Checking in on solar power

In this episode, longtime solar industry analyst Jenny Chase,
author of Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon, catches us up
on the current state of the global solar industry and looks to
where it’s going.


(PDF
transcript)


(Active
transcript)


Text transcript:


David Roberts


Jenny Chase went to work for the London-based startup New Energy
Finance in 2005, straight out of university in Cambridge. She
founded its solar analysis team and helped establish some of the
first reliable indexes of prices in the solar supply chain, as
well as some of the first serious industry models and
projections.


The solar power industry barely existed then. Now solar is the
cheapest source of new power in most markets and the
International Energy Agency expects it to dominate global
electricity by 2050. Throughout that heady transition, Chase has
run and grown the solar analysis team, even after the company was
bought by Bloomberg and became Bloomberg NEF in 2009. It has
become one of the most respected teams in the business and a
widely cited arbiter of industry data.


In 2019, Chase wrote a book summarizing what she learned over her
years analyzing the industry. It is called Solar Power Finance
Without the Jargon, but the title is somewhat misleading — it
covers solar power finance but also solar power history,
technology, and policy. It is leavened here and there with droll
bits of biography or advice from Chase and contains an incredible
amount of information in a highly compact and readable package,
just over 200 pages.


A heavily updated second edition was released this month. Also
this month came Chase's yearly “opinions about solar” Twitter
thread, which is highly anticipated among a certain kind of
energy dork [waves].


I figured it would be fun to have Chase on the pod to talk about
the current state of the solar industry, whether anything but
standard-issue solar PV is ever going to flourish, and what the
world needs to help balance out increasing penetrations of solar.


Okay then. Jenny Chase from Bloomberg NEF. Welcome to Volts.
Thank you so much for coming.


Jenny Chase


Thank you so much for inviting me, David.


David Roberts


I read your book over the past week and it's just delightful. I
really recommend it to anyone. I feel like the title is a little
well, I guess it does say without the jargon, but I just feel
like the word finance is going to scare off some readers. But
it's really just a nice, extremely approachable introduction to
this whole thing of solar in the markets and how it's funded and
how it's proceeded over the years. So I really was charmed by it.
I noticed actually that it had a little bit of kind of
autobiography in the first few chapters and I thought it was
really kind of funny.


I had never really thought about it, but you and I have some
parallels in our history. We sort of snuck into what was at the
time a relative backwater in the world right around 2004, I
think, both of us, and then just kind of hung around.


Jenny Chase


Absolutely. And I can't get another job, so I'm stuck doing solar
at Bloomberg NEF now.


David Roberts


Same, we've been doing this for so long now that I couldn't
really do anything else, but we just kind of planted ourselves
and stuck around until the area we were in suddenly became huge
around us.


Jenny Chase


It's a pretty good place to be planted, though. I mean, back in
2004, I was looking at this industry, and I started specializing
in solar in late 2005. And I was like, "One day this might be 1%
of global electricity supply, but, you know, that's worth working
on. Even 1%, it's worth working on if we can make it clean." And
last year, it was 5%, and it isn't done growing.


David Roberts


Same, I started covering climate change during the George W. Bush
administration. I was like, maybe someday someone will do
something about this. Maybe someday we'll pass legislation. And
then here we are. PV dominates the world. People are targeting
net zero. How things change.


Jenny Chase


Yes.


David Roberts


So I want to ask you, you have been following now the solar
industry. I mean, honestly, one of the coolest, most fun, most
sort of, like, optimistic of all the dark things happening in the
world. I know so many people who basically are pinning, like, 98%
of their hopes for the future of humanity on this market that you
follow. So what a fun thing to be following. But here I'll start
with a very big, broad question. A big part of the history of
solar that you recount in your book, and I've written on this
before, too, and there's been academic papers on it is a series
of public supports.


Basically, you get the German feed-in tariffs. You get huge
Chinese manufacturing subsidies. Spain had a little period of
insane feed-in tariffs for a while. So it was definitely public
policy that brought solar from obscurity, where it was when you
first started following it, to borderline ubiquity now. And I
just wonder, could solar survive now? Could solar PV would solar
PV survive and thrive now without public supports?


Jenny Chase


Oh, absolutely. You couldn't stop solar if you wanted to stop
solar, David, at this point. Those subsidies, yes, they were
needed in the early years. They drove growth. They drove
companies to actually make these things. But the thing about
humans is that when they make things, they get better at making
things. And that has been an incredibly powerful story. Solar
modules cost over $100 per watt in the 1970s, in today's money.
By the time we started in 2004, they cost about — it was about $4
a watt. Stayed that way for about four years because there was
very strong demand, again, driven by subsidies, and then started
falling again.


And, you know, last week they were 12.8 U.S. cents per watt. And
I am super annoyed that didn't get into the book, because, of
course, I had to lock down the book four or five months ago.


David Roberts


What was the cutoff price that you managed to squeak into the
book?


Jenny Chase


I think it was 24 in the end. And I hope anyone reading the book
realizes that I knew that was not the final price.


David Roberts


Well, this is the insane thing about this market, about this
whole technology, is it's such a moving target. And the reason I
started with that question is that I think to people in our
industry at this point that has sunk in. It's clear that this is
a juggernaut, that this is the cheapest thing going now and that
you couldn't stop it if you want to. But I honestly don't know if
that alone just that basic fact has penetrated this sort of
general public consciousness. I feel like people generally still
see solar as kind of a nice liberal extra whipped cream on top
kind of treat you get with some extra subsidies.


But it really is the cheapest source of energy now, which is such
a fundamental break from when we started, that I just feel the
need to repeat it.


Jenny Chase


I mean, it is. I would slightly clarify that by saying it's the
cheapest source of bulk electricity generation in many countries.
There are some countries in northern Europe where it actually
probably should be wind that's slightly cheaper. And also it is
bulk electricity production. In 17 years of covering the solar
sector, I have learned that the sun doesn't shine at night.


David Roberts


How many years into your career were you when this sank in, when
you discovered this horrendous fact?


Jenny Chase


Not very many, but I have to admit that here in Switzerland, I
only realized when I had a solar system installed in 2018, quite
how bad it can be in the northern European winter.


David Roberts


Yeah, we'll discuss how to get around that. So, PV is now a
juggernaut, is growing at crazy rates. Prices are falling at
crazy rates. It seems like every week or two brings a new record
low price of modules, some sort of record in deployment, some
sort of wild new forecast. Just actually, right here, tell us,
because you just came out with a forecast, did you not, for solar
for next year?


