How the Sun Won (The Solar Era, Part 1)
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Here is an underappreciated world historical fact. In the past twenty years, the Price of solar panels has fAllen not by twenty percent, not by half, but by more than ninety seven percent. And as a result, solar power has gone bad.

The amount of solar power that was installed in the world over the past two days just today and yesterday is greater than the total amount of solar power that existed in the whole world in two thousand four, and the rate of new installations is still growing. This is very good news for the world. Widely cheap and abundant solar power won't solve all of our climate problems, but I will solve a lot of them. Solar, combined with batteries, will provide a huge chunk of the world's electricity in the decades to come. On top of that, the spread of solar means that within a few years, energy may be free, free energy in the middle of the day in many parts of the world, and that free energy will create new opportunities, new ways to generate and store fuel and heat, new ways to fight climate change.

这个 goals seen。 This is what's your problem. Starting today and continuing over the next few weeks, i'm going to be talking to people who are in the middle of the solar power revolution, people who can tell us how this extraordinary thing happened.

This ninety seven percent fall in the Price of solar panels. And what that means for the world. My guest today is Jenny chase.

She's one of the world's top solar analysts. She's been covering the industry for something like twenty years. She's a writer at bloomberg N.

F. And she's also the author of the book solar power finance without the target. I talked with Jenny about how solar power got so cheap and what that means for us now.

So okay so so it's the turn of the century. Solar power is very expensive. It's uh four dollars per watches for the solar panels. Um when does that start to change? What sort of the first key moment in the story of solar power getting cheaper?

So the first, the first moment was probably solve power getting like slightly more expensive, because for germans brought in an expanded version of a previous program, pull the feed in tariff in two thousand and four. This was the by far the biggest incentive driving the most solar build that the world has ever known. And there was a kind of second noise as all the world solar modules started going to germany.

okay. And so it's great, I think, for world historical reasons that germany did this. I wish they called IT.

Something other than a feed in tariff does IT make more sense in german. I hate this phrase. Feed in there is a sensible in german and is just a bad translation.

No, not really. Is on spice of a good for good tongue in german.

And he does .

the feed rice.

okay. So what is the feed in terris?

So IT means that you get paid a fixed Price for the election icy that you feed in to the grid.

I see. So it's basically the german government saying we promise to pay anybody who puts up solar panels a certain amount for the energy those panels produce .

for twenty years, I think, from twenty five years, twenty years now OK.

And so tell me more about this unfortunately named policy that helped kick off the solar power revolution.

Well, basically, for the first time, IT was actually profitable to put solar power plants on fields. I mean, historical, nearly all solar models have been a stolen move tops, because you just didn't buy a huge numbers of cell modules. You bought the small numbers of selling modules because they were expensive.

And so for the first time, they were actually specialized development companies who were rolling solar panels out on fields, and they were raising money from investors. And for the first, because of feed and towel is paid for the lifetime of the system, more or less, almost then you can do things like get bank dead for that. So banks and and germany also had a support for bank death for projects. But for the first time, european and banks in particular could get really comfortable with the fact that the cash loans from the solar projects were extremely reliable as so you could lend money to these projects, but quite a low rate of interest.

So germany creates the feed in terris means it's easier to get loans because now the government is promising to give you a stream of income for twenty five years, which is a lenders dream come true. It's it's a sovereign bond like investment. Um you start getting commercial development of solar power for the first time in the history of the world.

What happens s next? And you get manufacturers ramping up so you get U S. On power and ever Green solar, chinese sun tech, german q cells coming in and they went on to the public stock markets and raised money to expand their factories and also to secure supplies of their own material policy icon. Now, until the germans started this this crazy solar expansion, the solar industry had got along just fine, using off cuts from the semicon up to industry. As for that silicon.

the of cuts, meaning just scraps from chip factories.

yeah.

okay. So what does that mean for just this raw material, the silicon, once the industry becomes industrial ized and starts ring oping up after this german policy change?

First of all, policy and factories are quite a really expensive and they require a lot of technological experts to do. There's nasty chemicals. There's a point in your where you have to be simultaneously heating and cooling different parts of a react of a reactor.

