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

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Everything Electric podcast. We're talking

solar today, big time. We're doing a lot of talk about solar. You will cover most of the

things I wanted to mention, but one of them that we forgot to mention 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. What's happening around

the world with solar installations and 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 the 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. 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. What we needed to do was talk to someone who's got a bit of a

grasp of the global situation as regards solar. I chose to speak to the very wonderful Sonja

Dunlop, who is the CEO of the Global Solar Council. She is the guest on today's podcast.

Before we dive into that, please do subscribe to this channel. Please do subscribe to

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and please welcome to the Everything Electric podcast, Sonja Dunlop.

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day and commercial vehicles too. And now, back to the episode. So, Sonja, 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's Sonja Dunlop. I'm the CEO of the Global Solar Council, where headquartered

here in London that we are the Worldwide Industry Association for Solar and Battery Storage. So,

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 so, we're really the

peak industry association representing originally just solar and now we've added battery storage too.

Right. I mean, the two seem to be going hand in hand more and more often, don't they?

I mean, can you give any sort of, you know, global picture stats 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, if you go over the last 20 years, when I first put solar panels on my roof,

probably more than 20 years ago, and 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. 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. The cost of both solar panels and battery storage have come down about 90%

in the last 15 to 20 years. And 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 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 organization that kind of does the global

thought leadership on the top of worldwide. And 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, as a country I'm very familiar with, you know, battery in your house is just

normal. It's like having light bulbs or a kettle. It's not a big, it's not a weird thing. It's

an incredible 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 hardworking families and

households, but also for the wider electricity grid. And that's why Australia, having now

well over 4000000 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 program 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 have

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. 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? Oh, 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? This

is the, that combination of solar and batteries is the way that we as at every level, so this

applies at household level at for large businesses, say large warehouses, for large scale, you know,

solar farms, applying vast amounts of electricity into the grid. This 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 the costs.

Keep paying the gas. Exactly. Keep paying the gas bill essentially. And so suddenly,

just in terms of the upfront cost, you know, the comparison between the two 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, switching to solar and storage

and other renewables as well. Yeah. I mean, that's a, 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, they're holding up the supply. I 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, 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, ships, but it can also go on trains or lorries. So we're quite flexible in our supply

chain. There are already some shipments that are coming across the old Silk Road, across Eurasia.

Right, right. In my 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 Romanian crisis. And that's what's so exciting, really. Yeah. And so that's

quite good news. I didn't know about that about there is, so there is a manufacturing-based

four solar panels within Europe now. Because 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 salt energy industry conference in the world, which, believe it or not,

has 800,000 people at this exhibition. Oh, my God. It's mind-boggling, 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,

but in response to the Strait of Hormuz crisis, have come out saying, right, we are going to switch

to homegrown solar storage, wind, renewable energy as a response to this. We don't want to be held

hostage to whatever the latest geopolitical crisis is. And the key thing is that if you're

reliant on oil and gas or diesel, you're having to import new supplies in every 25 days. With 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, that you can only use the fuel we import once,

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, the environment,

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 because we can't... 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 refiner. And I'm talking 25

years ago, I filmed this recently. And I was amazing. The technology is amazing. It's incredible

what we do with a tanker load 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. So many...

So much more. Yeah. But I couldn't help thinking all the time I was there. One thing,

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 were 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 stuff,

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 only gets used once. I did that. It struck me then,

and we've got to get another ship in, and another ship, and another ship all the time.

Adjust for inflation, 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 something that

you burn, like you say. The cost keeps coming down and over time as we get better

and better at designing these systems and making them. So it is a fundamentally different way of

generating your energy. And 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, if you are lucky enough to have

a spare £1,000 to put into balcony solar or a spare couple grand to put into a rooftop solar

system, you're essentially protecting you and your family from future price rises to come.

And that is what that's the way entire country should be thinking, but that's also how every

energy consumer is already thinking from now on. If there's one topic in this area that I really

am very un... I don't know about is balcony solar. This has really appeared very recently.