Jenny Chase


Yeah. So annoyingly, it's my job, or my team's job, to keep our
forecast to 2030 updated. And apparently, we're going to have to
start doing 2035 soon, which is just great because we have not
nailed 2030 yet, I can tell you. We haven't nailed 2023. So, this
week I've been publishing our latest update of the forecast, and
our estimate for 2023 rose 5% on last quarter. So, we're now
thinking that 413 gigawatts of solar modules will get installed
worldwide this year, and 240 gigawatts of that will be in China.


David Roberts


Wild. Have you ever in the 20, almost 20 years you've been doing
this, forecasted too high? Like, have you ever overshot on PV?


Jenny Chase


Slightly, yes, actually.


David Roberts


You did?


Jenny Chase


We had a bit of a moment of over-enthusiasm in 2018, I think.
And, like for specific markets, we get it wrong sometimes. I
mean, I thought South Africa was going to be five gigawatts this
year because of the rate they appeared to be going in May and
June, but that has actually slowed down a bit and I dropped that
from five gigawatts to 3.5 gigawatts. So you can be quite wrong
in the granular sense. And of course, when you're covering the
market quarterly, you have to cover that sort of thing. You can't
just say, "oh, it all comes out in the wash," even though in the
long run it kind of does.


David Roberts


Yes, it does all seem to be coming out in the wash in the long
run. The line is only pointing in one direction, as they say. So
I guess one of the things I'd like to talk about then is it seems
like in terms of continued and accelerated growth in PV, the
technology is in place, it's cheap enough now, the manufacturing
is in place, the market is fairly robust, there's a lot of
supportive public policy now. There's a lot of money, you know
IRA being the notable example.


Jenny Chase


Yes, I mean, you Americans love throwing money at things.


David Roberts


Well, we can't do anything else. Our government is so broken that
throwing money is literally the only public policy tool remaining
to us that cannot be sort of mired in process. So everything's a
nail. So yeah, we're throwing a lot of money at solar.


Jenny Chase


Creates a lot of green jobs.


David Roberts


Yes, that's a lot of wind at the back of solar. So let's talk
about then, what are the restraints now on solar going forward?
What are the constraining factors? I don't think it's any longer
money and I don't think it's any longer policy, at least big
picture climate policy, what's now holding it back?


Jenny Chase


So, at the moment, it's grid. If you're sitting there with a pot
of money and you're trying to put it into solar projects that
will generate and sell electricity and there are a lot of people
who are in that position, many of whom are my clients. The
problem actually is finding somewhere where you've got land,
where you can get permission, and where you can get a grid
connection, and it's mostly actually the grid connection we
really need to build out the grid.


David Roberts


Is that true everywhere? Is that true in every market you look
at? Or is the U.S. particularly bad on that for some reason?


Jenny Chase


No, it's everywhere. It's literally everywhere. If you were to go
to a solar conference anywhere in the world, walk into the room
and say, "oh, here in South Africa" or "here in Turkey, grid is
the main constraint" and everyone will say "this person knows
their stuff."


David Roberts


You can sound smart everywhere now. That's interesting. It sort
of bespeaks, I think, something then maybe universal then, rather
than some quirk of U.S. policy or something like that.


Jenny Chase


Exactly, I mean, basically, around the world, we've built grids
for centralized power plants which made a certain amount of sense
when we had centralized power plants. But to get all this cheap
electricity from wind and solar to market, we are going to have
to build some more wires.


David Roberts


Yeah. And is permitting just securing land in and of itself, is
that also a universal thing, or is that somehow uniquely U.S.?
Because we really do have a tangle.


Jenny Chase


You do, but challenges with land, they look different in every
country, but it is quite universal that it's not easy to just
grab a patch of land and have the rights to long term build a
project on it.


David Roberts


Where are the markets where buildout is happening fastest? And is
that —


Jenny Chase


China. It is China.


David Roberts


I guess China is always the answer to that question, it's kind of
a cheat. Are they doing something with their grid that like — I
mean, are they just building, is that the simple answer? They're
just building a lot of it.


Jenny Chase


There's two things that China is doing. First of all, it's got a
very coordinated rooftop program, so a lot of the provinces are
building a lot of residential and commercial solar. And secondly,
and separately, it's building energy megabases out in the desert
and building ultra high voltage transmission lines out to them.
So it's got this two pronged strategy. Plus it's got a bit of
other utility scale being built as well. I mean, basically, China
is just building everything it's got.


David Roberts


Who's building fastest? The answer is China, on more or less
everything.


Jenny Chase


Always is. I mean, 240 gigawatts, we think will be built this
year in China and the entire world market last year was 252.


David Roberts


Yeah, that's wild. You look at these models that say we need X
amount of PV to hit our targets, to hit net zero by 2050 or 1.5
or whatever it is, and they look so big and eye-popping, they
look to the naked eye sort of like impossible, especially when
you break them down. Like, we have to build a utility scale solar
plant every five minutes from now till the end of time and they
seem impossible. But China is moving at that pace. It is moving
at the crazy pace we need to. It's possible.


Jenny Chase


It absolutely is. Yes, China is moving at that crazy pace. And to
be honest, solar modules are super cheap and solar is actually
quite easy to build compared with everything else we've built.


David Roberts


Yeah, well, it's just Legos, right? I mean, it's more like Legos
than a nuclear plant, for instance.


Jenny Chase


Very much more like Legos than a nuclear plant. I mean, I think
that the engineers working on solar plants would probably say
that there is a certain amount of skill to doing it properly. And
there is, of course, but I think you can build a decent solar
plant with relatively limited technology.


David Roberts


In terms of all the constraints or headwinds that you mention in
the book, let's talk about these trade disputes and trade
barriers, because we're hearing now about tariffs. Talk about
tariffs as flying everywhere. Trump put a bunch of tariffs in
place.


Jenny Chase


Actually, it was Obama that put the first tariffs in place.


David Roberts


On solar?


Jenny Chase


On solar, yes. 2012.


David Roberts


Interesting. And they've been in place ever since. And I'm just
wondering, on the macro level, is this just going to change where
the panels go and when? Or is this going to be a constraint on
absolute growth, do you think?


Jenny Chase


So, trade barriers are the reason that we generally regard the
U.S. as this weird little market, not really a proper one. The
U.S. would definitely be installing more solar if it hadn't been
for constraints, particularly last year. First of all, modules do
cost two to three times as much in the U.S. as in Europe and
other markets.


David Roberts


That's just because we're not buying the super cheap Chinese
ones. Is that so?


Jenny Chase


You're not buying Chinese. But also, last year there was the
Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which means that anything
coming into the U.S. has to have a pretty strong verification
chain showing that every part of the value chain was made outside
the province of Xinjiang in China. And functionally, it seems to
have stopped a lot of Chinese brands getting in at all, although
Indian brands possibly using the same wafers don't have so much
trouble.


