From Balcony Solar to Solar Farms, is sun setting on fossil fuels permanently after Iran own goal?

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0:37hello and welcome to another episode of the everything electric podcast um we're talking solar today big time we're doing a lot of talk about solar uh this is just you will cover most of the things i wanted to mention but one of them that we forgot to mention uh in this podcast which I think is just one of those statistics that shows that things are changing very, very fast. There were 27 ,000 solar installations completed in the UK this year. We're talking rooftop solar, 27 ,000. And it's only June, so we're halfway through the year. It is extraordinary how quickly this is happening. But that's just in the UK.

1:22What's happening around the world with solar installations and the solar technology and in particular solar and batteries is genuinely shifting the dial much faster than people expected and often not driven by a kind of government legislative framework or instructions from the top or the desire to force people ram solar down their throat it's exactly the opposite people are seeing that the fuel supply like fossil fuel supply is unreliable and expensive. Those are the two really important things we need to remember about fossil fuels. It is unreliable and very expensive, and it always will be, and it's only going to get more volatile and more unreliable.

2:08And what people are doing around the world for no reason at all other than it makes sense economically is they are adopting solar at rates that we are just dizzying. So what we needed to do was talk to someone who's got a bit of a grasp of the global situation as regards solar. And so I chose to speak to the very wonderful Sonia Dunlop, who is the CEO of the Global Solar Council. She is the guest on today's podcast. So before we dive into that, please do subscribe to this channel. Please do subscribe to Everything Electric Tech and everything electric cars because we are covering the enormous changes that are taking place around the world and around the corner and so please do do that please do tell your mates about it and please welcome to the everything electric podcast sonia dunnob our three free youtube channels on evs and clean energy tech are funded by our fun packed test drive-tastic events in the North, West and Greater London and our events Down Under.

3:15Next up, Everything Electric heads to Cheltenham and then Twickenham. All events include a B2B EV Day and commercial vehicles too. And now, back to the episode. So, Sonia, thank you so much for joining us today. I think we're at a point where the topic that you're involved with is absolutely critical and having an enormous global impact. like it's really accelerating to such a degree. So can you quickly explain what it is you do and who it is you're working with and what you do? Absolutely. So my name is Sonia Dunlop. I'm the CEO of the Global Solar Council. We're headquartered here in London, but we are the worldwide industry association for solar and battery storage.

4:01So we represent and unite the whole of the global industry from every part of the sort of supply chain from manufacturing all the way down to local rooftop installers putting solar on your roof or indeed the local shop selling balcony solar all over the world and and so we're really the peak industry association representing originally just solar and now we've added battery storage too right okay i mean the two seem to be going hand in hand more and more often i mean can you give any sort of you know global picture stats of of the increases because what's so obvious is that there's been really big shifts in it i mean and i'm just thinking sort of go over the last 20 years when i first put solar panels on my roof yeah probably more than 20 years ago but and they were they were then really expensive it was a really exclusive thing you had to do all sorts of clever financial models to make it even plausible and you got phenomenal feed-in tariffs and all that the geek maybe he had to be a key because i was like there's two ways of describing an early adopter a wonderful person that's forward thinking or an absolute idiot it's one of the two i think i was the latter but you know i was very interested in it but that has changed so much now the cost of i can't remember how much the cost of panels has dropped but it's a lot they are hugely cheap of both solar panels and battery storage have come down about 90 % in the last 15 to 20 years.

5:34And that is part of why, like you say, we're kind of at the dawn of a solar era, which was actually a phrase that The Economist magazine coined. We are now the fastest growing source of electricity in the history of civilization since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and the cheapest source of electricity in the history of civilization. And that means that if you look at the numbers, you know, about 75 % of the new electricity generation that's being added to the grid every year now worldwide is solar plus battery storage. And that is an incredible position to be in. And it's an honor and a privilege to be leading the Global Industry Association, which is, of course, also the organisation that kind of does the global thought leadership on the topic worldwide.

