Jenny Chase
@solar_chase
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Solar analyst with BloombergNEF, goose keeper. Author of "Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon". Opinions here are all my own. She/her.
Switzerland
Joined November 2014
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Time to make 2024 updates to my annual “opinions about solar” thread. If you like these, the second edition of my book, Solar Power Finance Without The Jargon, is new this year. A 30% discount code WSQ0437 is valid on publisher website until end of Oct.
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My family finally became Swiss citizens after a 4-year application process. Photo shows information for our first referendum vote.
Since I cannot be refused citizenship now, it is time to say what I *really* think of this country. Thread.
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Some good things about Switzerland:
1. Infrastructure. The rich use public transport, and the Postbus serves even isolated communities. Houses and apartments get built as infill, not sprawl. This is a country that plans 50 years ahead, across the generations.
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2. Child-friendliness. It's normal to see 5-year-olds walking alone to school or around the village. Even posh restaurants are quite child-tolerant.
3. Hefty penalties for speeding when driving, often linked to financial circumstances, so the rich pay higher fines.
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... Overall, I think Switzerland is a good example of a country that is both rich and low-carbon-emission (aided by abundant hydropower), and is generally both well-run and incredibly democratic. We will take our responsibilities as citizens very seriously.
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Britain's cheese and beer are *much* better than those of Switzerland and it's not even close. Also, British tea may be made of floor sweepings, but at least we pour hot water directly onto it instead of serving as a cup of lukewarm water with a sad teabag on the side.
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5. Really serious about democracy - they vote on everything - and seem to be making it work. People do not just vote in their own short-term best interests, and the voter information package is a serious attempt to *inform*.
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Some bad things about Switzerland: low tax rates and high salaries act as a brain drain on surrounding countries (hi). This is how a poor country has become a very rich one in less than a hundred years.
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4. Pragmatic approach to problems. For example, mythical national hero is a dude who had a problem with oppression, so he shot the oppressor in the back with a crossbow in an alley.
None of your Robin Hood-esque plot-extending scruples or kowtowing to the monarchy here.
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Really the answer to "why am I doing this" is "got a boyfriend, didn't I, and he wouldn't leave his job for me, so I told him we could get geese or I'd leave, so we got geese and had a kid and now we're staying".
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Switzerland's neutrality is self-serving (but if no nation was neutral, no nation could host organisations like the Red Cross. And if neutrality is your thing, you cannot make exceptions, otherwise it's not neutrality).
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6. Generally, as explained in citizenship class, to be a great Swiss person is to be quietly competent and community-minded. There's some tall poppy syndrome, but a more positive interpretation would be that Swiss success is not conspicuous consumption or attention-seeking.
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The citizenship process (in canton Solothurn) is 25 hours of courses designed to make you think about why you are doing this and prepare you for two exams, and multiple interviews. And also to make you deeply examine what *you* are good for and why a country would want you.
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Final notes:
- I moved here in 2010, you need 10 years' residency to start citizenship application
- Been married to 'the boyfriend' since 2012. He's
@BjornHolzhauer
and he quite likes Gruyére.
- apéro with goslings is 100% shield against hate comments.
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Weird things about Switzerland:
1. Older Swiss people wear heavy clothes all spring, and stare if you don't. I guess those who herded cows up the mountain dressed for a sunny morning eventually died in an afternoon snowstorm. But for a walk around the village it's overkill.
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2. Swiss service in restaurants or shops outside cities is usually unfriendly unless you're a regular. They are doing you a favour by selling you their product. It's nice that they don't need the money that much. But as a newcomer, it takes some adjustment.
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3. If you are a regular it's great! This week I think I bought a mower without signing a contract, discussing price, or giving them my actual name. It will turn up at my door this week and I will get a bill. Probably. Sometimes I misunderstand things in German.
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Time to make 2023 updates to my annual “opinions about solar” thread.
If you like these, the second edition of my book, Solar Power Finance Without The Jargon, comes out very soon (just sent final proofs to publisher!)
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Pretty cool chart from my team at BloombergNEF. In 2012, the standard solar module was multicrystalline silicon, 15.4% efficient and costing $1.09/W in 2023 $. In 2023, standard is mono PERC, efficiency 21.3%, price $0.13/W.
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1. Time to make minor updates to my annual “opinions on
#solar
” thread.