David Roberts


Do you think? Because you know IRA, and recent Democratic
legislation in the U.S. puts a big emphasis on trying to onshore
or friendshore things, not just solar panels, but also the
materials that go into them, EVs, batteries, etc. Do you think
that these trade barriers, which are more I think the U.S.
probably has the most of them around solar at this point, or at
least as much as anybody else, are going to — like, is that price
differential going to settle out? Is it possible, I guess what
I'm asking is, do you think it's likely that the U.S. is going to
bulk up its own manufacturing or the manufacturing of its friend
countries, whoever those turn out to be, that that price will
even out relatively quickly, or is it going to take a while?


Jenny Chase


I think that the U.S. will probably have a lot of its own
manufacturing, maybe even for the more complex parts of the value
chain, because most of the solar capacity announced in the U.S.
so far has just been for the module stage. And you can make a
solar module in a garage if you have to. That's not the high tech
bit of the chain. I don't think that the price differential will
even out. I don't think that the U.S. will get to the scale and
the integration of manufacturing bases that China has anytime
soon. I mean, China is genuinely good at this.


This is not a matter of cheap labor. It's not a matter of not
even cheap energy. It's that it does the whole thing there. And
they've got very, very good at it.


David Roberts


Oh, so this is not just a matter of their stuff is cheaper
because they have I mean, I think that's the sort of popular
perception, right, is that they just have cheap labor and lower
standards, etc., etc. But there's genuine technological expertise
that's difficult for us to replicate.


Jenny Chase


Absolutely. I mean, China is the reason why solar is not a
cottage industry anymore. The Chinese manufacturing industry is a
juggernaut. It's viciously competitive within itself. The
companies hate each other. If you're imagining some kind of
monolith, that is not the case.


David Roberts


Well, China is very big. There's plenty of room inside it for
competition.


Jenny Chase


There certainly is. So now the skill to ring out final tenths of
a cent out of the cost of making a module, it's high tech
engineering, it's very careful, but it's also something you've
just got to have done a lot of and know exactly how it works.


David Roberts


Is this something you lose sleep about? Do you think the U.S.
energy balance in 2030 is going to be substantially changed by
the presence of these tariffs?


Jenny Chase


I think that the one reason the U.S. isn't having as much of a
boom as other countries in solar is the tariffs. So I hope the
IRA can shift it. I mean, from an external perspective, the IRA
looks like pushing down the accelerator really hard on a car that
has the handbrake on.


David Roberts


Yes, the handbrake being the trade barrier and the permitting.


Jenny Chase


And the permitting. And the grid. To be fair, there's stuff in
the IRA about the grid as well, about building that out, and I
know Jay Gashar(sic.) is working on it.


David Roberts


And the final question about trade barriers: Are these more or
less consensus — is there any prospect of these going away? Or do
you think these are more or less kind of a permanent feature at
this point? This is how we're going to do it?


Jenny Chase


I think, in the U.S. and India — that's the other weird little
market — they are not going away anytime soon. These are two
countries that are quite committed to building a domestic
manufacturing industry, even if it costs more.


David Roberts


And you think it'll be a long time before either of those are at
the level of cost and technical expertise of Chinese companies?


Jenny Chase


It'll be a long time. I mean, you could say that at this point,
even just making modules as good as China was making three years
ago is actually all right. You could say that's good enough.


David Roberts


One other constraining factor which I have been interested in for
a long time and think is controversial, at least in my little
corner of the world, is this notion of renewables in general, but
especially solar, eating its own lunch, as they say. Price
cannibalization, as you call it, in the book, which is a simple —
I don't think there's anything particularly technical about —
it's, just that all the solar is producing at the same time when
the sun's out. So the next solar plant you build is going to be
directly competing with the existing solar plant, producing solar
at the exact same time and thus mildly bringing down the price.
The more you build, the more the price comes down.


I feel like the conventional wisdom, call it like five years ago
or ten years ago, was that this phenomenon of renewables eating
their own lunch is going to kick in at a lower level than has
turned out to be the case. And I just wonder if you agree with
that — if you agree that this is maybe less severe of a problem
than we thought a while back?


Jenny Chase


I think what we've realized is that most grids actually have a
fair amount of flexible capacity. So you can turn down gas plants
in the daytime and of course you want to because it's good if you
can turn down the gas plants and burn less gas. It is starting to
be a problem though we do have zero or negative power pricing
events quite regularly on sunny weekends in Europe. Now
California has them, bits of Australia have them. There are times
of the day when power on the spot power market doesn't cost
anything and you could say, well, what's the problem?


And like, as a first approximation, there isn't actually really a
problem.


David Roberts


Yeah, free power doesn't seem like the worst thing that could
happen to you.


Jenny Chase


But it does, of course, mean that if you want to build another
power plant that's the same, you are competing with free power a
lot of the time. And you can do it to an extent, because while
solar is getting cheaper, you still build for those — they call
them shoulder periods when solar is not at maximum and the power
price is not zero. But it is still a concern. And, to be honest,
that's what keeps me up at night. The fact that we will get
stronger negative feedback mechanisms kicking in, particularly in
places that don't have a lot of flexible capacity, who are maybe
doing coal and nuclear rather than gas and hydro.


On the other hand, one big update between the first edition of my
book and the second is that batteries are just a thing now.


David Roberts


Yeah. Which is newish in the world, I think. New enough that we
don't totally know how it's going to affect things.


Jenny Chase


Yeah. And batteries have to be built and obviously they have to
be manufactured, they have to be built. They are actually really
expensive. I mean, when we try and calculate the economics of
batteries, I'm not entirely sure why most people in Europe are
building them, but they are.


David Roberts


Yeah, you seem skeptical of the economics of residential
batteries too.


Jenny Chase


I am very skeptical. I attempted to calculate the payback period
on my parents' battery system in the UK, and it's more than 20
years. I'm like, "Mum, did you know this was that bad when you
bought it?"


David Roberts


And yet you also say that you've underestimated batteries. What
do you mean by that? What are they doing more than anticipated?


Jenny Chase


Getting bought. No, I mean over 70% of residential solar systems
in Germany and Italy added this year now have batteries attached.
And that does make a huge difference to this power price
cannibalization problem because it does mean that you can shift
your output to the evening and the night. And then what keeps me
up at night is the seasonality thing.