There's all kinds of gasses you're trying to purify. There's a huge amount of incredibly technical expertise that at the time, there were only really five companies that worldwide that could do IT, which was fine because they were only supplying the that we conduct to industry, right? The demand was not that great, but solar panels used a lot of sica compared with semiconductors, and so demand just went up.

So before the germans, before two thousand four, you could get silicon for about twenty five dollars a kilogram. What's the Price go up to after when everybodies trying to get into the solar panel bit?

So the spot Price went up forever, four hundred dollars a kilo.

Oh, well. So went up by, like, don't know, almost twenty x exactly. So there is this thing people, people love to say about commodities, right? Which is the cure for high Prices is high Prices, which basically means if there is a high Price on some commodity thing, more people will will make IT, will pull IT out of the ground, whatever.

And that increased supply will drive down the Price. And that happens here, right? Uh, more polysilicon factories come online. So the Price of the raw material falls and then demand for for solar panels grows, but not as much as people expected. So there is this collapse in the Price, right, this first big decline where between two thousand and eight and two thousand nine, uh, the Price falls from four dollars a what to two dollars a what. Um so what does this first big decline mean for the industry?

IT has a little bubble, but the german market expanded because of course, germany still had its feed in tariff, no cap. And suddenly you've got two dollars of or what modules rather than four dollars of what modules. So developers and germany were basically getting catching the U.

S. market. There is this look called jig shah, who some of you may have heard of since about two thousand and three have been running a business called sattin that sold commercial rooftop solar in amErica to attitude like wallman. T and I didn't mention.

So digger shot this guy you're talking about. He actually was on this show. He now runs a an office in the U. S. Federal government that's basically in charge of lending out money to energy transition companies, companies, you know, trying to make clean cement and that sort of thing. So what's he's doing back at this time?

So at this time, he was convincing companies like whole foods and walls mart to sign twenty year power purchase agreements with his company so that he could put solar power on their roofs.

So it's, again, this idea of financing, this idea of if if he gets some institution like walmart that everybody trust and everybody thinks is going to be around for twenty years to promise to buy solar power for twenty years personably, then he can get the financing to build the panel. Now, I mean that the basic idea.

exactly. And then he would go to the financer and say, look, i'm selling this power to whole foods under A A twenty year power purchase agreement. This is not risky.

Lend me some money. And he had to do some convincing to vary and find the right person in each division. But he did. And um he was able to do for these these retailers solar power at Prices which were reasonably attractive to them.

So so IT worked.

IT worked and I think he did very nicer in two thousand and nine because just like because this company also had fixed Price power, precious agreements in place and suddenly modules for much cheap er than than theyd expect.

So so uh so his margins go go up. The cheaper modules are he still getting paid the same for twenty five years? It's great for him. So clearly, the rise of chinese and manufacturing of solar panels is a big part of this story. Is that where does that happen in the story?

It's been happening all along. I mean, one of the companies that that did an IPO in two thousand and five was some tech which is chinese essentially it's using technology developed in australia at the university of new south west. But it's IT is a chinese company, went by a chinese person and yeah so the chinese are there from the beginning, but the people around this time the policy Prices coming down as well. So the policy is coming down to the sort of sixty m change from four hundred kilogram OK.

So this time there is like two thousand and eleven is about .

two thousand and eleven. Two thousand eleven module Prices have drop to one one dollar.

okay? So they fAllen in half again. They went four to two and out of one. And you mentioned police silicon, silicon Prices are coming down. That's because what people are building more and more of these factories, there's an economy of scale. That's a sort of classic the development .

what you're going to get that is chinese companies figuring IT out. So what hundreds mean, pretty probably literally a hundred chinese companies attempted to make policy, but making policy icon is hard and most of them failed and some of them were extremely random companies. Then again, the largest policy ican make her in china these day's tone way started as a fish food maker. So who would I say fish food?

And then they decided to pivot to police silicon.

No, they still make fish food.

Um how that happened? Is there some genius there? They make a million different things. Or do they just make fish food in police silicon?

They do just make fish. And now they make policy ican, fish food solar away for cells and modules. But they still, but they still get about ten cent of .

the revenue for fish food. amazing. So in two thousand eleven or so, china's kind of not just solar panel industry, but the the raw materials of the policy icon part is coming online. And you're getting this kind of manufacturing ecosystem for which china is famous in a lot of industries s right, like they don't just make one thing. There's often a region where lots of different manufacturers are making sort of components for each other, and there's kind of a whole value chain in one place that happening in china at this point.

