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1/10 I finally got round to reading Greg Nemet's "How Solar Energy Became Cheap: A Model for Low Carbon Innovation". Time for a book review in 10 tweets.pic.twitter.com/f7WeFH7Buw
2/10 Firstly, don't be fooled by the hype: it took a long time, as Nemet points out. The first commercial solar cell was produced by Bell Labs in 1954. Between then and solar making up just 1% of global electricity (in 2017) took more than half a century.
3/10 The formative phase of other energy technologies, before market penetration, often took equally long. Davy invented the electrical arc lamp in 1809, Faraday discovered electro-magnetic induction in 1835, but Edison only put together the first commercial system in 1882.
4/10 Clearly, we don't have that kind of time with climate change. The key to solar PV's success was twofold. Firstly, knowledge flowed freely across the world. This allowed successive waves of government policies to pick up the baton each time another one dropped it.
5/10 It also allowed the complementarities of different national innovation systems to come to the fore, as each successive country added its own unique contribution to the PV innovation story. The mobility of the industry allowed knowledge to quickly move to where policy went.
6/10 Secondly, it took - hold your breath - demand pull! Getting to the costs we have today required around 4 billion panels to be made over the course of PV's history. Demand pull policy, including across international markets, drove learning and manufacturing scale up.
7/10 There is a nice anecdote in Nemet's book in which he relates that Project Independence, the 1970s US R&D program that drove solar's initial wave, was deliberately styled on the Apollo and Manhatten projects. To those say we need an Apollo R&D project to solve climate...
8/10 ... tell them we already had one, and it gave us 20% of the solution 5 decades later! Climate change is just that complicated. Sustained R&D and, but above all demand pull, is what's needed. Nemet also rightly notes where the analogy of solar falls down.
8/10 Small unit sizes, high intersectoral and international spill-overs, standardization and mass-manufacturing meant that solar had all the ingredients for cost reductions with R&D and demand pull. The same model may work for advanced batteries, electrolysers, and DACS
9/10 It may not work for technologies with large unit sizes, small or slow production runs, and strong barriers to knowledge spill-overs. CCUS, low-carbon aviation and shipping come to mind. Here other innovation approaches may be required than the model provided by solar.
10/10 This is a fantastic book for all interested in the history of energy technology innovation, and its implications for climate mitigation. We need more of these deep dives into what has worked and what has not.
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