clue to a country’s identity. In America, Peter Landers, pointed out, the “standard family choice” is a $50,000 gas-fired SUV; in China,
A majority of new vehicles sold in China are either fully electric or plug-in hybrids, and a look around the recent auto show in Shanghai showed that local makers have mostly stopped introducing new gasoline-powered models. In the U.S., by contrast, the traditional combustion engine still powers about 8 in 10 new vehicles.
The price difference is overwhelming. Chinese car buyers no longer need to debate whether an EV can be made affordable, not when a decent starter model costs $10,000 and a luxury seven-seater with reclining massage chairs can be had for $50,000. Because of customer demand, even the low-end models come with advanced driver-assistance software.
Ten thousand dollars for a “decent starter model.” We’re not talking junk: “a new Toyota electric-powered sport-utility vehicle for about $15,000, complete with sunroof and cup holders.” Some of this comes because Chinese automakers are paid less (enough, however, to afford a new car); some of it comes from increasingly roboticized factories; and some of it comes from government subsidy. Because the government has decided it wants to own the future: Whose cars do you think are going to do better in, um, “foreign lands”? Bloomberg, in March, reported that Chinese automakers were “taking over roads from Brazil to South Africa”:
In South Africa, China-made vehicles account for nearly 10% of sales, or about five times the volume sold in 2019. In Turkey, Chinese brands claimed an 8% share in the first six months of 2024, up from almost none in 2022. In Chile, they have accounted for nearly a third of auto sales for several years running.
China sends more vehicles abroad than any other country, and its passenger car exports surged nearly 20% to 4.9 million in 2024 alone, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers—from less than 1 million in 2020.
In Brazil,
Luiz Palladino, 61, an engineer who has owned GM and Honda vehicles in the past and currently drives a Haval H6 EV, compared the car with much more expensive luxury cars.
“The moment I got into the car I thought: It’s in line with BMWs, Audis, with top-notch car finishing,” he said. “It has everything I want.”
Ok, that’s China (where thanks to huge solar buildout the use of coal for electricity dropped 5% in the first quarter, even as electricity demand surged). Now let’s look at Britain, where humans first learned to burn fossil fuels in quantity in the 18th century. There, the Labor government is apparently set to announce that all new homes will come with solar panels up top.
Housebuilders would be mandated by law to install solar roof panels on new properties by 2027 under new rules, seen by The Times, which ministers have claimed would slash energy bills and reduce emissions.
The change was estimated to add about £3,300 to the cost of building a semi-detached or terraced house and just under £4,000 for a detached property.
However, it was expected that new homeowners would recoup the extra costs within four years, with an average three-bedroom semi-detached saving more than £1,000 a year on energy bills.
This makes eminent sense because
Fitting solar power during construction is much cheaper than adding it to older buildings, which requires costly scaffolding and often new wiring. The payoff will be lower bills for consumers and lower emissions from buildings, which have become the second-biggest carbon polluter after transport.
And it comes despite the efforts of former British Prime Minister (and current Saudi lobbyist) Tony Blair to scupper such advances. Keir Starmer has four more years on his electoral mandate; Canada’s Mark Carney five, and after last week’s smashing election win Australia’s Anthony Albanese has three; the rest of the English-speaking world seems set to keep moving forward into a working energy future. And the rest of Europe too.
In Germany, for instance, as many as 3 million apartments may now have “balcony solar” arrays, solar panels that can be bought for a few hundred euros at the equivalent of Home Depot, hung from the railing of your veranda, and plugged straight into the wall, where they provide a reasonable amount of power. As France 24 reported recently:
City authorities in Frankfurt gave Christoph Stadelmann, a 60-year-old teacher, half of the 650 euros ($676) he paid for his kit at the beginning of last year.
Stadelmann expects to make his money back within three years.
Mirjam Sax said she would recommend balcony solar panels in spite of Germany's sometimes grey weather.