David Roberts


Yeah, so you feel "okay" then about the, sort of, sun going down
problem, the diurnal problem, smoothing out, like Jesse Jenkins
and I did this a few weeks ago about the sort of timing of
intermittency of solar and there's second by second swings,
there's minute by minute swings, there's hour to hour swings. And
it sounds like you think and I think he thinks that batteries are
going to sop up most of the sort of short term variability.
You're more confident than that than you used to be, let's say.


Jenny Chase


I certainly am, yes.


David Roberts


Well, this is another question I have about this. And maybe as
someone who's watched markets grow and develop, you have some
insight into this naively. I would think if we have this problem
in a capitalist society, in a market where during certain periods
of the day, we're producing this valuable commodity for free. And
so it's just sitting there. It seems to me naively, that you're
going to get a stampede of people finding ways to use that power,
finding ways to use that excess solar power. Not just you could
shift demand under those periods of high sunlight and just use it
directly, or you can find new ways to store it or shift it or
move it around or something.


But this seems like the kind of problem that markets ought to be
very good at solving. So why should I worry rather than just
thinking like this will solve itself? You say high prices are the
solution to high prices. It seems like free power ought to be the
solution to free power also.


Jenny Chase


So I think it is. But historically, people have not always
responded to power price signals. I mean, certainly on the
residential level, people have not always responded to power
price signals quite the way you would expect them to. And on the
commercial and industrial level, you often have to spend a lot of
capex to take advantage of these low prices. Like for making
hydrogen, for example. You can make hydrogen with electricity,
but the electrolyzer, which is the equipment that makes the
hydrogen, is really expensive. So you don't want to buy all that
equipment and run it for like 1000 hours a year.


You want to be running it at least 50% to 80% of the year. And
there's a lot that we can probably do with stuff we already have,
like flexible charging of electric vehicles is an obvious thing
that we should all be doing.


David Roberts


Water heaters, hot water heaters.


Jenny Chase


Water heaters are good. Yes, heat pumps. Although again, in
northern Europe, the issue with heat pumps and heat pumps are
brilliant, and I have one, but the issue is that they do run a
lot more in the winter, and that is when we do not always have
the sun.


David Roberts


Yes, this is back to balancing out solar, which we'll return to
later. So I want to ask about — it's funny, normal people, when
they get excited about solar, there are a bunch of call them sort
of exotic forms of solar that people love to get excited about.
And at some point in your book or Tweet threads, you have poured
cold water on all of the following: thin film solar, thermal
electricity, floating solar on water, agrivoltaics (i.e., solar
on the farm building), integrated solar, perovskite solar. And I
guess I'm just wondering, do you think that standard PV built in
the standard way is such a juggernaut that all of these things
are going to turn out to be more or less kind of like frivolous
extras?


Are any of those going to be real? Because you've broken a lot of
hearts. There's a lot of people who love — in each of those
categories there's a lot of fans whose feelings are hurt when you
come along and say, "It's just solar PV on a boat, don't get so
excited." Are any of those worth getting excited about?


Jenny Chase


No, I wouldn't get excited about any of those, sorry. I mean,
some of them are worse than others. I think the best thing I
could say about solar thermal electricity generation is it's not
quite dead yet and floating — so the big thing about floating
solar is that you could put it on water and sometimes it's really
easy to get the grid and the use of the site on water. So, for
example, our hydroelectric dams, the water is usually already
zoned as electricity production and there's a grid connection and
there's generally anticorrelation between the output from the
hydro dam and the solar panels.


So, like in summer, the solar panels are going into the grid so
you can save some water. So it's good, but it is still solar on a
boat. And agrovoltaics, I'm worried that people are a little bit
overexcited about that because, if you do it wrong, it is bad
solar subsidizing bad farming. There are some crops, like
berries, maybe berries you can grow under things with shading,
but how many berries do we want to eat as a civilization?


David Roberts


But thin film, more energy dense, but higher cost.


Jenny Chase


Less energy dense, I would say.


David Roberts


Oh, wait, is that —


Jenny Chase


First Solar is — So the only thin film player of any significance
left is First Solar.


David Roberts


Oh, right. Less energy dense, but allegedly cheaper to crank out
because you can do it on a sheet.


Jenny Chase


No, it's more expensive now.


David Roberts


Well, then what the hell?


Jenny Chase


The reason First Solar is having a great time now is because
plants in the U.S. are going to get 17 U.S. cents per watt under
the IRA as a production tax credit.


David Roberts


Good grief.


Jenny Chase


And because the U.S. has trade barriers on imports.


So does thin film — I mean, if it's less energy dense and more
expensive, then it's hard for me to think of an obvious
application for it. What's left for it to do?


Lower embodied carbon, actually. But when we talk about thin
film, we really are talking about First Solar at this point
because everyone else has failed. And to do credit to First
Solar, it's a company that has met its milestones, scaled up
meticulously, has a great recycling program, and has a pretty
plausible claim to having lower embodied carbon per watt than
crystalline silicon.


David Roberts


Who's using that?


Jenny Chase


Americans. Nobody else would buy them. They're more expensive and
less efficient.


David Roberts


But on their roof or where — ?


Jenny Chase


It's ground mounted mainly. There's no reason why you couldn't
put them on the roof, but because they're less efficient, you
would tend to go for the crystalline silicon option.


David Roberts


And then the one that really hurt my feelings was this about — I
used to get so excited about all these ways of integrating solar
into building materials, right. Like, they say you can put solar
cells in windows so that they're sort of ambiently generating all
the time. They say they can put it in concrete. Like you can put
them on fabrics now. Like if you read the lab stuff, the MIT
press release world, there's all kinds of cool stuff you can do.
Integrating solar into other materials. You just poo-poo all that
— is there nothing to any of that?


Jenny Chase


Don't put them on fabrics. You know the really great thing about
glass, it's one of the oldest materials we've got and it doesn't
degrade, it doesn't flex. It's pretty hard, it stays transparent.
It's a really great material to encapsulate your modules on.
Every attempt to make flexible solar has ended up with worse
encapsulants that will almost certainly degrade after a few
years.


David Roberts


So you haven't seen anything in the building integrated world
that you think even on the long term has a chance of surviving.


Jenny Chase


People say it's pretty. I mean, if you want to pay more for
pretty. Personally, I'm interested in electricity generation. But
like most of these solar windows, they are just bad. They are
just bad PV that is being sold as a gimmick and it's barely worth
wiring up, in all probability.


David Roberts


Well, that's just a bummer. I love this sort of Sci-Fi vision of
your entire infrastructure sort of ambiently generating power all
the time because it's all sort of got solar cells in it.


Jenny Chase


But just put proper solar panels on the roof, it's the same
thing, except it probably works better and it certainly costs a
lot less.


