Big Solar vs. Little Solar: Pick a Side
Welcome to Bright Ideas, a weekly newsletter for people who want to know about the wild rise of clean energy. I’m L.A.-based energy reporter Julian Spector.
As discussed last week, I’m doing a series of weekly debates on notable tensions within the clean energy sector. I’ll make persuasive, or at least plausible, cases for each side and then you, The Reader, can decide who wins.
Actually, let’s make this a little more interesting. If you reply to this email with a one-line judgment of the outcome, I’ll include those in next week’s edition.
This week we’ve got:
Big Solar vs. Little Solar
Arguments and rebuttals
Learning from Octavia Butler’s apocalypse
Subscribe here if you haven’t yet.
And tell your friends about this, if you’re a good friend.
Big vs. little solar
Solar is not the biggest clean power source in the U.S., nor the second, nor the third. But it is the fastest growing. That’s because the building block of solar power is the photovoltaic panel, a mass-produced commodity. All the scientific and industrial innovation that goes into making panels better and cheaper makes its way into solar plants large and small.
That creates a different dynamic from hydroelectric dams, which are such daunting infrastructure projects that we don’t really build them any more. Wind projects use a series of identical units, but those turbines are massive compared to the modular building block of solar.
Now solar is so cheap that it’s taking off in places that don’t care so much about its solar-ness as its competitive economics, like Texas.
This proliferation raises a question: which type of solar offers the most bang for your buck? We can build massive power plants in the desert, chasing economies of scale. But unlike traditional power sources, you can also scale down solar to fit on your house.
With limited resources to deliver a historic shift from carbon-emitting to carbon-free power, should we prioritize large solar power plants, or small installations where people live and work?
Go Big
If we want to clean up the grid as fast as possible, we need the most bang for our buck. Large or “utility-scale” solar is the obvious way to go.
Picture it: developers scour the countryside for flat, open terrain with decent proximity to the transmission grid. They get the rights, then design a layout to maximize the power they can produce. They optimize the orientation of the rows, maybe putting them on mechanical trackers to follow the fiery orb across its daily arc. Then the plant owner monitors it to ensure the utmost production, and dispatches teams for maintenance as needed.
You’re buying in bulk and delivering in bulk, saving on the unit price of materials. And mobilizing a crew for a large project is more cost effective than gearing up for a bunch of different small ones.
These projects keep setting the records for cheapest solar contract in the world. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (my hometown utility) recently signed up for power from the forthcoming Eland plant, to be built in a sunny and dry part of California, which will offer cheaper electrons than any other domestic solar plant that we know of. Such projects use union labor, so they compensate their workers well, and they inject valuable money into the local tax base.
To get the most clean energy for your investment, build big. Going small easily doubles the unit price of electricity.
Racks for days. These unit economics are stacked! (Photo credit: DOI)
Go Small
Solar panels unlock the radical potential to generate life-giving electricity wherever you need it. To transform our energy system, we need to make the utmost use of that possibility.
The primary advantage is that making power where you consume it frees you from total reliance on the broader grid network, which is aging and facing new challenges of its own. Let’s say you build big out in the desert—and then a wildfire sweeps past the transmission line that carries that power to the cities. If the grid connection goes down, the power plant isn’t helpful. But if you produce solar power on the very buildings that need it, you don’t have to worry about it reaching its destination.
Besides, the “build solar in the desert” framing reveals a gross Californian, or at least Western, chauvinism. How are you supposed to do that back East? In places with high density or rich, centuries-long histories of development, there simply isn’t much wide open acreage to convert into power plants.
That’s the beauty of decentralized or “distributed” generation (call it DG if you want to impress the solar pros): you can do it wherever you want, at whatever scale fits. Cabins, houses, shops, malls, casinos, shipping warehouses, all can benefit.
Plus, these investments are largely paid for by the people who will benefit from them. For a resource-constrained clean energy transition, that’s huge: as long as the rules allow people to benefit by saving money on their power bills, they can spend their own dollars to create more carbon-free electrons. Everyone benefits.