"If you've got a balcony, if you've got a bit of sun, you can put up a panel or two to see if it's worth it," she said.
"It's easy, and there's a price for every budget."
You can’t do that in America, because our country has fallen behind these foreign lands. As Grist reported last week, Underwriters Laboratory, which certifies appliances, hasn’t bothered to do the work to approve the systems, which means they can’t legally be installed in most places.
These challenges will take time and effort to overcome, but they’re not insurmountable, advocates of the technology said. Even now, a team of entrepreneurs and research scientists, backed by federal funding, are creating these standards. Their work mirrors what happened in Germany nearly a decade ago, when clean energy advocates and companies began lobbying the country’s electrical certification body to amend safety regulations to legalize balcony solar.
In 2017, Verband der Elektrotechnik, or VDE, a German certification body that issues product and safety standards for electrical products, released the first guideline that allowed for balcony solar systems. While such systems existed before VDE took this step, the benchmark it established allowed manufacturers to sell them widely, creating a booming industry.
“Relentless individuals” were key to making that happen, said Christian Ofenheusle, the founder of EmpowerSource, a Berlin-based company that promotes balcony solar. Members of a German solar industry association spent years advocating for the technology and worked with VDE to carve a path toward standardizing balcony solar systems.
Happily, we have some “relentless individuals” here as well—Cora Stryker, for instance, who this year started Bright Saver—to bring the balcony technology to America. I talked with her at some length last week: I’ve stuck our exchange into question-and-answer format below
- Is America finally getting balcony solar!? Tell me about how you heard about this new development and got involved.
Yes! We’re already doing installations in the SF Bay Area and we are looking for early adopters to help us start a “balcony” plug-in solar movement in this country like the one we are seeing in Germany. As you know, plug-in solar isn’t just for balconies. It can go almost anywhere—in the backyard, the side of a house, in front of a garage, etc. My cofounders and I started Bright Saver because we believe that the benefits of producing clean energy at home should be available to everyone, not just homeowners with good roofs who can commit to spending $20-30k, although our system is also great for folks like me who have maxed out our rooftop solar capacity and want more power. Rooftop solar is all or nothing—what we are offering is a more modular, lower-commitment, more affordable, and versatile solar option as an alternative.
In this political climate, I think we are all looking for solutions that give the power to us, literally, rather than relying on government to solve climate.
I first heard about balcony solar when you started writing about it, actually! Then I met my cofounders Kevin Chou and Rupert Mayer—tech entrepreneurs who got the climate call—and I joined as the long-time climate advocate among us.
2) What's your hope for this project—how big can this get?
We can get big. Really big.
Seventy percent of Americans can’t get rooftop solar, but millions in that group want it. How can we produce more clean energy nationwide? We believe the solution is to address accessibility first, giving everyone an option to produce solar at home. This will give millions of Americans an option to become primary producers of their own energy, saving on electricity bills, and, we believe, bringing millions into the climate movement, giving us all hope that the power to address climate rests in our hands.
If we do this right, we follow in Germany’s footsteps, and produce several gigawatts of clean energy annually. However, unlike Germany, we can’t take the risk of letting it take 10 years to ramp up because we don’t have 10 years when it comes to climate. That’s why we started Bright Saver—to make this happen more quickly than it would on its own.
3) The U.S. has different wiring than Europe—explain if this is a problem and how it's overcome?
That’s been a structural—pun intended—concern for some time. In Europe, you can buy plug-in solar units at the grocery store for a few hundred Euros, plug them into the wall, and you’re done. Unfortunately, we can’t use those European systems because, as you point out, we have a 120-volt electrical system and most of Europe is on a 230-volt system.
Here, we are limited in the number of systems that are compatible with our electrical system and they are expensive and not easy to install. We exist to eliminate these barriers to adoption. For instance, as a nonprofit, we keep our prices low and we install the system, a complicated process that requires a licensed electrician.