David Roberts


Fine. Ruin my Sci-Fi vision. And perovskites, the other great
white hope of this whole world at this point are competing with
SMRs to be the perpetual next big thing. The next big thing in a
few years, forever? Is that going to happen? Is it happening? Is
it getting closer? Are we closer now than we were three years
ago? Or is it still at the pure hype level?


Jenny Chase


Well, I was walking around the world's biggest solar conference
in Shanghai in May, and I was having a little bit of a panic
because I thought I'd more or less finalized the book saying some
relatively uncharitable things about perovskites. And every
single company was like, "perovskites!" I actually saw my first
perovskite, and then the Chinese manufacturers were like, "oh,
our research arm has got perovskites." "Oh," Hanwha Qcells was
like, "oh, we've made an investment." First Solar was like,
"we've made an investment." I was like, "oh, god, is this going
to make my book look stupid in six months?"


But to be honest, nothing has come of that. Which doesn't mean
that nothing will, because it was relatively recently. But
personally, I think they were just having a little moment of,
"oh, everyone's saying this. We have to seem like we're ahead of
the curve." And they all have a skunk works where they're
investigating this sort of thing, and so they basically release
some of the lab results. And I think it's at least five years
away.


David Roberts


And also, one thing I've come to appreciate more looking at this
stuff over time is even if the perovskite tech proves out faster
and better than we expect, it's just like you're so far behind
the eight ball at this point trying to catch up with PV or
squeeze in past PV anywhere. That the tech thing is not even the
main problem. It's just your scale wise. Like, where do you
start? Where do you find a foothold?


Jenny Chase


No, really, the tech thing is the problem. The problem is that
this stuff does not have a lifetime of years.


David Roberts


Oh, it degrades quickly?


Jenny Chase


Exactly. I mean, the problem with perovskite is it degrades
really quickly. And I don't think anyone is claiming that they
have a completely stable product that's ready for
commercialization at any price. But the other thing is that if
perovskite does succeed, it won't be as a standalone product. It
will be as a second layer on top of crystalline silicon. So it
will backpack.


David Roberts


Oh, interesting. So it will be like an improvement to existing
panels.


Jenny Chase


Exactly. And it will make a lot of money for the company that
figures it out.


David Roberts


Again, sort of from the outside, it looks like your basic PV
panel, your basic solar photovoltaic panel looks a lot today like
it did ten years ago or 20 years ago, to my eye. But one of the
things you describe in your book is that there's actually lots of
micro improvements happening. There's lots of improvements
happening within these PV products. So maybe just talk a little
bit about sort of like what tech improvement looks like within
the PV category and how much headroom is left for just the
standard PV panel to get better.


Jenny Chase


So the first thing I would say is that the layperson doesn't need
to know anything about exactly how a solar panel works.


David Roberts


Thank goodness.


Jenny Chase


That said, obviously, there are incredibly talented engineers who
are working really hard to make that panel more efficient and
produce the same output or more output with fewer materials. And
so the big improvements over the last 15 years have been wafers
have got thinner, so there's much less polysilicon used per watt.
It used to be about 10 grams per watt in 2008, and today it's 2.6
grams per watt.


David Roberts


And that's just a cost-saving.


Jenny Chase


It's a cost-saving. It's also an embodied carbon saving, if you
care about that, because polysilicon is a very energy-intensive
step of the value chain. The wafers have got bigger, so you can
make them out of bigger ingots and then they're easier to handle
and they have a lower ratio of the gaps between them. So the
standard wafer used to be what we call 156 mm, which is the side
length, and now the standard one is 182 mm. So that saves all
kinds of costs. There's been a move in cell architecture, first
of all, from aluminium back surface field to passivated emitter
rear contact (PERC), which is currently the standard.


But we're just moving to TOPCon (tunnel oxidated, passivated
contact).


David Roberts


Okay.


Jenny Chase


And to be honest, I can barely remember what that stands for. I
never know what the difference is.


David Roberts


But from the layperson's point of view, the upshot here is that
they're getting cheaper and they're working a little better.


Jenny Chase


And more efficient. And there are theoretical limits to how
efficient they are.


David Roberts


And where are we at now? Like 20 — state of the art is like 22%.
Is that right?


Jenny Chase


State of the art is probably 24 or 25% of commercial production.
Obviously, most modules are a bit worse than that. I think it's
about 22% for the typical module this year. And it will be a bit
better next year because next year the typical one will be
TOPCon, not PERC.


David Roberts


And that 25 could get to — ?


Jenny Chase


34, perhaps. I think we've got a roadmap to 34%.


David Roberts


No kidding. That's not a small amount.


Jenny Chase


I think we hit that by 2050. It's not a small amount.


David Roberts


That's a third more power coming out of our panels.


Jenny Chase


The same space, yes.


David Roberts


That's more room for improvement than I thought. And that's just
with polysilicon PV?


Jenny Chase


Just with crystalline silicon? No, that involves a heterojunction
that does involve a second junction on top of that. So another
layer of another sort of semiconductor, whether that is
perovskites or something else. Because when you stack your layers
of semiconductor, you absorb different wavelengths of light with
different semiconductors and so you get a higher efficiency.


David Roberts


Interesting. I didn't know there was that much headroom left. And
whatever happened to concentrating? I always thought that it was
very clever the concentrating solar panels, where you just use a
cheap plastic lens to concentrate the light, and then you get
more intense light and you can get more sort of, comparatively
more power out of the light with a special kind of solar cell.
Did that come to anything?


Jenny Chase


Cells got cheap and lenses stayed expensive. Also, if you're
doing that, you've got to make sure that the angle that your
panel is mounted at is correct, because otherwise it's focusing
the light on the wrong place and it turns out to be way cheaper
to use ordinary solar cells. And it doesn't matter that much if
they're oriented right, rather than have a super duper lens thing
that has to point the exact right direction. So, CPV is dead.


David Roberts


Another clever tech, RIP. And what about — these are you know,
we're mostly talking about improvements to the panel and the
cell. What about, you know, I saw a company that is using steel
for framing instead of aluminum. I think I could be getting that
wrong, but I think that was it. The stuff around the panel, the
brackets, and the frames and the mounts, is there a lot of
headroom for improvement in that stuff?


Jenny Chase


I think there probably is. So steel is heavier than aluminium, so
I think this is for the frame of the module. And module frames
used about 2.8% of world aluminium production last year, so it's
not actually small. Now, steel is lower carbon than aluminium,
but it is heavier. So I suspect the maths on that might be a
little bit complicated. But if you don't have to transport them
very far, that's good. And of course, when you've got solar
sitting in a field held up on steel structures, then there are
improvements to be made to the design of that.