6:27And I mean, it is that combination, isn't it? I think even five years ago, the notion of having a battery was still like early rooftops. Although it was a kind of bit of an exclusive battery nerd, you know, energy nerd thing. And that has become, I mean, in Australia, it's a country I'm very familiar with, you know, a battery in your house is just normal. it's like having light bulbs or a kettle you know it's not a big it's not a weird thing it's a huge uptake of battery of domestic batteries in australia yeah yeah also because you need those batteries to complement the solar right it's the combination of solar plus batteries which is just really transformational transformational for regular hard-working families and households but also for the wider electricity grid.

7:15And that's why Australia having now well over 4 million households with solar on their roofs, having got to days where over 100 % of the electricity for parts of Australia is being generated from regular rooftop household solar, they've now started a big battery programme in order to pair the two better and to really get the benefit of the combination of both. yeah and so what about i mean because i like the fact that you deal with all aspects of this because you know anyone can sort of go oh why they put solar panels on the on that field over there well there's hugely complex financial arrangements that are involved in that as well yeah i mean could you go into the sort of finance of you know how is it now cheaper to build a solar farm than it would have been 10 years ago, for example.

8:06Oh, hugely so, hugely so. So the cost of the actual batteries and the solar panels have decreased. The batteries, for example, have decreased by 70 % since only 2017. But also the cost of a total installation or a solar farm has also come down massively. I think the way to think about it is that this really is the energy of today and the energy of the future, right? That combination of solar and batteries is the way that we, at every level, so this applies at household level, for large businesses, say large warehouses, for large scale solar farms supplying vast amounts of electricity into the grid.

8:52This is how we're going to get our cheap, reliable and forward-looking energy going into the future. And really interestingly we're now at a real tipping point because it now costs as much to build a typical solar farm in terms of the initial capital costs as it costs to build a gas power station and of course the thing is with a gas power station you've still got to keep paying for all of that keep paying the gas bill essentially and so suddenly just in terms of the upfront cost you know the the the the comparison between the two is is not looking good for the other side and that's why you're seeing more and more countries around the world especially in response to the iran energy crisis um uh switching to solar and storage and other renewables as well yeah i mean that's you know that's a very easy and i think perfectly legitimate criticism you know that, you know, liquid and fuels and gas, you know, are less reliable in geopolitical terms, because stuff like that can go, you know, ridiculous wars taking place, you know, that are holding up the supply.

10:06I just wanted to quickly, it might be a bit of a side note, but has there been disruption to the distribution of solar panels, for example, and batteries because of what's going on in the Straits of Hormuz? Actually, luckily, no. So the solar panels that are coming from China, say, into the UK and Europe actually tend to go around the bottom of Africa, around Africa, basically. So they're not affected at all with the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz. We also, because it's, you know, you can fit 750 solar panels into a typical shipping container and that shipping container can go on ships, but it can also go on trains or lorries.

10:48So we're quite flexible in our supply chain. There are already some shipments that are coming across the old Silk Road across Eurasia. Right, by land. By land, exactly. But it's quite a nimble global supply chain. And we're also seeing more and more factories being set up all over the world, in the Middle East and in the Gulf, in the US, across Europe, especially in Hungary, actually. and across Southeast Asia as well. And so it's quite a nimble global supply chain that actually has the ability to double or triple almost overnight. So we're ready and waiting for the big surge that we are just starting to see now in response to the Iranian crisis.

11:36And that's what's so exciting, really. Yeah. And so that's quite good news. I didn't know about that. So there is a manufacturing base for solar panels within Europe now. Yeah. I mean, the first panels I had were made in Germany, but the panels I've got on now are made in China. So that's the change that's happened. And, you know, we cannot scale this without China, right? China has huge economies of scale and can produce really high-quality products at an incredible speed. I was in Shanghai just last week, actually, at the biggest soul energy industry conference in the world, which, believe it or not, has 800 ,000 people at this exhibition.