My job is to put myself out of a job—if we jumpstart this movement now, we get more manufacturers into the game; competition drives down prices and increases ease of use, which stimulates more widespread adoption; and the virtuous cycle continues on market forces without us. In this political climate, I think we are all looking for solutions that give the power to us, literally, rather than relying on government to solve climate.
4) What do you need from local authorities to really make this happen?
We are primarily installing units in the backyard or front yard, where we believe permits are rarely a concern. I have young kids, and I can’t think of any parents who got a permit to put a trampoline or a slide in the backyard. Similarly, the 800 watt units we are installing are impermanent structures which you plug into an outdoor outlet like an appliance. They are half the electricity load of a hair dryer, and we include a smart power meter to make sure they never backfeed into the grid.
What we need is local and state legislation like what just passed unanimously in Utah. As you know, that legislation eliminates the ambiguity when it comes to mounted plug-in systems so folks can put them anywhere that is convenient for them. In fact, part of our nonprofit’s mission is to build a national coalition of advocacy groups to help pass such legislation in all 50 states—so please get in touch if you know groups that might want to join our coalition!
5) Why do you need donations to get this started?
Without donations, we stay small and grow slowly. I’ve been approached by several venture capitalists who say to me, you have huge market potential—let’s talk! But we want to keep lowering and lowering prices as we get bigger, not feeling the pressure of investors wanting us to raise prices and increase profits. We are a nonprofit because, well, w're not here to profit—we are here to bring solar to everyone who wants it.
We have a big vision to give all Americans the option to become energy independent. We plan to include home battery storage in the future, but we are only four months old, we have limited funding, and we need to start somewhere. Donating or becoming an early adopter will make it possible for us to stay true to our mission of serving everyone with solar energy and growing the climate movement so that every household of every means can start producing their own energy from the sun.
Many thanks to Stryker and her friends for getting this off the ground (and if you think it tickles me that she first read about the concept in this newsletter, then you’re right; that’s why I do this).
And here’s the thing. Though Americans aren’t used to it, there’s sometimes something useful in being behind all those other foreign lands. They’ve figured out what needs to happen, and all we have to do is copy. That’s what China did for decades—maybe it’s our turn. And now I’m going to go watch a bunch of foreign movies before the tariffs kick in.
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Some Bright News for a Dismal Week
Solar panels have, over the last months, suddenly gotten so cheap that they’re now appearing in massive numbers across much of the developing world.
Sep 17, 2024
Not perhaps a week for good news—not with former U.S. President Donald Trump trying to initiate a pogrom in Ohio (and the Secret Service protecting him from a crazy right-winger). Not with insane floods across Central Europe where the blue Danube is now a raging brown monster, or in the Lake Chad region where hundreds are dead.
But there’s something else going on behind the scenes—silently. And it’s happening in places where people need it most.
Solar panels have, over the last months, suddenly gotten so cheap that they’re now appearing in massive numbers across much of the developing world. Without waiting for what are often moribund utilities to do the job, business and home owners are getting on with electrifying their lives, and doing it cleanly.
This won’t just transform the climate, it will transform lives.
How do we know? Basically by good sleuthing. The first account I saw came from Azeem Azhar and Nathan Warren. They were looking at Pakistan, where power prices in the wake of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion have soared so dramatically that sales of electricity have gone down 10% in the last two years. That should cripple a country—”yet somehow it’s economy grew by 2% anyway.” Again, that should have been impossible: if there’s a truism, especially in the developing world, it’s that growth in energy use is tied to growth in economies. So what was happening? Basically, Pakistanis were buying huge quantities of very cheap Chinese solar panels and putting them up themselves. Pakistan, they reported, “has become the third-largest importer of Chinese solar modules, acquiring a staggering 13 gigawatts in the first half of this year alone.” This is particularly astonishing because the country’s entire official electricity generating capacity is only 46 GW. In other words:
in just six months, Pakistan imported solar capacity equivalent to 30% of its total electricity generation capacity—an absolutely staggering amount.