So it catches the wind less, so it's more sturdy with the same
amount of materials.


David Roberts


And just in terms of mounting and tracking the sun, what's the
state of the art? I always wondered, is it going to end up being
cheaper to just make the cheapest possible panels with the
cheapest possible installation? Or is it worth spending the extra
money to get fiddly precise tracking of the sun throughout the
day?


Jenny Chase


So modern trackers are not particularly precise, actually. They
just more or less follow it from east to west, because, unlike
concentrated photovoltaics, they don't have to be precise. So the
really rough rule of thumb we have is that tracking costs about 4
cents per watt more in Capex and gives you 25% more output, which
does mean that you put tracking in in sunny places, because 25%
more output is more powerful in sunny places.


David Roberts


Right.


Jenny Chase


So we reckon that you don't really use tracking anywhere, like
further from the equator than France, and you use tracking in
sunnier places. Tracking also takes more land, but it also gives
you a nicer output profile. It gives you like a table of output
profile throughout the day, because you start generating first
thing in the morning, whereas if you just make them south facing,
you get this peak.


David Roberts


You get more into those shoulder periods.


Jenny Chase


Exactly.


David Roberts


And what about people who think that AI and machine learning is
going to revolutionize anything? Is AI or machine learning any
help at all in PV, in tracking or anything like that? Or is dumb
and simple better?


Jenny Chase


This is machinery tracking moves. It's stuff that's got to be
reliable, it's got to be rugged. I'm sort of inclined to say that
AI can't revolutionize it, but maybe machine learning can do a
little bit around the edges.


David Roberts


In terms of markets, one of the things you say in the book is
that while the sort of macro growth has been relatively steady
and predictable, there's been some surprises on where this
happens. And it's funny, I thought in your forecast now you have
this category "rest of the world," outside of the major markets,
which you are sort of using as kind of a buffer. You're just sort
of like adding a bunch of capacity in the rest of the world
category just as a buffer because you keep underestimating;
everyone keeps underestimating how fast things are going to go.
And I know you said —


Jenny Chase


We don't do that anymore. Now we call it buffer/unknown. And then
people ask me, "what's buffer/unknown?" And I'm like, "we don't
know."


David Roberts


Exactly.


Jenny Chase


They go away after that.


David Roberts


This to me is funny as we've been underestimating growth in PV so
long that at this point we're just like, "Here's our forecast...
plus some. We don't know where or why, but there's probably going
to be more."


Jenny Chase


Exactly. And we need it as well. Even within a single year, we
tend to find it gets taken up by existing markets being more than
anyone thought.


David Roberts


Oh, funny.


Jenny Chase


But my clients do tend to get mad at me if that's more than about
like 30% of world demand.


David Roberts


Wow, 30% is a substantial amount of like, "we don't know" buffer.


Jenny Chase


I mean, that is by 2030. So, there's a lot of "we don't know" by
2030.


David Roberts


Yes, true. I wonder, I was going to ask about this later, but
this seems like a good opportunity: Why is it, and this, I guess,
is kind of a sociological or maybe even like a psychological
question, why is it that it is so much easier and safer to make a
conservative forecast that ends up being wrong on the downside,
which is like 99% of solar forecasts to date, than it is to try
to be as optimistic as reality? Like the one thing I come back to
over and over again, and you mentioned it in the book, is like
the one solar forecast that's been even close to reality was
Greenpeace's sort of wild forecast early in the 2000s, where all
they did — it was viewed as wildly optimistic — but all they did
is just say, "Well, here's the improvement rate, here's the
learning rate. What if that just keeps happening?"


Jenny Chase


No, they just took the growth rate of build and extrapolated
that. Oh, it was simpler than that. They don't know what a
learning rate is. And yes, it was the best mainly because it was
the highest. I'm just going to say it's also not particularly
useful if you're trying to decide what world markets to go into
or sort of adjust your expansion strategy if someone's just
telling you, well, it will be 40% growth per year forever.


David Roberts


Right. Well, you want something more granular than that, I guess,
if you're in the business —


Jenny Chase


And more regularly updated and where someone is actually sitting
behind it, being somewhat responsible for being wrong.


David Roberts


Right. But why is it, why do we always under predict? And why is
there no like, people seem to feel safe under predicting, whereas
clearly there's a much greater fear of overestimating such that
everyone's underestimated every time forever. What explains that?


Jenny Chase


I mean, you can't predict complete transformation and the more
you know about a market, the less you can predict that it will
totally change, I think. So obviously, if you are an expert on
the energy market, you can't predict it. You don't want to
predict that everything becomes totally different. Also, like if
you go around with wild numbers, everyone just calls you boosters
and says that you're just selling something which is not entirely
untrue. But mostly what I've been trying to sell is accuracy.


David Roberts


Yeah, it's a little crazy. People would almost rather be
inaccurate than risk that than risk being viewed as a booster. It
seems like in a biz where you're literally predicting and
projecting seems like the social penalty for inaccuracy ought to
be maybe higher than the social penalty for being optimistic.


Jenny Chase


The thing is that there are no prizes for just coming up with the
biggest number. I mean, you can do it, but it's not particularly
helpful. I mean, throw a pin at the dartboard and if you happen
to be the closest, it doesn't give you any real insight. And
also, solar is weird. It's the first form of bulk electricity we
ever have had that doesn't involve turning something, turning a
generator. So it is a little bit unique. It's the first ever
semiconductor form of electricity, so it is unique. But it's also
you cannot extrapolate a growth rate forever because you end up
with the whole world covered in solar panels."


So you do have to recognize that there are limits to this and
there are negative feedback mechanisms. And on the local level,
we already see some of those negative feedback mechanisms.


David Roberts


I get all that, but just at a certain point, like the IEA, if I'm
wildly under predicting solar again and again and again and again
and again and again, eventually those arguments have to lose some
of their power, don't they? Like whatever limit you're worried
about or trying to predict, it's not happening statistically on
the odds it's probably not going to happen next year either.
There will be limits, obviously, like the learning rate and the
growth rate and all that can't project out to the future the way
they are forever.


Jenny Chase


The learning rate, you can actually, because it's an exponential
decay, so you can double capacity as many times as you like.
You're never going to get the price to zero. So the learning
rate, you can theoretically go out forever. Don't ask me what's
happening to my experience curve this quarter because the price
is way below the experience curve, and this is causing some real
construction difficulties.


David Roberts


Really?