If you like these, you’ll like my 2019 book, Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon. Five stars on Amazon, apparently “entertaining” and writer knows her stuff”. Also available here:
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Whoa. "We have completely got rid of our dependency on Russian fossil fuels. It went much faster than we expected... So we have the possibility to redirect or reorient the additional funding of REPowerEU – ≈€250 billion – to our net-zero industries."
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This is the PV experience curve. My team and I have been maintaining this version since 2007. I reckon I'm a bit of an expert on it.
The thing about the law of the experience curve, it's really more like a set of guidelines.
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1. Time to make 2021 minor updates to my annual “opinions on
#solar
” thread.
If you like these, you’ll like my 2019 book, Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon, a little old but still valid, five stars on Amazon.
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1. Time to make 2021 minor updates to my annual “opinions on
#solar
” thread.
If you like these, you’ll like my 2019 book, Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon, a little old but still valid, five stars on Amazon.
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As a solar analyst, every time I see "if renewables are so cheap why aren't we building more of them?" I tap my head lightly on the wall and go back to updating the database of rapidly rising build numbers.
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@AudeIdScire
It's possible in the major cities, but definitely advisable to speak some German, Italian or French. Citizenship in my canton requires B-level German and the courses, interviews and exams were in German.
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Over the last decade, India has increased the proportion of its population with access to electricity from 80% to 99%. I hadn't realised it was quite that dramatic!
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@adribadini
I don't know, honestly.
Definitely we were asked about clubs we were in, about village life, about local events. A certain amount of integration is desirable and I think when we retire we had better look at joining some Vereine!
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Leaving
#Intersolar
. This industry is primal chaos, prices below $0.10/W, over a terawatt of manufacturing capacity chasing ~585 gigawatts of installation this year.
Everyone's putting a brave and optimistic face on it though, and solar is good at finding markets.
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I am stepping down as manager of BloombergNEF's solar team. It's been 17 years and I am very tired. I want to do more writing and fewer expense approvals.
I'm not going anywhere -
@lara_hayim
is the new Head of Solar and I look forward to working with/for her.
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For those emailing me to ask why our solar build forecasts are different to the IEA's: I don't know why the IEA is wrong.
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I remain *incredibly* impressed that Erthos has apparently created a whole company around "just lay your solar modules on the ground, don't even bother".
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Good article (which quotes me). A very rough calculation suggests a solar fence could cost as little as 30 euros per meter (for 1.1 meter high fence), which is... pretty cheap even just for a material.
Despite capturing less sunlight when installed upright, solar panels are being used in the Netherlands and Germany to build garden fences, as households look to save on the high cost of roof installations
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Going through the predictions we made for solar at the start of the year. 317GW new build in 2023? Lol no 413GW. $0.22/W modules? Lol no $0.122/W. N-type >15% of market, fair. Grid still a bottleneck, well that wasn't much of a prediction, was it.
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Is my birthday, am 41. Would like:
- reasonably equitable peace on earth
- rapid decarbonization of human civilization while bringing everyone a developed-world standard of living
- better data reporting
However, will settle for a homemade carrot cake and a bicycle ride.
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Small Child: are you working on your book?
Me: trying to
SC: about solar panels?
Me: yes, solar panels!
SC: Papa says you know more than anyone else about solar panels.
Me: Well... in some limited respects
SC: so have you been to the sun?
... I have been exposed as a fraud.
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Worth following what happens now Nigeria has removed subsidies on refined gasoline for consumers, causing petrol prices to spike 175% in a nation that has over 50GW of private generators and under 15GW of on-grid capacity.
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It's 9am on a Sunday morning and time to update my
#unpopularopinions
on
#solar
thread from a year ago*. I've mellowed in some respects, so only some will be unpopular. I'm not gonna wait for likes in case nobody does.
*
Since everyone is doing it: if you want an
#unpopularopinion
*about
#solar
power, give me a like.
* not guaranteed unpopular
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1. Time to make minor updates to my
#solar
unpopular opinions thread, since this seems to be a good way to organize thoughts.
If you like these, you’ll like my book, Solar Power Without the Jargon.
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@pvmagazine
1. To opinions! Solar is the cheapest source of bulk electricity in many countries, and the quickest to deploy, and now you couldn't stop it being built if you wanted to.
The limits to PV build in most places are grid access, permitting, and sometimes installation labour.
