#material science

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle

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:

https://billmckibben.com/books/here-comes-the-sun/

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/06/exxonknew/#%F0%9F%94%A5

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility

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:

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/solarcycle-to-recycle-10-million-solar-panels-yearly

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/09/practical-visionary/#popular-engineering

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:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil-industry-campaign-money/

He's doing his damnedest to make good on his promises, with incredibly wasteful, job-killing project cancellations:

https://stateline.org/2025/09/16/trump-has-crushed-offshore-wind-plans-but-states-havent-quite-given-up-hope/

But, as McKibben told David Sirota in a recent Lever Time podcast, reality has a stubborn pro-renewables bias:

https://podcastaddict.com/lever-time/episode/206986172

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":

https://austinfreepress.org/renewables-are-now-the-costco-of-energy-production-bill-mckibben-says/

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?

"Cornell scientists have discovered a potentially transformative approach to manufacturing one of the world's most widely used chemicals—hydrogen peroxide—using nothing more than sunlight, water and air. The research is published in the journal Nature Communications.

"Currently, hydrogen peroxide is made through the anthraquinone process, which relies on fossil fuels, produces chemical waste and requires transport of concentrated peroxide—all of which have safety and environmental concerns," (...)"

"According to Amin Zadehnazari, first author and a postdoctoral researcher in Abbaspourrad's lab, the new research introduces two engineered, light-responsive materials, dubbed ATP-COF-1 and ATP-COF-2, designed to absorb visible light, separate photogenerated charges and drive the conversion of water and oxygen into hydrogen peroxide.

"These materials work efficiently under visible light, are stable and reusable, and point toward a future where hydrogen peroxide could be made locally instead of in large chemical factories," Zadehnazari said."

""The challenge," Zadehnazari added, "is that while the existing anthraquinone process is toxic and not clean, it's cheap. We're now focusing on how to make this sustainable alternative affordable at scale."

Technically, the work builds on the design of covalent organic frameworks—crystalline, porous structures of organic molecules that can be tailored to absorb light and shuttle electrons. While previous photocatalysts have faced challenges with efficiency and stability, the new COFs demonstrate competitive performance for sunlight-driven hydrogen peroxide generation.

The implications are significant, Abbaspourrad said. Producing hydrogen peroxide onsite using sunlight could reduce dependence on large-scale logistics of transport and storage of the reactive chemical, a major safety concern. Smaller local generators might serve water treatment plants, hospitals or consumer applications without the same infrastructure or risks. It could open new markets for decentralized chemical manufacture, particularly in developing regions or in applications where smaller batches matter."