12:24It's mind-goggling, really, learning about this. But ultimately, this is about energy security and energy resilience for countries all over the world. And there's been about 40 countries, especially in Southeast Asia, that in response to the Strait of Hormuz crisis have come out saying, right, we are going to switch to homegrown, you know, solar, storage, wind, renewable energy as a response to this. We don't want to be held hostage to, you know, whatever the latest geopolitical crisis is. And the key thing is that, you know, if you're reliant on oil and gas or diesel, you're having to import new supplies in every 25 days.

13:07With solar, you can lock in at a low price for 25 years and you are safe with that low energy cost for 25 years. And that's the big difference. I mean, I think it is fine. it does feel like because i've been banging on about this for decades you know that you can only use the fuel we import once you know which is a sort of absurd thing to say but when you have a container with 750 solar panels on and you import that there's a cost to that there's the transportation there's the the environmental all those things count but you don't use those solar panels once you use them for 25 plus years i mean it's just a completely different economic outlook and i think that's just starting to dawn on people that because we constantly you know i think my whole worldview changed when i made a tv series about how things get made and i spent two days at an oil refinery and i'm talking 25 years ago i filmed this not recently and i was amazing the technology is amazing it's incredible what we do with a tanker load of of crude oil from saudi arabia it's remarkable it's extraordinary it's not just petrol for cars or diesel for trucks it is everything you know so many and so much more yeah but i couldn't help thinking all the time i was there one thing uh which i think people don't know and we're going slightly off topic but it is relevant is the amount of electricity that is used by an oil refinery which is equivalent to a large city that's how it was explained to me by the engineers that work there and we've only got three big refineries in the uk and this was one of them they are enormous facilities but also that that stuff as it was cut you know as i could see where it was going into the tanks and then it was going to go down into the pipelines and be distributed that it only gets used once i did that struck me then and we've got to get another ship in and another ship and another ship yeah all the time and when you adjust for inflation you know the cost of fossil fuel based electricity or fossil fuel energy has actually basically remained the same for the last 200 years whereas because solar and battery storage are a technology not a fuel because they're a piece of infrastructure, not just, you know, something that you burn, like you say, the cost keeps coming down and down and down over time as we get better and better at designing these systems and at making them.

15:39So it is a fundamentally different way of generating your energy. And, you know, if you're a household sitting at home faced with yet another sky high energy bill, whether that be for your power or your gas, you know, if you do, if you are lucky enough to have a spare thousand pounds to put into balcony solar or a spare a couple grand to put into a rooftop solar system you can you're essentially protecting you and your family from future price rises to come um and that is that is what that's the way entire country should be thinking but that's also what every energy consumer uh is already thinking uh from that on because it would be good because if there's one topic in this area that i really am very on on i don't know about is a balcony solar this has really appeared very recently so this i mean in crude terms you could hang a solar panel off the balcony of your apartment yeah with a wire that goes into a plug socket in your apartment and that electricity goes into your ring main and powers things in your house is that correct is that correct and that's why it's called either balcony solar or plug-in solar but it's actually that plug-in element that's transformational because you can literally like plugging a kettle into your socket, right?

16:55That's all you need to do. You don't need an electrician in to come and do that for you. And so, yes, it can be off a balcony if you have one. I've seen it done outside of windows as well, if you have the right setup or, of course, in your back garden, in your front garden, wherever you have a bit of space. And this is anywhere in the world, of course. and plug in solar which ideally you combine with a small battery storage you know battery of maybe the size of i don't know an old-fashioned radio um that's what's really being transformation in terms of allowing everyone the ability to access solar no matter how much your budget is no matter whether you're going to stay in your home for the next 25 years or not you know maybe you're planning to move in a couple years.

17:46Of course, if you've got balcony solar, you can take it with you. Absolutely, you can take it with you. And that solar panel will keep going for about 25 odd years. So it really is a worthwhile investment and is a way of protecting yourself against ever increasing energy bills. Right. And they've been in use in other countries. I mean, it feels like a very new thing in the UK, but they've been in use in other countries for some time. Yeah. Yeah. So Germany is really the leader in this space. So Germany has about, well, well over a million balcony solar systems installed already. About half a million this year alone, of course, as people are faced with ever increasing energy bills.

