One thought on “Monday Message Board”

1. Hope

   Earlier this year I alerted readers to intriguing hints that solar energy may be going into overdrive, with Chinese solar panels now so cheap that mass adoption no longer depends on favourable public policy of any kind, let alone complex subsidies. Ordinary households and businesses in Pakistan just went ahead offgrid, to the tune of 32 GW of capacity in two years.The goverment scrambled to catch up and regularize the popular samizdat boom.

   There were hints that the same process has started in Africa, with a large mismatch between official counts of grid-connected solar and much more credible Chinese export statistics. Ember have now confirmed this: https://www.electrotech-revolution.com/p/the-electric-fast-track-for-emerging

   “The true scale of this shift [to solar] likely exceeds what official data captures. Change is outpacing the centralised statistics: for example, small solar panels on balconies and rooftops go largely unregistered in national figures. The gap between panels imported and capacity officially reported is large and growing. In eight out of ten CVF countries, [climate vulnerable LDCs] cumulative solar imports since 2017 are at least three times the installed capacity recorded in the most recent official statistics.”

   Some small and poor countries are outpacing rich countries in the adoption of clean electrotech :

   ”Small emerging economies are already at the frontier of electrotech uptake across supply, demand and connections: Namibia (35%) and Togo (18%) lead in solar generation, Jordan and Kyrgyzstan in battery sales, and Nepal (70%) and Sri Lanka (64%) in EV uptake.

   Our analysis shows that 46% of CVF nations, measured by electricity demand, have leapfrogged the United States in solar penetration, and about 51% have surpassed it in economy-wide electrification.”

   The kicker is that all this was happening before Trump’s war with Iran. Almost every country, and huge swathes of business, are now grappling with a massive oil and gas price shock. A hundred thousand spreadsheets are being rewritten, with higher and more volatile prices for oil, diesel and gas. Many investments tied to fossil fuels are being downgraded, and ones in renewables and electrotech moved up. Togolese farmers may not have spreadsheets, but they are subject to the same mark et logic.We know this because they have already started the big switch.

   Politics will speed things up. Togo has been run for 20 years by a man called Faure Gnassingbé. He may not have spreadsheet skills either, but he must be competent in assessing political risks. Dependence on Chinese banks for financing low-maintenance electrotech is looking a lot better this week than dependence on Big Oil.

   “Χριστὸς ἀνέστη!” is the Easter greeting of Orthodox Greeks, with the response “ληθῶς ἀνέστη!“ Doubting Thomases – always a large community – may wish to be less categorical in their hope: “Χριστὸς ἀνέστη?” – “Μπορεί.” (Maybe.) Hope comes hard today. Take it where you can.