The enshittification of solar (and how to stop it)
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I'm only a few chapters into Bill McKibben's stupendous new book Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization and I already know it's going to change my outlook forever:
McKibben is one of our preeminent climate writers and activists, noteworthy for his informed and brilliant explanations of the technical limits – and possibilities – of various climate interventions, and for his lifelong organizing work.
Here Comes the Sun is a capstone on several years' worth of surprising, infuriating and inspiring newsletter articles, particularly about the unheralded, unanticipated, and unbelievable growth of solar. Everything else might be utterly fucked, but solar is going great.
In McKibben's telling, everything about solar is going better than anticipated. Solar efficiency is increasing exponentially with prices falling through the floor. The material bill for solar is also in freefall. Everything surrounding solar is going amazing, too. Battery capacity is improving even faster than solar generation, and the best new batteries use the incredibly abundant element sodium (not lithium) to store those useful electrons. Long-haul transmission lines are crisscrossing the world.
Hyper-reliable electric cars keep getting cheaper, and the batteries are lasting much longer than we used to think they would. Some of these vehicles are nigh-miraculous, from the ebikes that get 5 miles to the penny, to the world's heaviest EV, a dump truck that shuttles to a quarry atop a hill where it is loaded with rocks, then regeneratively brakes its way back down the hill, accumulating enough charge to get back up to the top again (a perpetual motion machine!). Heat pumps and induction tops are actually more efficient than burning natural gas – in other words, it's cheaper to convert sunshine into electrons and electrons into heat than it is to just burn gas:
Then there's the capacity. China's solar capacity growth is insane – the solar equivalent of a new coal plant is coming online every eight hours. But it's even more intense in poor regions of the global south, like in Pakistan, where a legion of installers have learned their craft from Tiktok videos set to songs from popular musical films, leading to one of the most rapid electrification rollouts in human history. The closer a country is to the equator, the more sense solar makes, of course, so solar is sweeping some of the poorest countries in the world, liberating them from the need to attract foreign currency they can use to buy dollar-denominated barrels of oil.
Everything we thought would be a solar bottleneck turns out to be a feature, not a bug. Perhaps you've heard that solar is unsustainable because it competes for agricultural land, making starvation the price of clean energy. Wrong: solar provides shade for many crops that have been withering in the soaring heat of a climate-wracked world, and limits evaporation, reducing the amount of water needed to produce food crops. What's more, the cooling effect of that soil-retained moisture helps keep the shade-providing solar panels within their optimal operating temperature, increasing the efficiency of their power generation. And of course, every time someone switches from hydrocarbon fuels to solar, they reduce the demand for ethanol, and a third of America's corn goes into making this stupid, wasteful fuel additive (and corn is America's most prolific crop). That's land that can be given over to growing useful food crops. Solar is increasing our agricultural yields, not competing for farmland.
Then there's the material bill for solar: a recurring (and legitimate, and worthwhile) concern about electrification is that it comes with a vast material bill that will necessitate massive extraction projects. There's good reason to worry that the copper, lithium and conflict minerals needed for planetary solarization will come at the expense of the despoilation of habitat, the poisoning of indigenous people, and the ruination of miners.
Happily, this, too is turning out to be a tractable problem. First off, because the material bill for solarization just isn't that big when compared to the amount of fossil fuels we consume every year. To create the batteries we need to keep the whole world's lights on when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing, we will need to extract one seventeenth of the amount of minerals we burn every year in the fossil fuel system:
And while some of those materials will have to be replaced – necessitating more extraction – most of them can be recycled. The biggest bottleneck in recycling complex manufactured products like batteries is that it's energy intensive, but solar makes energy cheap. We're starting to see solar-powered solar-panel recycling operations that recover 99% of the materials in used up and superannuated solar panels, and use those materials to make new, modern, super-efficient solar panels:
And holy smokes is solar going to provide us with lot of cheap energy. Materials scientist Deb Chachra's book How Infrastructure Works estimates that we could give every person in the world the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, only colder) by harvesting 0.4% of the solar rays that strike the Earth's surface:
The last time I spoke with Deb, she waxed lyrical about how all that too-cheap-to-meter energy will make it possible to recover materials from old energy systems that weren't designed to be broken down and re-integrated into the material stream at their end-of-life, and how it will also allow us to economically make new devices that are designed to be broken down and re-used when their duty-cycles end.
Solar is a technology, not a fuel. Every generation of it is cheaper and better. There's so much low-hanging fruit for solar conversion. In Saul Griffith's Electrify, he offers lists of simple, tried and tested tweaks to safety codes that dramatically reduce the cost of installing and maintaining solar:
That's the good news. You probably know about the bad news: Donald Trump explicitly promised the fossil fuel industry legislation that he would kill renewables if they donated $1b to his campaign, which they did:
Money talks and bullshit walks. When Texas Republicans introduced state legislation requiring power companies to install a new fossil fuel plant every time they added new solar capacity, the bill died in a roar of opposition from rural, Trump-voting Texans who didn't want "DEI for natural gas":
There's nothing about renewables that cuts against the aesthetics or values of the conservative movement. Generating your own power on the roof of your own homestead (or with a clip-on panel attached to your apartment balcony) is fully compatible with the ideal of a sovereign individual, not beholden to a government-regulated power monopoly.