Jenny Chase


Yeah, so I feel some sympathy for the IEA as well, because what
they were trying to do was not make a prediction of solar. What
they were trying to do was model world energy supply in a sort of
continuous way that had worked when the world electricity,
worldwide energy supply was fossil fuels and nuclear. And then
they were trying to tweak the sensitivities of that model and
bring it to the future. It was not a model that was designed for
transformative change, and they have changed that around, and
they have got whatever their equivalent to the net zero scenario
is called, and they have changed that, to be fair.


David Roberts


Yeah, people do seem to be trying to catch up, but even the
people running faster and getting more optimistic are still, as
far as I know, undershooting.


Jenny Chase


It's more complicated, though, than just drawing a line on the
chart. At least, I mean, for my team, it isn't actually that much
more complicated, but when you've got to put things together and
make sense of it, be like, "okay, what is power price volatility
in California in 2030 if we project this out?" Then you do get
some very strange-looking effects. And you can either spend your
life analyzing those strange-looking effects and trying to figure
out where you should put your money in that, or you could be a
little bit on the conservative side.


And, I mean, we've been talking like it's all people in developed
countries. And the biggest problem my team has is that analysts
who have become experts on the energy of, say, Indonesia or
Brazil find it very difficult to imagine this strange thing
coming here and knocking it all over. And I don't feel like I can
go into emerging markets and say, "guys, you're all wrong, it's
going to look like this." At least not as forcibly as I maybe
would like to.


David Roberts


Yeah, there's something to that. Like, psychologically, the more
you know about a particular thing, the more sort of skeptical you
are about radical change happening to it, the more reasons that
change won't happen that you can cite. So when someone just comes
in and says, like, "I don't know, I just got a gut feeling that
miracles are going to happen and it's going to be more than
that," I can understand why they're greeted with skepticism. But
again, if that goofball turns out to be right over and over
again, repeatedly for 20 years, at a certain point you have to
accept that miracles are going to happen.


They keep happening. Speaking of that, where are the markets?
Like you mentioned that some markets have sort of like taken you
by surprise. And that's one of the things that's kind of skewed
your forecast in the past, is that things take off where you
don't necessarily expect. What are some examples of that? Where
is solar taking off now that people might not popularly know that
it's happening and where might be next?


Jenny Chase


So, I have no idea what's happening in Pakistan, but it is
importing a load of modules from China, four gigawatts a year.
Something's going on in Pakistan, and I have not spent enough
time, but I've spent a little bit of time looking at the
licensing website. It looks like there's a lot of commercial
scale going in there. I am still super excited about South Africa
because this is a major medium income economy that has been
having crippling blackouts and one of the best solutions is just
to buy a solar system and a battery.


David Roberts


Is this distributed that's happening there?


Jenny Chase


Mostly, but there's also a bunch of commercial and probably
mining scale because there is actually no limit now on how big a
system you can put in and have it feed into the grid. So there
will be some big stuff, but so far it's been mostly rooftop, I
think. So, South Africa is exciting. I'm quite excited about
Nigeria because Nigeria removed its fossil fuel subsidies earlier
this year, and Nigeria has about 15 gigawatts of on-grid power
capacity and about 50 gigawatts, very roughly, of generators that
run on diesel and gasoline.


David Roberts


Whoa, wait, they have more than twice the amount of personal
generators than they do actual grid-connected power generation.


Jenny Chase


So the sources are not great, but it's probably more like three
times.


David Roberts


That's wild.


Jenny Chase


It's called "I Better Pass My Neighbour," and basically, the idea
is that you've got a generator when your neighbor doesn't. And
running those generators became extremely expensive when the
subsidy was removed. So there has been an upswing in small solar
and small batteries.


David Roberts


Interesting. Yeah, I was going to ask I don't know that we have
time to get into it much, but I was going to ask what your sort
of general temperature is on the whole enthusiasm around kind of
like distributed off-grid for people in severe poverty. This idea
that you can get distributed PV to people before you can get the
grid to them, practically speaking. Do you put a lot of stock in
that?


Jenny Chase


I've been excited about that for the last 18 years. And if we're
honest, the growth has not been —


David Roberts


Yeah.


Jenny Chase


It's grown, but it's been steady and it's still pretty small. And
I'm really the only member of the team that spends a lot of time
on it because most people have better things to do. It is one to
watch, though, and I deeply hope that what does happen with this
latest fall in prices is that simple module battery systems and
things that can just power a house become so affordable that just
a wave of them goes in across Africa and Southeast Asia.


David Roberts


So you think there's still the possibility that we could hit the
S curve on that that could substantially tick up?


Jenny Chase


Yes, I do. I think there's still the possibility that things get
so cheap that we can leapfrog over the need to build a
centralized fossil fuel infrastructure to bring power to Africa.


David Roberts


Interesting. As a way of wrapping up the main experience, you've
had everybody who's watched this market, but I assume it's more
visceral for you being so close to it. The main experience you've
had is just headlong growth and PV crashing through purported
limits on PV, PV crashing through forecasts, crashing through
markets, just crashing through things, doing things people said
it couldn't do, being bigger, selling more, getting cheaper, et
cetera, et cetera. It's really a wild success story. So, I mean,
one of the things you address is actually, I'm going to quote
your tweet here because I thought it was interesting.


"When you tell an energy future model to optimize a power
portfolio for clean power adequacy, it will give you more wind
and less solar than when you tell it to optimize for a least cost
electricity sector development." In other words, if you just want
your model to do the cheapest thing possible to get you as much
power as possible, it's going to do a lot of solar. If you want
sort of adequacy and backup and resilience, you put more wind in.
First, just to say why that is.


Jenny Chase


So wind blows at night and in the winter. And it's not just
better system adequacy, it's that the wind pathway is actually
better if you want to get to net zero.


David Roberts


Better literally for reaching the goal itself?


Jenny Chase


And for economics like it's probably cheaper to reach net zero
building a mix of solar and wind in nearly all of the world. I
mean, there may be a few countries that have so low seasonality
that you could just do it with solar, but for most of the world,
the lower cost scenario will be at least 50% wind, 50% solar. And
if you let the solar get built first, it will cannibalize the
daytime and summer revenues of the wind, and the wind might not
get built.


David Roberts


Oh, interesting. And then you'll be stuck — you'll whatever, get
up to 80% and get stuck. Is that the —


Jenny Chase


And then you're stuck on a solar pathway. Yes.


David Roberts


Interesting. Yeah. So that was my next question. What do we make
of the fact that — because as Bloomberg NEF, their latest big
forecast shows that — we're actually on track to build as much PV
as we need under a net zero by 2050 scenario. We're actually on
track ahead of schedule, even mildly on PV, but behind on wind.
And I sort of have been wondering, there's two ways you could
interpret that. One is we've overshot on public policy supporting
solar, we're overdoing solar, we're making a mistake basically,
and we will regret this later. The other way to look at it is
just solar is doing what it keeps doing over and over again,
which is doing more than we think it can do and solving more than
we think it can solve.