This is probably when it's starting to appear. So in jazzy province, if you want to buy in capture ent or silver paste, then you can talk to somebody twenty kilometers away. Instead, i've talking to somebody in another country. And this this is starting to be very convenient.

like clearly, the Price has kept falling by a lot from one dollar. Like why does the Price keep coming down after two thousand?

And the so solar panels are a manufactured commodity and they they have something called the experience curve, which probably a lot of things have, but then they're difficult to know to notice, particularly they not broken model ze. So mos law is a special sort of experience cave.

But the the experience cave just means that every time you double cumulative experience that we have as a species doing something, yeah, we get a certain amount Better at IT. And in the case of solar panels is probably about twenty eight percent Better at IT. And that comes from having a Better recipe to get your solar models more efficient and you slicing your way for us more. All kinds of little tweet you back to use less material and to make your machines through output more energy and and to make things more efficient.

Ah so I mean, in a way, this is like the big story of of technological development in human life, certainly since the industrial of revolution a couple hundred years ago, right? You know people make these incremental improvements one up to the other and things get cheaper and cheaper.

And and you're saying that's basically how the Price of solar panels fell all the way from four dollars a lot to less than ten cents a lot, which is where we are now. So I want to kind of take stock like just what does this wild decline in the Price of solar panels? Like what does that mean for the world?

I think is basically really good news. So the power only only supplied about six percent of the world's electrical last year, but it's growing and nobody and you couldn't stop sell IT now if you wanted to .

ah just because it's so cheap. Like yes, there are subsidies for IT in various ways. But even without subsidies, in many cases, IT would be the best option.

Is that the king? exactly? And there were places where, I mean, I love talking about pakistan right now, because pakistan probably has about twenty givers of relatively new solar panels, most of which the Normal grid, the tradition rate, has no idea about where they are or whether they exist.

No, such just people like go into the store buying solar panels and put them up in their backyard, on their roof and its factories.

who are putting a solar panels on on their roofs. I mean, they are probably not going to the door. There are probably buying a buk. It's farmers putting them instead of to run their irrigation pumps instead of these or generators. I actually only know about this because I can see IT in chinese customs data.

And then when you go to google earth and look at the hotel or kaci or island bad, you can see that all the roof have sold the panels on them. A lot of the activity in the developing world increasingly is outside government programs. I mean, there are some countries wishes in the developing world too, that have government supported. Tn also built about twenty of solar in twenty, twenty and twenty twenty under a probably slightly badly calibrated government program. But increasingly, it's actually the businesses and individuals that are buying solar themselves because it's just less effort than trying to go through the government and trying to get support.

In a minute what the world will look like in the relatively near future when solar energy is free in the middle, the day in the world.

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Give me give me the big picture for like where we are twenty years ago, solar twenty yeah twenty years years ago, twenty five years ago, certainly twenty five years ago, solar power was like if you are rich hippy in marine county, maybe you spend a crazy amount of money to put solar power on your roof to feel good about yourself, right? IT was a kind of fringe thing.

Where are we now? The sun is one. Solar power was the by far the largest source of new install capacity last year.

So of any generations now, people hate you when you compare capacity, but about four hundred and forty four digits. Ts of new of solar panels were installed last year worldwide OK. And bearing in mind that the whole power grid after that is about nine thousand, three hundred bigger.

Ds, so if we keep adding half a terrible a year and we'll doing more than that this year, it's not gonna about six hundred gigas this year. Um I mean adding half a tera every year to a nine point three terror, you pretty quickly get to real amount of contribution. And this is why i'm pretty sure that by twenty thirty, power will basically be free. Whenever is Sunny.

Power will basically be free whenever is Sunny in around the world.

pretty much twenty .

thirty is soon, especially in like energy terms.

like twenty, like most energy infrastructure is really slow to build, but solum is really vast. And the only way, and we're already get into the point where in california, even in germany, on a Sunny day, the wholesale power Price goes very lower, even negative. And what you have. So the most likely thing, the most sensible thing to do in response to that is to hand free power at that time to the customers so they can actually increase their demand at that time and then charge them more later when the songs gone down.