Energy analyst Dave Jones has gone to great lengths to track this spread on Google maps, finding building after building across the country with big new solar arrays on the roof. For middle-class Pakistanis, they can pay off the investment in a few years selling back power to the grid; in poor areas, things like tube wells for irrigation are now increasingly run on solar. This means not just a decline in natural gas use for centralized generation; it also means many noisy, dirty, and expensive diesel generators that used to provide backup power are being turned off. The great solar analyst Jenny Chase at BNEF has found much the same thing. As Azhar and Warren point out:
by the end of the year, Pakistan’s distributed solar system could be nearing half the capacity of its entire grid! This isn’t just growth; it’s a silent revolution in energy production.
Were it just Pakistan, it would be a wonderful story but perhaps not definitive. But I had a long talk last week with Joel Nana, an analyst at Sustainable Energy Africa in Capetown who told a very similar story. He’s been leading a project to help countries across the continent deal with the increase in distributed generation, and he reports something similar happening in country after country—Zimbabwe, Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, on and on.
“In Namibia we uncovered they have about 70 megawatts of distributed generation—that’s rooftop solar pv that’s about 11% of Namibia’s installed capacity. Eswatini, it’s an old figure, but they’re already at 30 megawatts and it’s a very small country. That’s about 15% of Eswatini’s installed capacity. South Africa is the biggest market, and it has five gigawatts of distributed solar—about 9% of South Africa’s installed capacity.”
“You will not see these numbers anywhere,” he said. “They’re not reported in national plans, not anywhere in continental statistics. No one knows about them. It’s only when you speak to the utilities,” and even they know mostly about the larger installations—there are doubtless far more hut-scale systems across Africa. People are driven by the high cost of electricity, but also by its unreliability—in much of the continent “load-shedding” is endemic, with diesel generators roaring on to compensate, at least at businesses solvent enough to afford it. But diesel fuel is expensive, and generators are hard to maintain. PV is “a no-brainer for most businesses if not all,” he said. “The prices just make sense. The African market is a huge market for some of the Chinese manufacturers, so we have availability—huge availability. The market is flooded with panels from China.”
All this, he points out, is happening without any help from governments, and except for South Africa without financing from banks, who haven’t yet learned how to evaluate the credit risk. The continent needs more trained solar installers, and coordinated standards. On the other hand, many nations probably won’t need the big and expensive increases in bulk electric supply they’ve been predicting. And Nana and his colleagues are working hard to figure out how to make the most of this—how to turn solar pv into real economic assets for entire communities, through practices like net metering.
This is extraordinary news, in large part because it’s happening in places where people most need power—I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Africa looking at communities getting their very first power thanks to the sun. (And I’m headed back as soon as the election is over, so watch this space for more). This won’t just transform the climate, it will transform lives.
It comes on top of more visible good news—the IEA said this weak that oil demand around the world is softening because of “surging” sales of electric vehicles. In China, demand for gasoline will peak this year or next and then decline sharply. Britain, where the coal era was born, will close it’s last coal-fired power plant at the end of this month, while California—arguably Earth’s most modern economy—has managed to weather its worst heatwaves ever without blackouts this simmer thanks to ever-growing batteries of… batteries. (The state’s one big recent blackout came when a gas-fired plant went down in Pasadena). Hey, photovoltaics are getting so sensitive that they’re starting to be useful indoors, where they could replace small disposable batteries.
But nothing beats the idea that solar panels are suddenly sprouting, as if by magic, precisely where they’re needed most. If we can get there fast enough—before we’re overwhelmed by droughts and floods—then a sunny new world is entirely possible.
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Solar Power vs. The Darkness of Trump
We desperately need clean energy now. That’s what this election is about.
Sep 08, 2024
To understand the primal stakes in this year’s election, and to understand the very exciting possibility for rapid progress in the climate fight, a new set of numbers is extremely useful.