In crude terms, you could hang a solar panel off the balcony of your apartment

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? And that's what'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. That'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, battery of maybe the size of, I don't know, an old-fashioned radio.

That's what's really being transformational 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. Maybe you're planning to move in a couple years. Of 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, have they not?

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 have faced with ever-increasing energy bills.

The 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?

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, it becomes way too expensive. It's not interesting anymore.

If you are allowed to just go down to Lidl or to Iceland or to Beanyu 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

around the world. And of course, in developing countries in Africa and Southeast Asia and so on,

you know, people just take power into their own hands and install these things themselves

if they want to. And that's why, in many ways, we're seeing in some countries much faster take

up of rooftop solar there than we are indeed in other, in parts of the global north as we

developed. I mean, I think the big story, 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. But

in Pakistan, 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 in the United States, it will be the government

does a mandate where you get some money back or you 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. There's been no mention of it, but everyone's gone. I want to

put solar on my roof. There's an amazing, like 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

cities in Syria, where they have loaded accounts 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 operated by surprise. But suddenly power prices that,

you know, the final, 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. And the amazing thing is that

this hasn't come, this hasn't come in the form of grants or finance from the world. And 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. And 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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I mean, it is so, it's kind of become incredibly obvious. I mean, one of the,

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 to, for distributing electricity on a large

scale in many countries, you know, the cities have it. But if you were to go out there, and he said,

that's where he, he, it's not his business. He's got nothing to do with this, but he just saw.

Oh my God, they've got, there's a village here, and they've got a little solar array outside the

village with the battery in it. And so everyone's got electric light and electric cooking, where

they never did. And, you know, that impact is so hard to, 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, 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, is exactly, exactly. And, and, you know, it's very easy for us in the

UK to take electricity for granted. We take it for granted 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 just, I've got one here on my desk, you know, little solar lanterns like

this with a solar panel, one 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. We 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,

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, and just imagine how, 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. The village of Casa Kula in Malawi used to have no electricity at all

and a fantastic charity called Solar Aid came along. It was founded by Jeremy Leggett, actually,

who set up Solar Century 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 and every

single house in this village. And they said to the villagers, 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 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,

certainly been quite a lot of talk recently. I'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 had, it was before they put new solar

panels on, they 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 million solar panels, and they get on fine. You know,

but that isn't taking out, you know, that land wasn't plowed and planted before the solar panels

are there. It was grazing land. It's not good enough soil to farm in that way. But 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. Why the hell haven't they got

solar there? But I mean, what is your opinion of that? And, you know, if you, you know,

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 cattle grazing or whatever it might be. It's also actually crops.

So it's 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. And so that's why we're seeing this fast emerging area called agri-pv or

agrivoltaics, which is essentially just the combination of agriculture and solar,

where farmers are starting to realise 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 we've, we've, we're just starting a new programme of work in terms of working with farmers

to figure out what they need all over the world and 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. 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, and having

that extra income stream for the farmer can be make or break. Yes, yeah. I mean, no, I absolutely

agree. You know, I mean, it is, for someone who is disturbed by it, it's a very simple thing to do

is just check out how much land, 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 comparison because it is a fraction of the amount of land we're going to,

where we'll ever use for solar that is used for golf courses. And it just, it just puts it in a

perspective. I think one of the other, other things which you'll, I know you'll know

about, but whether that's a potential, a notion that's happening in the UK, because I don't know

that. You know, I'm actually traveling 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,

over a certain amount of spaces you have to put solar in, which is just pretty safe. And that's

a country that is much less reliant on solar because of their nuclear capacity. You know,

they don't, but their solar, we'll maybe discuss that later. But, but that, is that something

that you think might happen in the UK? And it should happen in every country, but.

Yeah. You know, this is the most versatile and modular technology you can imagine.