So let's talk about that in a little bit more detail. So there is this thing that is already true in california on other places, right, which is in the middle day, because of the growth of solar, there is more electricity being generated than people are using, right? great.

amazing. And so one option is you could just essentially not take that electricity, right? You could just not use IT, but you're saying that's not what's going to happen.

What tell me more about that. Like finally, have I think we all IT tailed when you literally turn off the solar panels to stop, then doing any damage to your grid and you can do that is super easier. It's actually way easier than IT is for fossil field plans.

What makes most sense is to offer free or extremely cheap power to people in the hope that y'll actually use that. If an individual, you might turn your air conditioner on to make your house really nice and cool, so you can turn IT off in the evening, and then your house will stay comfortable into the night. You might do your laundry.

And if you, if you are an an industrial campaign can do a lot more. So if you have a meat freezer, you can chill IT to minus twenty seven degrees sales, and then let IT warm up to minus nineteen. When power is expensive, you can charge your election c car.

I mean, especially if you can change IT work, you can hit your water for a shower later there. There are all kinds of things that we can do to shift when we use power into the day time. And of course, if you have got batteries, you can charge your Better terms.

yes. So what's happening with storage, right? That's that's the sort of complimentary piece of this that everybody always talks about what's happening with storage.

So still is definitely growing. I just looked at the new energy storage market outlook for my colleagues and a new new bill. Energy storage grew seventy six percent from the estimates, grown about over seventy percent from twenty.

So it's growing. That's good. And it's basically litham ion batteries and kind of batteries that are in electric vehicles is most we just .

lift in my amba aries, you know, because electric vehicles have driven them down the experience curve as well and elect vehicles, laptops, phones, these are actually quite they are getting more and more affordable.

And so I .

think we can probably assume that by twenty thirty, you very you have batteries charging and discharging every day to absorb some of that daytime sound of power.

And the question is, how much?

How much yeah and what .

does that turn on? I mean, what is IT? Just how fast do the mi on batteries get cheap? Is that the key unknown question IT does.

But I think what people don't realize when they talk about solar and batteries being the answer to everything, the first ball, they may be right in climates that are not very seasonal.

So if you're if every day you have a long day and then a similar length night, then IT may actually be fairly feasible to to run your civilization and solemn batteries ies in places like northern europe where I am, then you're gonna hit the problem that the biggest battery, you can imagine will not hold power from summer to winter. And the economics of that will be terrible. Because the first bunch battery issue you put in that charge discharge every day, their cost per cycle is whether be low because they have a lot of cycles. However, your next wave of batteries isn't necessarily needed every day, right? And if they are cycling every two days, for example, that is actually doubles the cost cycle.

The less you use that, the more expensive IT is sort of per unit of services providing you.

The economics are building a battery. The cycles once a year are almost impossible. I mean, you might be able to do something like feel a huge tank with the chemical fuel, or feel a huge big tank of hot of salt. Like what you can do is make a big tank of salt multon and then use that heat in the winter, because that is relatively cheap, so you could have a lot of bit to make hot.

So you build essentially like a giant salt cavern under the earth, spend all summer heating IT up and all winter using the heat to whatever makes team and spin turbine that's .

more to hate your home. I mean, that would probably easier way of doing that. But exactly most of assault is kind of a pain to work with as well, because IT tends to, if IT gets above about two hundred and if he gets below about two hundred and seventy one, sali, us, as I recall, IT freezes. And so if you've got any pipes that is meant to be going down, your pipes are now full of just non mulino. lt.

yeah. So so is the the sort of medium term unsolved problem, long duration storage for these reasons, like you clearly see a very short term path to free power in middle of the day. That sounds like you're pretty optimistic about kind of overnight charging. Like if you when you can charge in the day and discharge overnight, like litham ion will do that. But once you get to the sort of seasonal problems, is that where we don't really have A A clear answer is a .

lot less obvious what the answer is, which is why, as a solar analyst, I say a lot that we should be building wind as well. I mean, because the great thing about wind is Better a climate like northern europe. A lot of others around the world is IT blows at night and in the winter.