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Photovoltaics is the first major electricity generation technology that doesn't involve making a turbine go round. To be fair, wind and hydro use turbines but not steam.
[This is not an anti nuclear or really anti anything post, I'm good for explanations thanks].
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Hydrogen team have had it with the passenger transport questions.
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Just realised 2022 might be the first year that the largest source of new added annual *electricity generation* (not nameplate capacity) in the world is solar.
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This is super interesting: claims, plausibly, that rooftop solar (which in the UK and many countries is often almost unmonitored and even the amount installed is uncertain) is biting into gas demand. I think this will become widely acknowledged in the near future.
Not sure this is really being picked up in a lot of commentary on how the UK's power system is changing rapidly.
So let's be clear:
The UK's primary power source - gas - is now forced to operate at the same level as when the country was shutdown for most the year.
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Please never end a filename _FINAL. It won't be and it's very annoying.
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At nearly 39, I am a very different person to me-in-my-20s. Less emotionally volatile and pretentious, less anxious over trivialities and defensive of ego. But in some respects, I am exactly the same person.
Which is to say, I got drunk and cycled into a bollard.
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@YayoiSekine
@Dlashof
@drvolts
27. Ordinary people have no idea how much progress we’ve made. Tell people at parties that in 2022 renewables produced over 47% of Germany’s electricity.
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10. By 2030 most countries will have spot power prices of zero for a few hours every sunny day. This will be passed on to end consumers, to encourage them to shift power demand to sunny periods by electric vehicle and battery charging, preheating, precooling, etc.
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@YayoiSekine
15. We oughtta be building more wind. Seriously, solar will get built anyway, but wind needs some help, and wind blows in the dark and in the winter.
It doesn’t help that solar pushes down power prices and generates renewable energy credits, which hurts wind farm economics.
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Long, fascinating, beautiful article about undersea communications cables (of which there are "800,000 miles" and which are "about as thin as a garden hose") and the people who repair them.
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My team get criticism for our solar forecasts being too low (and sometimes some for being too high). People think the new build should keep growing at >30%.
We forecast just below 6TW cumulative PV capacity in 2030. Total world *power* capacity at end of 2022 was about 8.5TW...
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I think lots of us working in the clean energy industry don't want to express how afraid we are of climate change, because we'll be seen as alarmist and self-serving or at least unhelpful. And there's no good data to calmly cite on how bad it is going to be.
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I'm on holiday, post surgery, co-looking after a toddler and v drunk, but to summarise my takes on Twitter today:
- plant more fucking trees and let them grow
- keep open fucking nuclear plants open
- close the coal plants then close the gas plants
- be kind.
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It's weird how an article about how pressing the need is for solar recycling in the US cites a. several solar recyclers complaining of small volumes and b. most solar panels are no longer toxic enough to be considered hazardous waste.
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@AgiBergman
I've forgotten because it was mostly paperwork fees, but not nearly that much altogether. The commitment of time and learning for the course was far more significant.
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Although most solar panels in Europe are adequately cleaned by rain, I decided to have a go at six years of algae buildup.
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I'm afraid this week the standard (bifacial PERC) solar module price fell to $0.095/W.
What a world we live in.
Good morning with good news: Solar module price falls to record low of $0.096/W, says BNEF's 3Q 2024 Global Solar Market Report!
Record low prices fuel record high global installations in 2024.
BNEF reports 592 GW will be installed in 2024, up 33% from then record high 2023!
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@YayoiSekine
20. Electrification of transport is far better than biofuels; for example, as
@Dlashof
says on this podcast w/
@drvolts
, it takes about 300 acres of farmland to run a petrol car on corn ethanol, vs an electric car running on about one acre of PV.
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Reasons solar industry analysts don't want to forecast that a terawatt gets built in a year, ever:
- axis on chart doesn't go that high
- makes wind industry feel bad
- can't find markets to put it all in without the number being clearly ridiculous for that specific market
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Me, arriving after dark last night: going to have a great weekend in this isolated farmhouse my schoolfriends rented together! Going to kick back and enjoy not thinking about solar panels!
This morning, opening curtains:
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@pvmagazine
2. We don’t need a solar technology breakthrough. Today, solar developers just need a grid connection and permission to sell electricity, and then they’ll be off building solar plants whether it’s a good idea or not.