You can put solar pretty much anywhere, right? And, 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, 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, and

also shades the vehicles so they don't get so hot, which in the south of France, big problem,

right? So it makes total sense. And carports, it makes sense on buildings, it makes sense,

I think soon on vehicles themselves, actually 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 pulse plane a couple 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. And because it becomes so cheap, 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 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 to face that yet. But I mean, it is the material of the glass,

you know, can be recycled. But 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. Yes, no. So a solar panel can be 97%

of the materials in there can be fully recycled, fully recycled. So they are totally recyclable.

And what we have to make sure is that there is a recycling system in place that 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 that are available and to take them apart and recycle

all the different components. 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, the amazing thing is that as these 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. So that's why we're going to get to

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 mind for any of the raw materials anymore,

we just keep recycling the materials we have in the sort of global solar system as it were.

And same will be true for batteries around that time as well. But we have to make sure that every

single government in the world puts in place a system to make sure that old end of life solar

panels are collected, sent to the national recycling facility or whatever it might be,

and then properly recycled, because of course, there's always going to be

a sort of a misincentive to just throw them on the scrap heap. And we don't want that. And funnily

enough, we always as solar and battery storage, we always come under regular recycling legislation

for electronic equipment and products, right? But because we're a bit different, a typical iPhone

lasts about a year or two, a laptop, maybe a couple years, our product actually lasts 25 to 30

years. And so we're a bit of a misfit in amongst all the laptops and the mobile phones. We often

need something specific just for us to make sure that at the end of the product's life,

we'll still be able to collect it and recycle it. But yeah, the opportunity for a completely

circular solar panel industry worldwide is definitely within our reach.

Right. And I was at a conference, or like an event not long ago, about marine engineering. And there

was a lot of discussion there about the desperate need for the next generation of engineers that

can learn from the current lot. There's a shortage. There's a global shortage of engineers. This was

very specific marine engineering, which included offshore wind, interestingly, but shipping,

all those things. Is there a skill shortage globally in people who are capable of installing

solar panels always? Is the skill level? I think I sort of feel in order to be competent to put a

huge wind turbine in the North Sea, you need some engineering chops. Whereas I could actually

tighten up the bolts that hold a solar panel onto a frame. It's not beyond my skill.

Well, yes, but I wouldn't recommend you climbing up onto your roof. Probably wouldn't particularly.

Don't want to do that. No, it's interesting one. And there is a shortage in offshore wind and in

marine engineering and so on. In solar, to be honest, it's a bit different because

we have about 7.5 million people working in solar and storage worldwide. A huge workforce. It's

the size of the population of the Republic of Ireland. And most of them are local electricians

or local roofers that have just upskilled to be able to add solar to the list of things they offer.

Or local construction or agricultural workers that have gone through a bit of training to

build a solar farm. So in our case, no, there isn't a skill shortage because actually the skills

that you have to add on to the existing workforce are pretty limited. And it isn't that complicated.

It's certainly not as complicated as standing up a massive wind turbine out in the North Sea.

What we are very aware of is that especially when it comes to solar farm construction,

we need to make sure that the men and women who arrive on site do have the proper health and safety

and technical training to be able to build a solar farm, partly because you want it to

perform to spec, partly because you don't want any unnecessary accidents. And so we have launched

the Global Solar Training Standard and will soon be expanding that to battery storage to fix that.

On the rooftop side, it really varies from country to country, right? It's really the local roofing

and electrician workforce that sort of upskills itself quite easily in becoming the solar workforce.

And so you've just got to make sure that the local regulations in terms of safety when you have

people up on roofs are fully adhered to. And we're thinking about doing something in that regard

as well. And you've got to make sure that the systems are installed safely, that there isn't a

risk of any kind of things falling off and so on. So they need to be done properly. But no,

we do not have a global skills shortage. And we don't foresee that happening anytime in the future.