Ah it's it's a it's a good compliment. Um so wind has gotten cheaper but not nearly as much cheaper as solar, right? Uh, I didn't win clearly in the way that .

solar one why not wind is heavy engineering. It's not bulk manufacturing. That said, there have been huge improvements in wind, in wind turbines and in wind maintenance and financing for wind. And winter has been just getting bigger. I mean, one of the things you can do with winter, but as as the the materials to make blades get Better and Better, you can make winter carbines bigger and its windy.

a hide up. So wind has gotten cheaper. But IT seems like building, you know, garden blades, gargano turbines, IT doesn't have that beautiful commodity race to the lowest Price element that solar panels have that dead simple. They don't have to move. Once you make them, you can make a little one or a big one just by adding more like i'd love how commodified solar panels are. I know it's a terrible business to be in, but it's the same reason, right? It's a terrible business to be because it's this amazing, cheap, relatively simple thing that that is quite different from a turbine the size of a giant building that is a thousand feet up in the air.

whatever IT really is. I mean, solar panels are the first major electricity generation source that isn't doesn't involve .

anything moving yes, that you yeah nothing to get stuck. Um you've been doing this job. You ve been following the solid power market for twenty years. When you look ahead another twenty years from now, what do you think i'll be going on?

That's that's such a hard question. I mean, I think we will I actually relatively optimistic about us having us achieving a worldwide energy traction. I think that in twenty years, nations that are currently developing will have substantial economies winning substantially on solar power and batteries, ies and.

I hope they also have air conditioning and ways to make to protect themselves from the the effects of extreme climate change, because we also have incredibly extreme client change. So I think the the developing world will be substantially solar power is at least a bit about the Sunny and realize that not actually a hole developing. Well, I hope there is.

I hope there is. There are much more widespread transmission grids around the world because it's often Sunny and windy in one place when it's not Sunny or windy in another place. And if the more we can, we can run big power lines to smooth that out and set each other power, the the easier this whole energy transition will be and the less gas we will need to burn.

Sometimes there's there's a project now where they want to build solar panels in australia and run a wire to singapore to send the energy to singapore, right? I love that one. I love that idea. Is, is that a real thing? Was that just like silly?

It's a really big cable. I mean, like I hope they've figured out this all figured out, but that is that the four thousand .

kilometer cable, I mean, there's cables. I know there are different kinds of cables, but like they ran a cable across the atlantic for telegraph, whatever, a one hundred and fifty years ago or .

something yeah I mean, that's that's a good reason to think IT is possible. I think it's technically possible. I suppose part of me wonder where where the singapore and decides in to buy power from, for example, indonesia, which is closer. yes. I mean, I really, really just so far away from singapore.

Yes, I mean, that's why it's sort of so thrilling to consider, right? This idea of like what we got some down here, they need power up there as just build a big cord.

I mean, also was a soler animals. I prefer the idea of running tables east to west. I mean, we just put a big cable all the way around the world resorted right.

because it's always Sunny somewhere.

So was Sunny on about half the world at one time.

Yeah, it's funny. I didn't even think of that, of course. Well, so a couple of things. We haven't talked about the grid. We're talking about wires and plugging things in. We have been talked about moving power just from one place to another place not so far away. You i've I understand and that the great is in many places, including in the developed world, not optimal, efficient and is a sort of binding constraint in some instances, like tell me about the grid.

what grids are actually pretty efficient. There's so as you move from a high, quite a centralized power system with large power plants in a couple of locations to a decentralize stem where you've got wind farms and solar farms all over the place being connected, you need a lot more grid OK. And we estimate the investment in the grid has to be about sixty percent of the investment in the actual solemn and in farms themselves, quite twenty thirty to stick to in their zero pathway. So investment in the goodness to be substantial, we need to like bolster the the short range grid because literally, if you're trying to feed too much of electricity in one point, in the grad at one time, IT gets stuck and you can't get IT all sweet and then some of your farms don't get paid.

And also just to be clear, we're electrifying, right? We're not only switching the source of electricity from fossil fuel to uh, solar power, but we're also taking things like stoves and cars that have been previously directly powered by fossil fuel and powering them with electricity. So we just need more wires. However, we're getting the electricity or more room in the .

wires pretty much yes. Yes, building grid specifically for, for example, of solar plant, it's quite tough because the utilization of the grade will be quite low .

because the solar plant is not providing electricity all the time.

exactly. I mean solar plant output is very peaky IT really does peaking in the middle day. You can have panels that follow the sun and then its less peaky, but it's still not a big part of the day. Um so yeah I mean, basically, we have to build more grid. We have to connect both both local grid and also long range grade just to connect whole regions.