The broader geographic scope of this approach pays for jobs all over the country, while freeing up money that the solar customers can spend on something besides electricity. Instead of waiting for utilities to sign big power plant deals, those who want to can start building now. Why wait?
Try having a cat at a big old utility-scale solar plant in the desert. You know what’s better for having cats around? Residential solar, that’s what. (Photo: DOE)
No, Really, Go Big
Hey, we agree that people on the East Coast deserve clean energy too—there’s got to be some consolation prize for enduring mundane topography. But let’s talk about dense urban settings. Do you think New York City could power itself on rooftop solar? High rise roofs are too small and cluttered, and way to many people live and work in them for rooftop solar to fill their needs.
Most roofs were not designed to host solar panels. Why struggle to make them work when you could go find a nice empty field and pay the farmer a livable rate to lease it?Speaking of payment, how many of your rooftop installers pay union wages?
And it’s fine if private citizens choose to spend their own money building mini power plants. But if states are subsidizing that form of solar, that’s shifting money from people who can’t put it on their roofs to people who can. If a state wants to encourage solar, it’s only fair to prioritize the most cost-effective kind, and the kind that benefits everybody equally.
Except You Should Really Go Small
It’s true that many home solar markets got started with a little help from the government. That’s how you nurse infant industry, doofus. Now solar has grown so competitive, people want it because it saves them money. States are dialing back their policy support as solar grows.
Need proof? Check out South Carolina, where utility Duke Energy and a bunch of solar industry groups just agreed on a new solar policy (If you haven’t followed solar policy battles, just know that’s not the norm). The new plan still pays people for extra solar power they send to the grid, but it also makes sure solar adopters are paying their fair share of grid costs. Both sides agree this would help the solar industry in the state keep growing, something that has strong bipartisan support there.
Instead of making people more reliant on the aging grid system that they don’t even understand or have a say in, let’s give people the power to make their own power.
That’s it, that’s the debate. The rest is up to you now. Reply to this email with your one-sentence verdict. If you’re not getting this in your inbox, subscribe now so you can participate next time.
Octavia Butler Knew What Was Coming
Apocalyptic thinking doesn’t exactly comport with the Bright Ideas brand, but life’s been pretty apocalyptic lately. In the midst of that, I turned to the fiction of Octavia Butler, not to escape but to process.
Parable of the Sower takes place in the 2020s, in a Southern California hit hard by climate change. Drought and recession have shredded the social fabric, leaving homeowners hunkered down in walled off enclaves, while everyone else scrapes by outside. Fires scourge the region. People don’t trust cops to help. Corporations assert ever greater claims on their increasingly disposable workers, who lack other jobs to escape to.
An uncomfortably relatable dystopia.
Butler envisioned that world in the early ‘90s. Her prescience is more jarring than comforting, but her teenaged protagonist Lauren Olamina models how to deal with life’s myriad disruptions. Much of the preparation is mental, but Lauren shows how to make a thorough go bag, which I remembered when the earth shook violently for several seconds Friday night (that happens in the book too!). Anticipating trouble before it happens allows Lauren to better protect the people she cares about.
Beyond the action-packed survival story, Sower also depicts an alternative energy future—one without fossil fuels. Gasoline has become an impossible luxury for the beleaguered remains of SoCal; the characters bike everywhere they go, or walk. The freeway system has become a massive conduit for hopeful people fleeing north toward water and jobs. But when they take the 118 to the 23 to the 101, they’re doing it on foot.
This is not a cheery vision of decarbonization. But it is a vision of decarbonization. We’ve never lived in such a world, so it can be hard to picture, but doing so is crucial to making it real.
It’s clear that we could survive without fossil fuels, but we’d have to manage serious collapse-of-civilization vibes. Rather than simply eliminate fossil fuels, the task of clean energy writ large is to replace fossil fuels with something better, so as to meet our needs without poisoning anyone.