18:27The Benelux countries, so Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria, lots of countries across Europe have started doing it. and indeed have many different states in America. So Vermont, Virginia, California, Utah, even parts of America, you wouldn't expect it. The key thing that we need for balcony solar and what we are about to get as of this summer here in the UK is the permission that it doesn't need an electrician to install it, right? Because if you have to call a Sparky out, if you have to call an electrician out to install it and just plug it into your wall, becomes way too expensive.

19:08It's not interesting anymore. If you are allowed to just go down to Lidl or to Iceland or to B &Q or to Ikea and other retailers are available and just pick up a system yourself, you know, carry it home and plug it in yourself, then suddenly we're really talking in terms of the payback and how much money you can save. And so that's the key change that we are pushing for in every single country around the world and of course in countries like in developing countries in africa and southeast asia and so on you know people just take power into their own hands and and install these things themselves if they want to and that's why in many ways we're seeing uh in some countries much faster take up of rooftop solar there than we are indeed um in other in parts of the global north as we as we develop i mean i think the the big story which which I just think is extraordinary, because it's kind of come out of the blue, and it hasn't been because the government has decided to do anything.

20:08But in Pakistan, the uptake of solar, they're kind of on a par with the entirety of Europe. They have bought so many solar panels from China, and I bet those are probably imported over land. I mean, that could very easily be the case. I don't know. But, I mean, it's quite interesting because generally, you know, in Europe, certainly the experience, and the United States, It will be the government does a mandate where you get some money back or you could get a feed-in tariff or all the kind of ways that we've used to encourage people to uptake solar in the last 25, 30 years. No one's done that in Pakistan.

20:44There's been no mention of it, but everyone's gone, I want to put solar on my roof. There's an amazing Google Earth photograph of the same section of a city five years ago, no solar. Now every single building in that picture has got solar panels on the roof. And there are similar photos like that from all over the world, actually. You should see some cities in Syria where they have loads of backups, as they do in Pakistan. And every single inch of roof space is covered in solar panels. What happened in Pakistan was actually just, it completely took the government and the grid operator by surprise.

21:19But suddenly power prices, the energy bills went up suddenly. And people realized, hold on a minute. If I just buy myself a few solar panels and a battery, I can, you know, I'll get my money back within a year, you know, or so. And then I'll be continuing to generate for 20, 25 years after that. And that's why we're now at the stage where six out of 10 homes in Pakistan have solar on the roof. Why they've generated about half a million jobs because, of course, it is a labor intensive process on a roof and adding it. So it generates a lot of jobs. And they have now saved themselves$12 billion of fossil fuel imports now since they went solar.

22:05And the amazing thing is that this hasn't come in the form of grants or finance from the World Bank. It hasn't come in the form of some kind of top-down strategy. This is the people of Pakistan taking the energy into their own hands and getting$17 billion of their own hard-earned cash and putting it into what is essentially an energy infrastructure asset class in the Pakistani grid now. And fossil fuel demand is now down 40%, 40 % because people have switched to solar and storage. And so what we're now doing is making sure that the Pakistani grid operator learns from other grid operators around the world, such as in Australia, on how to run a grid with such a high share of solar and storage.

22:54And we think the Pakistani story could well be replicated in many other countries around the world within fairly short order. And that is really exciting.

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23:48I mean, it is so, it's kind of become incredibly obvious. I mean, a very good friend of mine has spent a lot of time working in Africa. I've never been to the areas he's been to. I've been to South Africa and Morocco, so I've been to the middle bit. But what he said was there isn't any infrastructure for distributing electricity on a large scale in many countries. You know, the cities have it, but if you go out and... And he said that's where he... It's not his business. He's got nothing to do with this, but he just saw, oh, my God, there's a village here and they've got a little solar array outside the village with their battery in it.