And is that happening? Like is that becoming a constraint already? Like where are we in terms of the relationship between the development of solar power and the development of the grid?

So if you walk into any solar conference all around the world and say, oh, the problem in this market is good, then everyone will nod and say, this person knows what they are talking about because the the developers all know how difficult is, is to get.

Sometimes it's just they need to get permission to connect to the grid and because there are hundreds of people trying to get permission to connect to the grad and the grid has to be quite chosen and they and grits, just a lot of the time, I just don't have the manpower to make that decision when you've got when you've suddenly got hundreds of power plants asking whether they can join your worries like this is not necessarily decision making process that kids were set up to do. So sometimes this is as simple as man power. Sometimes it's actually a question of building, of their being substantially more grid build needed. But greed is always a problem. And there are there, there are thousands of gig of solid and wind projects in on the planning table, but waiting to get permission to connect to the grid and get built around the world.

So you mentioned that the us. Is weird in terms of solar power. Um why why is the U S. Weird in terms of a solar power.

So the us. Is much slower to grow then you would expect of a market of its size and wealth and support level. And partly that's because it's got quite a nimbi problem.

It's hard to get a permission to build plants is also partly because the U. S. Is an expensive place to buy solar panel, which again is partly because there has been a trade war between the U.

S. In china since twenty twelve. Obama brought in the first import tariff s on chinese modules.

And consistently solar models in the U. S. Are at least double the vices that they are elsewhere.

So so you are saying the the a global Price of solar panels now is nine point something per. What per?

You would pay at least twice that in in the U. S. Right now.

Oh, wow. So it's like twenty cents of what instead of nine point four. I think .

although although you might get some some the uh in containers at port and need to be selling .

a great Harry for a IT less so is that just .

because of terriers that in thrifts the uncertainty because because the U. S. Import streets are quite complicated. If you're a developer, you don't want to take the risk of buying a module that will be stopped. customs. So there there's a strong sort of push towards just a few name brands and IT that also pushes up the Prices a bit. But yeah, it's basically the tariff on the trade war.

Is there is there A U. S. Solar panel manufacturing industry that, that terf is protecting?

There wasn't for a long time. There was there was first solar, which manufactured mostly in malaysia branda. But there is a move to once that specifically since the inflation reduction act past the inflation reduction apps is quite is pretty generous for solar installations, but it's really generous for solar manufacturers settling out plants on U.

S. soil. And there has been a boom and announcements of solar factories returning to the us. Was they how they do?

Let's talk about the inflation reduction at the I R A. Like it's a giant bill despite its name. It's much more about sort of subsidizing the energy transition than about specifically fighting inflation. Um how how does that affect the adoption of solar power in the us?

I mean, to me, IT feels like somebody is pushing down really hard on the accelerator. Well, the hand breaks on.

So so the break is the tariff and the accelerator is the inflation.

With like the tf and also the difficile of planning with getting planning permission to do things in the us. And also the fact the grade is also an issue in the us as everyone else. And the gas and the gas .

is the fact .

the inflation reduction that will give you loads of money if you managed to get one of projects.

So there is a reason why one .

of your fastest growing regional markets is texas because there's not a lot breaks and taxis. There are data center setting up there that will crease power demand. Solar, wind boom really booming there.

There's not a lot of White in texas.

It's not a lot of nym yim or this or it's a very, very um it's a market where you can actually build things .

that is interesting rate because politically, solar power has this left violence in the us as a very sort of democratic leaning violence. Texas, a very republican state. And the fact that solar power is booming the most, there is really telling.

IT really is in batteries too. I mean, texas is building wind Solomon batteries at at one of the most rapid places of any reregister, the U. S.

So you started covering this field in two thousand, five, right, right at the moment when I was all starting, and nobody knew IT at the time. But when you tell the story, IT all sound sort of clear in retrospect, right? Like solar panels are this fundamentally very simple thing.

They don't have to move. The input is pretty straightforward. Why has he been so surprising? Why did nobody see IT come in? I think what we said.

there are couple of things we didn't expect. So we didn't quite estimate correctly how fast demand would pick up and how and actually how quickly governments would come in and and set their own subsidies, realizing the subsidy didn't have to be so high anymore and how of vast organic markets would kick off. And we basically underestimated human generated and how easy IT is to deploy something that is like a black rectangle that comes out of a bacteria. And you put IT in the sun, summer, when why IT up?