So yes, one of the problems that I had when I installed a second battery and more solar at

my house was the local, I think the DNO is a district network operator in the UK,

sort of panic. This is a few years ago, panicked and went, you know, because we're, I'm in a fairly

remote rural area with a sort of 1950s grid connection. So it's probably not, you know,

it's a little bit at the limit of its abilities already. So there's now a lot of electric cars

in the village and a lot of solar. But it's the how the grid, how the grid adapts, you know,

our grid in this country definitely built for big coal burning power plants on the coast,

sent electricity inland. And that's how that's how we all grew up with that. And that obviously

isn't what we need now. I mean, is there a globally are there developments and obviously

discussions around how we adapt our old grid to this new paradigm? Yeah. So there's big discussions

in terms of, you know, how much new grid infrastructure we need to build. And there's a

global commitment to build 25 million kilometers of new grid infrastructure by the end of, yeah,

by the end of this decade, actually, believe it or not. A lot of that will be in the developing

world, right? Although there's also a discussion that how in some countries,

if you're doing it at the grid edge, so in your village, rather than in a big power station,

you actually the amount of grid out grid, you have to build is less, right? The cost of the

grid build out is less. But I think the other big difference is actually in how you operate the grid.

So in the UK, there's a control center in Warwick, which is roughly in the center of the country,

where they have loads of screens and they run the national grid across Great Britain,

and they're constantly monitoring to make sure that demand and supply are in sync with each other.

And when you have a lot of solar, wind, battery storage and so on, the way that central grid

operation command center works is slightly different. And so here, the grid operators that

are very advanced in this, which is essentially the Australians, the Californians, Texas as well,

Germany, and a couple others, the Chinese to some extent, actually, are teaching other grid

operators how it's done. And actually, the UK is at the very cutting edge of this, at the cutting

edge of working out how to manage a grid with a large share, 2000000 solar homes across the

UK now, which at first, when I started in the solar industry, a good 10 or more years ago,

national grid kept saying, it's really funny on a really sunny Sunday, it seems like we just don't

seem to have as much demand as we used to have. And then suddenly the light bulb clicked and they

understood what was going on. But now grid operators are being really clever in factoring in

solar at every size into the way they manage the grid, and being really clever in terms of when

they go out to auction to get those grid stability services they need to maintain a perfectly stable

supply, that they're slightly changing the requirements of what they need so that batteries

can bid in and provide those services as well. And batteries are so fast and so accurate in

providing those grid stability services that it really is changing the way grid operators

all over the world think, because a battery can switch on like that in microseconds, whereas a gas

or coal power station takes a good few minutes, if not 10 or 15 minutes to ramp up. And so that's

the big difference actually that grid operators are experiencing. I mean, there was a fabulous

story from Australia a few years ago now as a friend of mine worked in the grid in Australia,

he's now he's now he doesn't live in Australia anymore, but the discussion that went on on a day

where they nothing happened as far as they were concerned, nothing happened. Then they found out

like 10 minutes later that a large coal burning power plant had gone offline. It had tripped down

for whatever technical reason, but no one noticed. And they went, well, how can we not notice that

was three gigawatts. And that was the first big battery was in South Australia. It kicked in so

fast that none of their sensors picked it up. It was like instantaneous and it kept the no one

had a blackout. Normally that would have caused a rolling blackout across New South Wales, and they

didn't see anything. And that was you just think that is because the that was the big Tesla battery

that was put in in the wind farm in southern. And they the engineers behind that battery didn't

know it would do that. They were surprised when they then discussed it later on, they went, well,

we're glad it did it, but we didn't know it would, you know, we thought it could all

go wrong, you know, they didn't. So it is it is remarkable how the impact that these things are

having that we don't really see. I mean, when I saw the batteries being installed on the solar

farm I visited in Australia last year, it's on such a scale, it's like the size of a large

suburb, you know, which is just batteries. It's a massive, massive installation, which means that

that solar farm sends out electricity 24 hours a day. It's not intermittent.

In California, some say now that solar is now pumping more electricity into the grid at night

than during the day, because so much of that solar is being stored in big battery

farms like that one, you know, big, what they look like just a row of containers, actually.