24:24And so everyone's got electric light and electric cooking where they never did. And, you know, that impact is so hard to focus on because it's not one big, solid, you know, power station that generates. It's distributed over the whole country. And it's sort of, in a sense, unregulated, very much like in Pakistan. You know, it's just happened because people have worked out, oh, this is, we can have electricity, we can have lights on. And we're not paying for wires that come hundreds of miles across the country, which, you know. Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, it's very easy for us in the UK to take electricity for granted.

25:03We take it for granted that every time we flick the switch, the lights go on. But, of course, in many parts of the world, well, some parts of the world, they have no electricity at all. Many, many parts of the world have constant rolling blackouts. And that's why I've got one here on my desk, you know, little solar lanterns like this with a solar panel on one side, the battery inside, and a little light on the other side can be absolutely transformational for people. and means that we don't have to build out massive grid pylons all the way out to every single village across sub-Saharan Africa.

25:34We can do it in a much more bottom-up and indeed probably much cheaper way by just putting a couple solar panels on each house and putting a small solar array just outside the village and combining that with batteries, of course. And we estimate now that about 550 million people around the world, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, use off-grid solar and storage at least once a week. So even if they don't have it on their own home, they walk to the local village and charge their mobile phone with thanks to a solar system and a battery. And just imagine how transformational that is for people's lives and how we really can now dream of delivering full energy access to every single person in the world if we just scaled up the rollout of solar and storage in these villages.

26:27The village of Kasa Kula in Malawi used to have no electricity at all. And a fantastic charity called SolarAid came along. It was founded by Jeremy Leggett, actually, who set up Solar Center in the UK. And they came along and they said, right, we're rolling out solar as a service. We're going to put solar panels, a battery and a light bulb on every single house in this village and they said to the villagers don't you don't need to pay for up front you don't even have to pay us a monthly fee just pay us for every kilowatt hour of electricity you use pay as you go solar as a service if you don't have the money switch it off you won't pay a dime and and it's that kind of business model that really means that we can spread this to every corner of the world and that's really exciting but then if we come back to this country you know there's certainly been quite a lot of talk recently.

27:22I've sort of been made aware of, you know, they're ruining our farmland. They're covering our decent farmland in solar panels. I mean, my experience of like really being in the weeds with a big solar farm was in Australia, which was, and it was on a scale that we cannot imagine in the UK. I mean, it covered an area about the size of Kent. You know, it was huge. But it had, well, it was, before they put any solar panels on, there were about six and a half thousand sheep it's a sheep farm in new south wales there are now six and a half thousand sheep and a and a million solar panels and they get on fine yeah you know but but that isn't taking out you know that land wasn't plowed and planted before the solar panels were there it was it was grazing land it's not good enough soil to to farm in that way but that it does you know and occasionally you'll drive along a road or a motorway in the uk and you'll see you know a big field covered in solar and then when you do see a big warehouse roof that doesn't have solar on i mean that makes me angry because why the hell haven't they got solar there but i mean what what is your opinion of that and you know if you yeah and how much land is actually being taken up by solar in the uk yeah i mean look we need both right we need loads of rooftop solar on every single warehouse and building and so on and we need those ground mounted solar farms and like you say it is perfectly possible for a piece of land to both be a solar farm and a farm farm if i can put it that way and to have that dual harvest and it's not just sheep grazing or or cattle grazing or whatever it might be it's also actually uh crops so it's you um growing there's all sorts of crops that you can grow very well under solar panels whether it be blueberries or asparagus or vineyards, actually, or often, you know, slightly more delicate crops that need that protection and need that careful sort of tender loving care underneath.

29:21And so that's why we're seeing this fast emerging area called agri PV or agri voltaics, which is essentially just the combination of agriculture and solar, where farmers are starting to realize that they can actually protect their crops in a very, in a much more efficient way by using solar panels than the traditional methods. And indeed, you know, in terms of cherry tomatoes, which are sometimes damaged by hail storms or extreme weather events or so on, you know, it can be very, very effective to add solar to that. So So we're just starting a new program of work in terms of working with farmers to figure out what they need all over the world.