We'll be back in a minute .

with the lightning round.

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to talk a little .

bit about a particular part of your book. So in the midst of your book, right after a chapter called how market set power Prices and right before a chapter called solar, after the two thousand eight crash, there is a chapter called networking and other stuff not taught at state schools. And you're not talking about like energy networks. You're talking about you know going to meetings and introducing yourself to people and and serious like it's an interesting chapter. I wanted talk about IT, but like what is that chapter doing in the middle of a book about energy financing?

So Jacob, I wrote this book for somebody like me who is not particularly push, came through the state school system, which is the sort of government school system, and literally had nobody to tell me things like how finance worked or what you should wear to a meeting. And so I vote this book for somebody looking for a job in something vegan Green. And this is one of the things that I had to learn. And I think he would have been useful to me to have someone sit down and say these things. I would have been a little bit less awkward in many, many meetings.

So you do in this chapter just sort of give some simple tips like water. Water, say you're three top tips for networking. I think you can ask .

people what they do, and then you can ask them how they make money. Fun that because theyll give you a much more interesting answer than if if you just let them talk about how their business is great because everyone .

talks about that. What's one thing I should not do if I had a networking event.

probably talk too much to somebody who doesn't want to listen. I mean, doesn't have to be very often, but I do sometimes get cornered by people who want to talk about something that is very specific that I and I will try very hard to find the interesting. But what's .

your getaway strategy in that setting?

So this is a tip from from somebody else. If you get drinks, get two drinks. And then if you're stuck in a conversation that you are not happy with, you say, I have to go and find the person how I got this drink for, then you get away. And if is a really interesting conversation.

you had two drinks that is a very that's a very like prepared did do you actually walk around that working in events with two drinks in your hands for just such .

a circumstance occasionally?

Um there's there's a section in this chapter called being female pros and cons. What are the present kinds of being female in networking settings?

To be honest, I think i've benefit over the years from the fact that people would rather have a woman on the panel.

on a panel like a.

on a panel in you like visible like I am sure that my profiles is an athlete has been improved by being a woman, and i'm grateful to that.

And is is the converse of that? Or is the flip side of that? It's been improved because there aren't very many women in the field.

yeah, but there are more than they used to be, which is amazing. So this is working like this strategy is working. So there are more and they are also more confident to actually say proper things.

Um come and ask you a couple of non networking questions. Um what's one thing you wish more people understood about energy?

I wish people would understand the difference between capex and .

apex because .

like there's a huge difference, but things that have high up fund cost, a low running cost, that there are ways of comparing them. The things that have constant .

cost and just capex is capital expenditure. Apex is Operating expenditure.

ate exactly cap, yes, have up front cost and running costs basically.

Why is there such a big deal?

It's the one thing that frustrates me that people will talk about cost and they'll talk about solar power being free, for example, and not think about the fact that this is a problem like if the sole of power is not free as merely paid up front. I think if we would want to understand energy is energy systems are actually almost any system. You need to have some understanding about comparing up funt costs and later savings.

Um if you were writing about energy, what do you think you'd be doing?

I hope I was waiting about sustainable agriculture. I mean, what I always wanted was to work in some way towards tackling climate change. Maybe I maybe item have trained as a heat pump in dollar, and I would be going around putting in heat puts maybe I D D work for a local, local planning office protesting planning applications for wind farms. That also a valid part of the energy transition. I think if you want to have hope for the future, you need, and you feel climate anxiety, which I think a lot of us do, it's really important to have something that you can do every day where you think, if I do a good job here, the world is Better than if I did a bad job, didn't show up for work.

Jenny chase is the author of solar power finance without the target. Next week on the show, i'll talk to the founder of a company that's trying to take that extra solar energy in the dole of the day and use IT to solve one of the biggest unsolved problems in the energy transition, generating the heat we need to make everything from steel to clothing.

Today's was produced by Gabriel hundred chain IT was edited by litigant caught and engineered by syrup gar. You can email us at problem at pushkin dot F. M. I'm jack, will seen and will be back next week with another episode .

of what's your problem.

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