But what's in there is just absolutely critical to the sort of stability of a

quality grid going forwards. And and the UK is actually at the very forefront cutting

edge of providing those incentives for batteries and also including batteries in the way it runs

its system and allowing batteries to bid in to all the different markets, whether it be the wholesale

market, whether it be the different grid stability services markets. And so the UK National Energy

System operator has a lot to teach the rest of the world on how it's done.

Yeah, which is so good. It's wonderful that we're in that position. I mean, I think the

bone of contention in the UK is that for what for multiplicity of reasons and solar isn't one of them,

we still have very expensive electricity for general consumer, which is heartbreaking. And

I kind of forget about it sometimes because I've got solar, so it's minimized for me,

but I'm still sort of aware of it. But yeah, no. But then I'll go to when I drive in France,

and I use a rapid charger in France, which here costs eye watering amounts of money.

It's cheap as chips. It's the same amount I pay for my electricity at home. And you go,

how is that possible? Why is it so expensive here? I mean, is it that the cost is tied to the cost

of gas? Is that really what is going on? That is what is going on. So for better or worse,

the UK went through a dash for gas on the previous governments and have a lot of gas power generation.

And so our cost of electricity goes up and down with the cost of gas.

And up until now, the UK grid operator has always kept a couple gas power plants running

24 seven to use that in case they need it. And we are now reaching and the thing is,

it's the their cost of operation that determines the electricity price for everyone in half hour,

right in that half hour period. But the good news is that we are now getting close to the point

where the UK grid operator is going to start running the entire UK power grid without any gas

at all on entirely clear power for to start with just 30 minute segments, see how it goes and then

move on from there. And so the more we can completely push those gas power stations out of the system

hour by hour, the more our our wholesale price of electricity will drop and therefore our retail

power prices will drop as well. But you know, this has been a choice of success with successive

governments. We are now switching to solar wind and batteries in a big way and quickly.

But the full we won't reap the benefits of that until we manage to kind of decouple the price

of power that we pay at home at the meter to the price of gas on international markets.

And that's the funny thing that it doesn't matter whether we generate the oil and gas ourselves

or buy it in Qatar or Russia or anywhere else, the price is still set on the global gas market.

And and and we are at the mercy of those of that price. And so we really need to be thinking about

an investment in energy resilience and investment in our energy security is an investment in solar

and storage and renewables, right? And making sure we have both the short duration storage

is what the batteries do, but also long duration storage to get us through the winter, which is

what the pump storage hydro and whale hydro power in Wales and Scotland does are well worth a visit

that. Exactly. And what long duration storage batteries will do for us in the future as well.

And yeah, it's it's we're in it's a real pity that we're in this situation in the UK, you know,

the Netherlands is the same in many other countries across Europe. And the sooner we get out of it,

the better. Yeah. And it is it is amazing how, you know, when you look back at our history,

because that's what I mean, my argument always is that technology is not political, you know,

and this is a really good example. It's it's both main parties in the UK did the dash for gas.

It isn't you can't blame one, you can't go home as a wretched tourist that was the

awful Labour Party. They know they both did it. They both pushed diesel as a clean fuel.

I mean, you know, you go, we need someone in Parliament who's technically literate to go,

no, guys, diesel is not a clean fuel. It's really not. But anyway,

don't want to go off that topic. But I think what's great from your perspective, what I'm

getting from you is, you know, that this technology is being adopted all over the world by completely

different countries with totally different outlooks, with different, you know, facilities

that they have, you know, some of them may have huge amounts of, you know, hydroelectric or

wind or whatever, you know, but you're seeing this is not localized, you know, because often

people go, Well, we're making all this effort, but no one else is doing anything. So why are we

suffering? Not at all. It's such a global phenomenon, I think, isn't it? It really is. I mean, half of

the world's solar and storage deployment rollout at present is in China. So no one can argue that

Chinese aren't doing it. The Indians are building solar farms on a scale that you would not believe

and have a target for 10 million solar homes by the end of next year, by the end of 2020.