30:06And making sure that the land retains its tax privileges and its whatever sort of special status it used to have as agricultural land, because it is still agricultural land. Right. And raising awareness amongst policymakers as well, that if they encourage that dual use of land, it can actually be a win-win, both in terms of power generation and in terms of protecting the farmers, both from damage to their crops, but actually also keeping the farmers going as a business, right? Because farming is not easy. And having that extra income stream for the farmer can be make or break. Yes, yeah. Yeah.

30:48I mean, no, I absolutely agree. I mean, for someone who is disturbed by it, it's a very simple thing to do is just check out how much farmland in the UK is used by golf courses. And I'm not anti-golf and I don't want people to stop playing golf and I don't want to ban golf. But, you know, it is worth doing a comparison because it is a fraction of the amount of land we'll ever use for solar that is used for golf courses and it just puts it in a bit of perspective. I think one of the other things which I know you'll know about, but whether that's a potential notion that's happening in the UK, because I don't know that.

31:30You know, I'm actually travelling through France quite soon. It's very obvious that very large car parks at things like shopping malls or, you know, out-of-town supermarkets, all their car parks, all of them are covered in solar panels. And I think there's a law in France, isn't there, over a certain amount of spaces you have to put solar in, which is just, for pity's sake, and that's a country that is much less reliant on solar because of their nuclear capacity, you know, but their solar, we'll maybe discuss that later, but is that something that you think might happen in the UK? I mean, it should happen in every country.

32:08Yeah. You know, this is the most versatile and modular technology you can imagine. You can put solar pretty much anywhere, right? And yes, and solar and what are called solar carports or putting rooftop solar canopies on car parks makes total sense, especially, as you know, now that, you know, electric vehicles are growing massively and we're starting to electrify all forms of transport. And so having that sort of sun to wheel ecosystem right there in the car park means also you don't have to rely so much on massive imports from the grid. And also shades the vehicles so they don't get so hot, which in the south of France is a big problem, right?

32:52So it makes total sense. And carports, it makes sense on buildings. It makes sense, I think, soon on vehicles themselves, actually, on vehicles themselves, whether that be trains or cars or whatever it might be. There's already been a solar-powered plane that's flown around the world, the solar-powered plane a couple of years ago, just showing what might be possible at some point in the future in terms of aviation. You know, or solar panels this small on the back of a lantern, right? It's completely versatile and modular. and because it's manufactured you know mass manufactured at scale um uh and because it becomes so cheap uh the opportunities are almost limitless and what let's just quick i'm just going through all the sort of contentious aspects of it i mean the end of life solar panel what do you do with at the end of life with the solar panel i mean i don't know because i've had them for years and they've not reached their end of life so i haven't had to i've not had to face that yet but I mean, is the material, obviously, the glass, you know, can be recycled.

33:58But what about the other materials on it? Yeah. And, you know, the first solar panels installed in the UK, which was somewhere near Oxford, are actually still going strong about 40 years later. Right. Yes, exactly. Yes. No. So a solar panel can be 97 percent of the materials in there can be fully recycled. Right. Fully recycled. So they are totally recyclable. and what we have to make sure is that there is a recycling system in place so we need to make sure that there are actual recycling i don't know i don't want to call them factories but you recycle facilities facilities um they're available and to take them apart and recycle all the different components um and we have to make sure that there's a system in place so that when you buy a solar panel which is in the case in europe which is the case in europe and many other parts of the world a very small fee is applied which will essentially pay for the recycling at a date but also um uh the amazing thing is that as these um things have got cheaper and lighter over the years you can if you take a solar panel from 25 years ago and recycle it today you actually have enough raw material to make 10 of today's solar panels right and so that's why we're going to get to a stage pretty soon, let's say roughly around 2040, give or take, where we could in theory end up in a completely circular industry where we don't need to mine for any of the raw materials anymore.