They come courtesy of Electrek’s Michelle Lewis, reporting on the longtime renewable researcher Ken Bossong’s analysis of the data on electric generation provided each month by the Energy Information Administration. And what they show is the remarkable transformation over the last decade. In 2014, solar power “utility-scale solar provided a mere 9.25 GW (0.75%) of total installed US generating capacity.” Which is to say, less than one percent. But “by the middle of 2024, installed solar capacity had risen to 8.99% of total utility-scale capacity.” (Add another few percent for rooftop distributed solar).
That still sounds like a relatively small percentage—under ten percent. But in fact what it measns is that we’ve finally moved on to the steep part of an S curve, and if we can keep up anything like that pace of expansion it won’t be long before the numbers are truly incredible. Indeed, as Bossong pointed out on Twitter, “the combination of utility-scale and “estimated” small-scale (e.g., rooftop) solar increased by 26.3% in the first six months of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.” Statistics numb the brain so let me say it another way: we are on the cusp of a true explosion that could change the world. We are starting to put out the fires that humans have always relied on, and replace them with the power of the sun.
Pretty much the same thing is happening with wind, and pretty much the same thing is happening around the world. Bloomberg predicted last week that global installations of new solar modules would hit 592 gigawatts this year—up 33 percent from last year. The point is, when you’re doing this a few years in a row the totals start to grow very very fast. When something that provides one percent of your electricity doubles to two percent, that doesn’t mean much—but when something that supplies ten or twenty percent goes up by a third that’s actually quite a lot. And more the next year.
For a long while, you could see this growth coming, but it hadn’t yet added up to enough to materially dent the use of coal and gas and oil. But that is starting to change. Here’s the most important number I can give you, supplied to me this afternoon by Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, who has been keeping careful track of the California electric grid. As I wrote earlier, it’s been moving to renewable energy faster than almost anywhere in the country. The result: “For the (almost) 6-month period from March 7 to September 4, fossil gas use on the grid was 29% lower in 2024 than in 2023.” I’m going to repeat that. “For the (almost) 6-month period from March 7 to September 4, fossil gas use on the grid was 29% lower in 2024 than in 2023.” That is, the use of natural gas to generate electricity has dropped by almost a third in one year in the fifth largest economy in the world. In 2023, fossil gas provided 23% more electricity to the grid than solar in that six month period. In 2024, those numbers were almost perfectly reversed: solar provided 24 percent more electricity than fossil gas, 39,865 GWh v 24,033 GWh. In one year. That’s how this kind of s-curve exponential growth works, and how it could work everywhere on earth,
All this is the premise for understanding why the fossil fuel industry is so freaked out about this year’s election. They can read these charts as easily as anyone, and they know what’s coming. If it keeps happening at this pace, it will quickly start reducing demand for their products—they have vast reserves of, say, natural gas in the Permian Basin that will stay there forever simply because there’s no market. They have to lock in customers right now, or else watch their whole business start to slowly, and then quickly, fade. And with that fade will come, inevitably, reduced political power. Right now they can still frighten politicians—hence the fact that Kamala Harris, with Pennsylvania on the line, has to insist she supports fracking. But four years from now, not so much.
And if Trump wins, there’s tons that he can do to slow the transition down. He can’t “kill wind,” as he has promised. But he can make it impossible for it to keep growing at the same rate—right now there are teams in the White House managing every single big renewable project, trying to lower the regulatory hurdles that get in the way of new transmission lines, for instance. A Trump White House will have similar teams, just operating in reverse.
Again, he can’t hold it off forever—economics insures that cheap power will eventually win out. But eventually doesn’t help here, not with the poles melting fast. We desperately need clean energy now. That’s what this election is about—will Big Oil get the obstacle it desperately desires, or will change continue to play out—hopefully with a big boost from the climate movement for even faster progress.
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