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5. Solar is now the cheapest source of bulk electricity in most sunny countries. We don’t need a technology breakthrough, or subsidies, in solar to achieve massive adoption. Mostly, solar developers just need a grid connection and/or permission to sell electricity.
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Just for the record: there is no way that building and maintaining solar collectors or reflectors in space will be cheaper and easier than building them on the ground, or building transmission east to west.
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I am on team "no, we will probably not see 1TW of annual installations by 2025, because it's very hard to see where they would all go". Our forecast is 585GW for 2024 and 641GW in 2025.
Anyway there will certainly be bankrupt PV manufacturers. There often are.
By 2025 there will be 2TW of annual PV manufacturing capacity, 80% in China. That's enough panels to meet an additional 9% of global power demand. Will we see 1TWh of annual installations and shockwaves across the economy, or bankrupt PV manufacturers?
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27. Getting to 100% renewables is really hard, but getting to 50%, 60%, 70% will not be as hard as we think and after that we will have a better toolkit for the rest.
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11. It may well be that "negative power prices for a few hours every sunny day, followed by high evening power prices when the sun goes down" is a problem solved by capitalism and batteries.
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It's worth noting that generally, worldwide, farmers *don't* oppose solar farms, because farmers like getting money for the use of their land and solar is less work than crops.
(Yeah also the amount of land is not that big).
Well will you look at that
Actual boss of actual farmers' union says solar farms not a threat to food security (which should have been obvious to anyone who understands that 0.1% of the UK is a small amount)
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@YayoiSekine
16. To put it another way: when you tell an energy future model to optimise a power portfolio for clean power adequacy, it will give you more wind and less solar than when you tell it to optimise a least-cost electricity sector development.
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@pvmagazine
3. Right now the price of solar modules hits a new record low every week (currently $0.136/W) due to oversupply. Some manufacturers will exit in the next two years.
This is quite normal in this industry, and nobody will learn any lessons from it. Good for buyers, though.
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@YayoiSekine
14. I'm more worried about seasonal intermittency than daily, because there is no way we can build a big enough battery to shift energy from summer to winter. The economics of battery storage are impossible at one cycle a year.
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Article attempts to find conspiracy in the fact that China is putting rooftop solar panels in places where there are roofs.
This is an excellent example of seeing malicious n-dimensional chess in something quite simple, when it's China doing it.
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If you're not getting a piece of energy infrastructure as a tattoo, do you even belong on Energy Twitter.
(I've considered solar panels, but how *embarrassing* it would be to have 166mm-based multi modules when the market's moved to 340mm dual-silicon-junction).
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The tripling-renewable-capacity target under discussion at COP28: more than we could have hoped for ten years ago, still a stretch goal, well aligned with our modelled pathway to a net-zero future by 2050. BNEF report in front of the paywall for once!
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Pro tip for pretending to be an expert on any solar market in the world today and in 2024: nod sagely and say "of course, grid capacity is the main bottleneck to build".
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12. Utility-scale batteries became a thing much faster than I expected.
@YayoiSekine
’s team recorded 16.8GW/32.9GWh of gross energy storage capacity additions worldwide in 2022, and expect 41.9GW/98.6GWh in 2023.
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We all know that the problem for solar economics now isn't cost, it's power price cannibalization, right?
Merchant solar economics pencil out fine at today's prices, but more solar will get built and crash your daytime power prices unless batteries/H2/demand response takes off.
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28. The 2022 energy crisis should put most concerns about cost of renewables subsidies to rest; renewable energy saved Europe billions of euros in imported gas, and reduced purchases from Russia.
Turns out fossil fuels also cost money, and sometimes, unexpectedly, a lot.
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Sometimes you just have to take a moment from being rational, optimistic, data-driven, happy to be a cog in the "good" part of the machine, and willing to discuss and compromise, and say: fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. This is fucking terrifying for absolutely everybody.
45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C. 45C.
Actually take a second to think about that.
45C. In the Arctic Circle. 45C
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37. There is enough land for lots of solar. There are enough golf courses in the U.S. for about 370GW, ffs.
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42. Anyone buying a new internal combustion car now is pretty silly. EVs aren’t the answer to everything – especially congestion of cities – but they do use much less energy and, with flexibility, can support the grid.
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What solar power policy looks like worldwide right now.