Solar also fits neatly within the idea of Christian Dominionism, that "God gave man all the things of the Earth." An existence dependent on setting fire to a dwindling supply of critters that died millions of years ago leaves a lot of value on the table. If God wants us to breed chickens to have vast drumsticks and breasts, why wouldn't He want us to capture the hyperabundant sunshine He sends our way every morning at dawn? Why would we limit ourselves to this inefficient, inconvenient and expensive ancient garbage?
What's more, solar is cheap – over the past year, we've crossed a threshold, and solar is now substantially cheaper than coal, natural gas or oil. It's getting cheaper still, with no bottom in sight. No wonder solar deployment is growing exponentially. Exponential growth is notoriously difficult to really get your head around, hence the ancient parable of the chessboard and the grains of rice:
Some of McKibben's critics have fallen into the same trap as King Shihram, failing to appreciate how fast the small absolute magnitude of an exponentially growing number can grow to engulf the world:
But the fossil fuel industry understands exponentials, and they're freaking the fuck out. Unluckily for them, their champion Donald Trump is singularly bad at making the case against renewables. Trump's big line for getting people to hate offshore wind is this bullshit story he tells about turbines confusing whales:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66928305
Earth to fascist: your people seriously don't give a shit about whales dying. If you're going to make up a story about wind turbines killing some kind of charismatic macrofauna, at least pick something deranged Maga freaks pretend to care about, like eagles or some shit.
Same goes for Trump's story about the environmental hazards of solar panels, that "rabbits get caught in solar panels":
But unfortunately, Donald Trump isn't in charge of ratfucking the solar transition. That role will fall to much smarter people from the fossil fuel industry, the same people who masterminded decades of climate denial. They're scarily good at their jobs.
From the fossil fuel industry's perspective, the problem with solar isn't that it's different from oil and coal. Big Carbon isn't shy about capex – they're always blowing millions on cool, eye-wateringly expensive new gadgets for sucking old dead things out of the land and sea.
The problem is that the sun shines everywhere. The fossil fuel industry is many things – ardent génocidaires bent on the extinction of the human race for profit – but what they are above everything else is rent-seekers.
The whole point of an extraction economy is to control a key factor of production so that other people need to come to you in order to do everything else. The ideal oil economy consists of a series of holes in the ground surrounded by people with guns, owned by a cartel that chokes off supply to maximize profits while leaving a highly visible share of the world's population shivering in the dark as a warning to anyone complaining about their prices.
Fossil fuels are valuable because they are a chokepoint on the entire productive economy. Anyone who's seen the Mad Max documentaries knows how this goes: even the most mid, paunchy, straw-haired boomer with volcanic bacne and shitty dress-sense can seize power over the whole population if he controls the supply of one of life's essentials.
The fossil fuel industry is a magnet for people who love a chokepoint. These people are born tollboth operators and they never stop hunting for turnpikes. They are landlords for ancient corpses, charging the whole world rent to keep the lights on. They are chokepoint-trophic. You can't be a warlord amid plenty – why would anyone get down on all fours and volunteer to be your footstool if they can get everything they need over the next hill?
I think there's a collision looming between these rent-seeking missiles and the ever-cheaper, ever-better solar world. Eventually, these garbage people will stop trying to halt renewables, and they'll start looking to own them.
You can already see the first stirrings of this: the more daring carbon barons are starting to flirt with geothermal and nuclear, and they're awfully fond of hydroelectric. Whatever the merits or demerits of these technologies, they have the (dubious) advantage that they are amenable to rent-extraction. To put up a dam, you need to own the land around the river. To run a nuke, you need to own a uranium mine.
Even geothermal is ineluctably place-based: there are lots of places where a borehole will hit something hot and bubbly, but it's an expensive proposition with a big, fat capital moat that limits competition. Anyone can slap a solar panel on their roof – but you can't dig a geothermal borehole in your back yard with a garden spade.
It's hard to find a chokepoint for the sun, but you know what has a lot of chokepoints? Technology. Remember, solar isn't a fuel, it's a technology. When big companies use technological chokepoints to screw their customers and competitors, we call that enshittification:
There's already tons of enshittification that's oozed into the cleantech sector. EV manufacturers like to boast that their cars are "software-based." Practically speaking, that means that when the manufacturer goes bust, all the cars sitting in inventory are permanently bricked:
Tesla is the greatest enshittifier the automotive world has ever seen, with scams that make Dieselgate look like amateur-hour. Imagine selling an EV and charging a monthly subscription fee to drivers who want to access more than half the charge in their batteries:
Residential solar inverter companies like Solaredge require an internet connection and shut themselves off after a protracted period of no-contact with the company's servers:
As with the solar revolution, the solar enshittification revolution is just getting started. There are so many ways that a "smart" device can be remotely downgraded. There's a "smart" sous-vide wand that got a mandatory software update that deleted its most popular features and turned them into monthly subscription "upgrades":
There's no (legal) reason that Samsung or LG couldn't do the same thing to the new induction top you spent thousands of dollars to buy and install (or built a custom kitchen around).