And eventually, just like sheer bulk, sheer low cost is going to
overwhelm these intermittency problems. And in the end, solar
will just be a bigger role in the final mix than we have
forecast. That solar is going to beat our forecasts again, that
solar is telling us that it can do it, rather than we're making a
mistake. Do you see what I mean? Which of those do you come down
on there?


Jenny Chase


I'm going to be really disappointing and say it's a regional
story. I think we're underestimating the impact of solar in sunny
places. I think solar in sunny places can absolutely go along
with it. Build some transmission, build some batteries, it'll all
be good. I think for places like Northern Europe, we really
should be building some wind and probably, to be honest, and
nuclear as well.


David Roberts


Why aren't we, why are we out of balance in those places? Why is
PV doing so well and those other things aren't?


Jenny Chase


So nuclear is hard. It's not popular, it's big projects. Nobody
really wants to take the risk. It's not cheap. There are many
reasons why it's hard to build nuclear and it will really require
government determination to get nuclear built and probably not be
particularly popular, but that may be changing a little bit.


David Roberts


That I get. Wind is a little bit more of a mystery to me though.
Why that's — ?


Jenny Chase


Yeah, wind is more difficult than solar, especially offshore
wind, because you've got to do a more difficult thing than
building a solar plant and you've got to do it out in the ocean
and it's got moving parts and things. Also, because the
individual projects are so big and things like the cost of steel
impact it. So, I think a lot of the issues recently have been
that someone's agreed to build a wind project and then found that
they couldn't do it at the cost expected and that has caused the
contracts to be canceled, companies to pull out. It's all been a
bit rough lately. And then for onshore wind, there's just often a
permitting issue that some of the, they're called easements,


the amount of space you've got to leave between the wind turbine
and something else is probably further than it needs to be.


David Roberts


Would you take that to mean if you were talking to national
policymakers, that they should dial back on support for PV or
just dial up support for wind?


Jenny Chase


I mean, if I was a policymaker, I would probably be dialing back
support for PV.


David Roberts


Would you? Interesting.


Jenny Chase


I mean, depending on which one I was, if I had none, I might not
be, but I'm not sure I would bring in extra support for PV right
now. But also it saved our bacon. I mean, last year, in 2022, in
the energy crisis, PV and wind, but also new PV, saved our bacon.


David Roberts


Yeah, it's a really underappreciated story, too. I feel like
somehow out of that episode, the powers that be somehow took the
lesson "we need more gas from different places." But that doesn't
seem to be like what the lesson they should have learned?


Jenny Chase


Well, last year we did because there were so many uncertainties
and last year could have 2022, the energy crisis could have gone
so much worse for Europe if we'd had bad weather. Bad weather is
a big one because if it gets cold, then gas demand would have
gone right up. And of course, what Europe does is buys gas all
summer to fill up its reserves for the winter. So you have to be
making accurate projections some way in advance. And in the end,
demand destruction was much more than expected as well. So high
prices meant lower demand apparently.


David Roberts


That's another lesson I feel like we learn over and over again
and can't seem to make it stick in our heads, is that demand is
much more — I've seen academic papers on this — you can get much
more out of demand in emergency situations than people think.


Jenny Chase


Sometimes you can and sometimes you can't. That's the frustrating
thing. And sometimes it takes an emergency situation to get that
out. I mean, I think maybe Europeans are maybe a bit fatigued now
with the whole saving electricity thing.


David Roberts


I've kept you long enough. As a final sort of looking ahead, if I
read your book and I take just what you've said here today into
account, I'm going to guess when I think about what's next for
solar, it's not going to be any weird exotic offshoot, or twist,
or brand new use, or brand new placement, or brand new
technology. It's just going to be more and more and more of what
we've got. Is there anything when you look ahead to the next five
years of solar, do you just see more, more and more? Are there
potential surprises?


I mean, obviously them being surprises you don't know in advance.


Jenny Chase


But that's the problem. Everyone's like, "what are the things
you've not predicted?" I don't know if I could predict them, I
would predict them. But I think higher volumes, lower prices,
more or less the same tech.


David Roberts


Same thing that's been happening then?


Jenny Chase


Wave of bankruptcy is probably coming.


David Roberts


And that's in manufacturers or installers or residential
installers.


Jenny Chase


Manufacturing, installers. Installers tend to go bankrupt after a
boom. And there's been a bit of a boom in Europe. I think there's
a little bit of a hangover in some markets and maybe some —
nobody ever notices when installers go bankrupt, though, it's one
of the problems with a very fragmented sector.


David Roberts


If it's really been commoditized, which is, I think, sort of kind
of the theme coming out of this whole area for years now. If
we've really settled on a commoditized, basically standardized
form of PV, isn't it the case that most commodity markets
consolidate over time? There's going to be a few big players? Do
you expect that to happen?


Jenny Chase


I don't know. The installation end is more like plumbing. And if
you have a good plumber, then keep their number and give it to
your friends. I think that locally skilled work people will never
quite be a commodity.


David Roberts


Right. But in the manufacturing, on the manufacturing side.


Jenny Chase


On the manufacturing, that's a commodity, and that is vicious.


David Roberts


Yeah. It doesn't sound like after reading your book, I'm like,
"why would anyone want to go into this business?"


Jenny Chase


I know. I mean the U.S. is like, "oh, we should make our own
modules." And I'm thinking, why? Horrible business.


David Roberts


There's low margin, frequent bankruptcies. Yeah, well, we'll see
how it plays out. Thank you so much, Jenny. And I will just say
again that the book was so approachable and readable and
interesting, and even I learned I mean, this is like, as you say
at the beginning of the book, this is the book I wish I'd had at
the beginning. I agree with that completely. Like, if you're just
getting into this whole area, it's just such a nice plain
language introduction to the various aspects of it, all of which
I think are less — they seem complex and daunting because of the
terminology and jargon that surrounds them.


But I think your book makes plain, like, there's nothing in here
that you need a PhD in engineering to understand. These are all
relatively simple concepts if someone just lays them out for you.
So I appreciate your book and your threads.


Jenny Chase


Thank you so much. And I appreciate the work you do on your
podcast explaining a wide variety of things I had no idea about.


David Roberts


All right. All right, have a good one, Jenny. Thanks so much.


Jenny Chase


Have a good one. Bye. Thank you.


David Roberts


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