Art commissioned from
@Monk3yBlood
for next edition of my book, but enjoy a very early look, and the fine detail that I'm not even sure will come out in print.
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@pvmagazine
4. Incremental improvements in solar modules continue. 2023 was the move from PERC (module efficiency ~21.3%) being the standard design, to TOPCon (~22.3%). The average solar module in 2023 was about 21.6% efficient, up from 15.4% (a now-obsolete multicrystalline design) in 2012.
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A colleague sent me this article, and: recycling is important, but the study gets weird fast.
Key assumption: people will replace solar panels early because the NPV of doing so is positive.
I am wondering if the authors have met many people.
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4. We don’t need a technology breakthrough. Today, solar developers just need a grid connection and permission to sell electricity and they’ll be off building solar plants whether it’s a good idea or not.
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Hi, I'm a solar power analyst. You may know me from my greatest hits including "no, PV is net energy positive unless installed indoors", "yes, we already know the sun does not shine at night" and "I do not know if you should get solar for your house without more information".
Hi, I’m a climate scientist. You may know me from my greatest hits including, “No, it’s not a natural cycle,” “Yes, I know it’s been warmer before (and the only reason YOU know is because we scientists told you so),” and “Just because it’s on YouTube doesn’t mean it’s true.”
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Feeling extremely pro-abortion right now, having lost a wanted but unviable pregnancy and a large amount of blood in a miscarriage ahead of a scheduled D&C.
I'm fine, I can make more blood, but that was dangerous, very messy and a bit scary. Abortion is healthcare.
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Wait *seriously*? I know there's a lot of solar panels going to South Africa and keep setting out to write something about it, but 1GW new build rooftop in two months?!!
Here's
@Eskom_SA
's estimate of how much rooftop solar PV has been added (cumulatively) in South Africa. It reduce the residual load that Eskom has to meet during the day, meaning less load shedding and more available energy to restore its pumped hydro and diesel storage.
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Just for the record, solar panels do not generally contain chromium, most of them are not made in Xinjiang, and there is no unforeseen tsunami of solar waste coming our way.
See, for example,
A colleague sent me this article, and: recycling is important, but the study gets weird fast.
Key assumption: people will replace solar panels early because the NPV of doing so is positive.
I am wondering if the authors have met many people.
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@YayoiSekine
@Dlashof
@drvolts
24. Nuclear is safer than coal and climate change, and better than gas unless the gas plants are running very rarely. Batteries should help with the unfavourable ramping economics of nuclear (you *can* turn nuclear plants up and down, but you really don’t want to).
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This thread has been my annual roundup of solar thoughts/ opinions, for 2022.
If you like these, you’ll like my 2019 book, Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon, a little old but still valid, five stars on Amazon.
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As usual I am sitting watching a PV manufacturing boom and thinking "y'all know this business is horrible right? You are building expensive factories using the latest technology, but within five years they will be superseded by the next tech generation".
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Since everyone is doing it: if you want an
#unpopularopinion
*about
#solar
power, give me a like.
* not guaranteed unpopular
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Metal-grade silicon price up from $4 to $10 per kg this month on power, coal crunches in China. About 1.1kg of metal Si is needed per kg of polysilicon, so that's going to hurt even at current polysilicon prices of nearly $29/kg.
Hoshine's stock price up 500% since Jan.
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Everyone should, every year, write down a list of "things I believe, or know to be important in my field, that not everyone realises yet and that will be important".
It's excellent for clarity of thought, and to track the changes in your own knowledge/opinion.
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@YayoiSekine
@Dlashof
@drvolts
23. Heatpumps are better for heating homes than hydrogen, but in seasonal climates like northern Europe will exacerbate the seasonal demand and supply mismatch for solar.
We need to build wind and probably nuclear as well.
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22. Hydrogen is going to be a thing, but not for transport and probably not for seasonal power storage – exactly. Using renewables when they’re plentiful to make H2, then using the H2 to make steel or fertilizer, looks quite promising.
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52. There is enough land for lots of solar. There are enough golf courses in the U.S. for about 370GW, ffs. There’s also loads and loads of roofs, so let’s see those who oppose ground-mounted solar support higher-cost roof-mounted solar.
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LCOE is just what you have to pay someone per MWh to get them to build you a power plant.
Nobody sensible is claiming it's anything more. But it is frequently worth calculating.
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