If I was a Big Oil company, I'd be investing heavily in the control systems for EVs, solar inverters, induction tops, heat pumps, smart thermostats, and anything else that depends on an internet-connected computer to operate. I'd flood every sales channel, offering zero-money-down installations with teaser zero rate loans and I'd do exclusivity deals with landlords and property developers. I'd get states and city councils to pass "safety" laws requiring grid coordination using a proprietary protocol and/or authentication token. I'd ship products that were compatible with open protocols, and later push mandatory updates to them that flip them to using proprietary controllers, like Chamberlain did with virtually every garage door opener in America:
I'd also be pushing the narrative that all this cleantech stuff is already enshittified – by China. I'd be out there shrieking about the possibility of China shutting off everyone's heat pumps in the dead of winter, or bricking every solar inverter if America doesn't back away from supporting Taiwanese independence.
It wouldn't even be (entirely) wrong. There are a hell of a lot of creepy things that a nation-state can do if they export critical, internet-connected infrastructure to the whole planet. Just ask any farmer who owns a John Deere tractor – every one of which is killswitched, meaning Donald Trump could order Deere to shut down a nation's entire agricultural sector:
The Tiktok ban provides a template for how this could be rolled out: gin up a moral panic about sinister foreign control over a key aspect of daily American life, then force a sale to one of Trump's billionaire cronies:
Trump could easily flip the whole cleantech sector to a consortium of US oil companies fronted by, say, Rex Tillerson. If you can't beat 'em, expropriate 'em.
I raise all this not to alarm people who are as excited by McKibben's news as I am, but rather, to game out the likely response of our sworn enemies so that we can get ready to fight them. These rent-seeking chokepoint obsessives have one move: corner a market and squeeze. They've been ratfucking renewables for decades because it competed with their existing racket.
But they aren't emotionally committed to setting fire to old dead things – they're just nature's most compulsive toll-booth operators, and they're sure as shit going to be looking for ways to stick toll-booths in our renewables future. Big Tech has shown them how to do it. So this is just another reason to defeat enshittification, which we must do anyway.
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1. Chalk river restoration is complete after two years
“A £1.72m chalk river restoration project has been completed after two years of [volunteer] work [… and] early monitoring had shown improvements for the rivers and the wildlife they support locally. […] The chalk streams in Hertfordshire were worked on to be more resilient and better manage high or low flows of water. Some riverbeds were raised with gravel while wooden debris was installed to create habitats for fish.”
2. Earth's heat to power 10,000 homes in renewable energy first for UK
“The UK's first geothermal power plant has been turned on, [… which] will help drive turbines to generate electricity for 10,000 homes, but will also provide the UK's first domestic supply of lithium - a critical mineral used in green technology.”
3. It’s electric: Scientists develop cheap way to keep sharks off fishing hooks
“In coastal waters off Florida, small zinc-and-graphite blocks rigged next to fishing hooks reduced shark catch by around two-thirds[….] The authors of the new study chose zinc and graphite because they’re nonmagnetic, cheap and readily available materials. [… The metal block] “only repels sharks and not anything else.” […] They have a patent pending and are refining the treatment with input from fishers from Florida to New Jersey, he said.”
4. Illinois cities move to cut ties with a massive coal plant
“[… Two cities] that account for almost half of IMEA’s power demand [… are] declining to renew their contracts past 2035 [… because] coal represents almost half of its generation assets. […] Since the two cities aren’t planning to re-up with IMEA, they are free to negotiate power supply deals with other companies that they hope can provide renewable energy and cheaper rates. [… This] shows that residents can successfully demand a say in where their energy comes from.”
5. JWM: Florida bears thrive with space and protection
“[… R]esearchers found that the Apalachicola subpopulation was growing at a rate of nearly 12% annually, largely driven by high rates of adult female and cub survival. […] The researchers found that habitat and legal protections helped this subpopulation rebound [… because] legal protections, like preventing people from poaching bears, has led to high adult female survival [and] “The more resources the mom has, the better care she can take care of her cubs,” Doran-Myers said.”
February 15-21 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)
Inspiration struck this afternoon. I’ve not looked at this selection of work since I was commissioned to take them in March during the Reykjanes Eruption at the time. Something got me into the mood to revisit . I’m pretty happy with the first shot of a volcano crater at sunset from the helicopter.
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In Iceland, people still bake rye bread by burying the dough in hot black sand near geothermal springs. The earth slowly cooks it for about 24 hours, and when they dig it up, the loaf comes out warm, sweet, and dense.