Wow. Wow. I mean, they would have had none five years ago or very few, but they may have been

tiny. It's phenomenal what's happening there. In the US, despite what the Trump administration

might be saying, you know, you can rent your roof out to a third party company, they'll come

and put solar on it and they'll sell you the cheaper electricity, which I think is a brilliant

way of doing it. And I'd like to see that in more countries. Again, three quarters of the new

electricity generation capacity being added to the grid in the US every year is solar and battery

storage. You know, these investors, they don't take their investment advice from the Trump,

from the Trump White House. Look at the numbers. They follow the money. They know how to save money

and make money and they just get on with the job. You know, Brazil has gone through a huge solar

and storage household revolution, millions and millions of households there.

You know, Nigeria could be on the cusp of a big, big shift in the way it generates electricity.

Remember in Nigeria, almost every single middle class home has a diesel generator in the back

ready to kick in in the event of a power cut and horribly polluting they are too.

So this is really a global phenomenon that's reaching every tiny Pacific Island, every community.

And that's really exciting. And that's part of why I find my job as the CEO of the Global

Solar Council so incredibly rewarding and why, you know, the team that we have working all over

the world to try and solve the remaining challenges that do stand in our way are so motivated by the

idea that this is literally in some ways the most important technology in the world right now

on a par with maybe artificial intelligence. Yes. Which we haven't mentioned the quite impressive

impact that data centers are having around the world. But I mean, that's maybe another

another topic. But for goodness sake, if you're going to build a massive data center,

put solar on the roof at least, it won't cover your power cut. I mean, I'm sure they've got to

be. It would be insane not to. Yeah, they are. And, you know, solar plus batteries is possibly

the only form of power generation can that can keep up with the data centers that can scale

quickly as the data centers are growing. You know, remember, we've got enough spare factory

capacity to trip double or even triple our production overnight so we can scale as

fast as anyone needs needs us to anywhere in the world. And yes, the data centers that are

especially growing fast in the US, but also in other parts of the world, especially in Spain,

actually, where there's a lot of solar and so they do have very low wholesale and retail

and Spain has actually been rather insulated from the global oil and gas price rises that

we've seen from the straight up hormones, partly because they've got so much solar and wind.

But, you know, these data centers are being built all over the world. And in many ways,

the only power generation source that can really scale as fast and keep up with them

is solar plus storage. In the US, a lot of them are also building gas turbines.

They love their gas turbines.

But, you know, we'll see what happens when they get the gas bill in a couple years.

But that's just quickly. I'd just like to go back to Spain because that was on my list and I've

forgotten. But the most recent stuff I've read about Spain is, you know, they were

badly affected by increases in gas prices. Their electricity was in like ours was tied to the gas

but they have decoupled. They've now got the cheapest electricity or nearly the cheapest

electricity in Europe, which is extraordinary. It's amazing. And that's because of their rollout

of solar and wind. They're only just starting to roll out batteries. So they've been a bit

behind the curve on batteries. But once they do, they've now gone into that in a big way.

And once they get their batteries out on the grid, things will improve. No. And it's amazing how

many energy intensive industries are now moving to Spain because they can see how cheap electricity

is there. Indeed, you know, sometimes in the middle of day, it goes down to zero or even negative

and the batteries will fix that by spreading that power across the day. But, you know, the big

energy power consumers are now going to Spain and setting up there because they see a grid with

loads of generation capacity, loads of solar and wind, both large scale and household level.

And they see a grid that isn't bothered if global gas prices go up. And that's pretty amazing position

to be in. Yeah. No, I mean, that is, well, I think I was going to say that it's good to end on an

optimistic note, but actually we could have ended anywhere in the last 55 minutes because it was

all, I mean, it is so uplifting to talk to you, Sonia, because it's so exciting what's going on.

