Solar is awesome, solar hype is dangerous

A call for sanity on a very cool technology championed by crazy people

Some of y’all got miffed that my post panning Bill McKibben’s book was “anti-solar.”

It wasn’t. At least, I didn’t mean it to be.

Solar energy’s frikkin’ cool! You point a pane of glass (+fancy electronics) up at the sky and get electricity out of the deal! It’s as close to magic as energy technologies come.

The basic awesomeness of solar photovoltaics isn’t in question. The engineering advances that have made those magic glass panes now very cheap to manufacture are also real, and are also awesome.

That this amazing technology has limitations is also fully normal. It’s not the magic glass pane’s fault that the sun sets, it’s not a diss on the technology to note that its output varies a lot according to the weather, the season, the latitude, etc. That’s just physics. It’s not the solar array’s fault that people tend to demand more power in the evening than at noon. That’s just modern life.

My problem isn’t with solar technology at all. My problem is with the magical thinking about solar that’s run away with the climate movement’s brain. My problem is with the wild, irresponsible overselling of solar by people who’ve let confirmation bias run away with their critical faculties.

Guys like Bill McKibben seem unable to process the way overselling solar risks bringing it into disrepute. It’s their determination to sweep the problems of intermittency under the rug that’s pushing solar deployment into the danger zone.

Ignore the problems the grid faces when you try to ask solar more than it can do, and you end up with things like the Iberian blackout: mass disruption, serious economic losses and a reputational disaster brought about not really by solar but by the irresponsible decision to rely on it too much, without adequate safeguards.

“Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality,” Orwell told us, and he didn’t have it wrong. False beliefs about how much of our electricity intermittent solar energy can supply causes supply instability and price instability. The hype has real, tangible consequences: rising prices, deindustrialization, and ultimately political backlash.

None of that is the fault of the magic glass panes that make electricity for free. They’re the fault of the rigid ideologists who insist on believing those magic glass panes can supply more of our electricity than fundamental physics suggests they can supply.

The bigger risk to solar deployment now isn’t that fossil fuel interests block them — there’s no blocking a cheaper, higher performing competitor, at least not for long. The bigger risk is that guys like Bill McKibben convince policy-makers that solar can do things it can’t do, that we overbuild, end up with more expensive, worse power grids, and turn a whole generation of voters against the technology in the first place.

So let’s get it straight. I’m not anti-solar. Bill McKibben is.