Summary
Much of the story in this New Yorker article is familiar, but here are some tidbits I hadn't seen before:
The Pakistan example is perhaps the most dramatic. As 2024 began, demand for electricity on the national grid started falling—not because the economy was in decline but because (as careful scrutiny of images on Google Earth revealed) so many Pakistanis were putting up solar panels. As one Lahore-area corn farmer, Mohammad Murtaza, told Bloomberg, pointing to his own photovoltaic array, “I have never seen such a big change in farming. Ninety-five percent of farmland has switched to solar in this area.” Many farmers can’t afford metal mounting brackets for the panels, which are more expensive than the panels themselves, so they just lay the panels on the ground, cells to the sun.
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Last summer, Joel Nana, a Capetown-based energy analyst, was struggling, as the Pakistan-watchers had been six months earlier, to understand new data. “In Namibia, we’ve uncovered that people have built about seventy megawatts of distributed generation, mostly rooftop solar—that’s the equivalent of about fifteen per cent of the country’s peak demand. In Eswatini, which is a very small country, it’s about eleven per cent of peak demand,” he told me. In South Africa, the continent’s economic colossus, small-scale solar now provides, by his reckoning, nearly a fifth the capacity of the national grid. “You won’t see these numbers anywhere,” Nana said. In Namibia and Eswatini, “they’re not reported in national plans—no one knows about them. It’s only when you speak to the utilities. And, in fact, the numbers could be much higher, because the smallest systems aren’t reporting to anyone, not even the utilities.”
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A report from the Rocky Mountain Institute predicted that by 2050 we will have done all the mining we’ll need to do for battery minerals; after that, we’ll just recycle them, over and over again.
That seems an unlikely claim—even the best recycling systems currently recover only about ninety-five per cent of the minerals—but with each passing year we learn to build batteries with less lithium, less cobalt, and less nickel, and solar panels with less silver. Improving that efficiency by six to ten per cent a decade is enough to offset the recycling losses, and we’re doing far better than that already.
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As Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist and a senior researcher at Oxford University, calculated recently, “the silver used in one solar panel built in 2010 would be enough for around five panels today.” By 2035 or so, when my oldest panels may have started to go out of service, the minerals that each contains will almost certainly be enough for ten new panels.
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In April, researchers at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences noted that all the corn grown for ethanol in the U.S. takes up about thirty million acres, an area roughly the size of New York State. If forty-six per cent of that land were converted to producing solar energy, they found, it would generate enough electricity for the U.S. to decarbonize its system by 2050.