And you've just, I mean, I kind of probably know more than the average person about what's

happening in, you know, it's my passion and fascination with it. But I think your clarity

of understanding and your knowledge and breadth of knowledge is really wonderful to hear because

you've actually, you know, I would love to have gone to the conference in Shanghai.

Next year I'll come along. But that is insane because I was at the motor show in Shanghai

last year, which was an extraordinary experience in itself. But I don't think, I mean, it sounds

like there were as many people going to the solar conferences they were going to the motor

show. I mean, it's an insane number of people, which kind of shows you the scale of that industry

as well. It's sort of absolutely. Yeah. And the main thing we are doing all over the world now

is working with our national industry associations. And we want to make sure we have a really strong

national industry association, every capital around the world, just to be to be working with the

government and working with the electricity regulator to say, you know, what all we need is low or no

import duties on solar coming into the country for the UK. That's a tick. We want low or no VAT

on the systems when you buy them, zero percent VAT here in the UK until the end of until March,

2027, for at least we want to remove as much red tape as possible, make it as easy as possible

for people to put solar on their roof. And with balcony solar, we want people to be able to just

install it and plug it in themselves, which isn't even that big an ask. And we want to make it easy

for people to be able to borrow money to go solar where they need to write no one not everyone has

10, 20 grand lying around in their bank account. Of course they don't. It's a huge amount of money.

And so people like Sunsave and Solar City and and similar, you know, should be able to come along

and put the solar on your roof for you and sell you the cheap power. But the really exciting,

I think, as well as when you get cities involved in this. So, you know, what if London set a target

for how many millions of solar rooftops it wants? What if Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow,

you know, Newcastle all did the same? What if if if thousands of cities around the world

just put their heads together and figured out how to just do this almost street by street,

then really, you know, we could we can literally power the world many times over,

either by putting solar on every rooftop we can, or by just combining it with 1% of the

world's agricultural land, you know, and so the the the options are limitless.

And so we just have to make sure that we fix those last few little problems. And then Bob's

your uncle, as they say. That is great. Use a word, a name that our podcast host has. Yes,

I'm very happy to be Uncle Bob for this particular particular job. Sonya, it's been a real joy

talking to you. Thank you so much for your time. It's been really wonderful and good luck with

everything. And I'm going to be following what you do very carefully because I think it's extraordinary

and all power to you.

Well, I really hope you enjoyed that. It was an amazing conversation.

The thing is when we stop recording, because I knew I didn't want to take up too much of

her time, but but Sonya and I then talk for another 20 minutes after that. And yeah,

there's a lot going on, I think is the bottom line. Really hope you enjoyed it. Please do,

as I said, please tell your friends about this, please spread the word, please do subscribe

if you haven't already. And as always, if you have been, thank you for watching.

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

About this episode

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Sub-Saharan Africa

UK

UK National Energy System operator

Car Dodge Ram

Term solar farms

Term capital costs

Term gas power station

Place Straits of Hormuz

Term supply chain

Place old Silk Road

Concept payback

Concept grid

Term rooftop solar

Term feed in tariff

Term solar panels

Term battery

Concept energy infrastructure asset class

Term solar and storage

Brand Honkuk Ion tyre

Topic Formula E

Term distributed

Term rolling blackouts

Term solar lanterns

Term Sub-Saharan Africa

Place Casa Kula in Malawi

Car Mercury Villager

Term agri-pv

Term agrivoltaics

Term solar carports

Concept sun to wheel ecosystem

Term end of life solar panel

Place Warwick

Term microseconds

Term ramp up

Term gigawatts

Place South Australia

Place New South Wales

Place California

Place UK

Term wholesale market

Company UK National Energy System operator

Term rapid charger

Car Dodge Charger

Term half hour

Concept decouple the price of power that we pay at home at the meter to the price of gas on international markets

Term energy resilience

Term short duration storage

Term diesel generator

Term power cut

Term Global Solar Council

Term data centers

Concept low or no import duties on solar

Term VAT

Concept red tape

Term balcony solar

Brand Sunsave

Brand Solar City

Term solar rooftops

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