ONE OF THE most destabilizing facts of the last five years is this: The price of a solar panel has fallen 75 percent. The engineers have done their job, and that offers many possibilities.
We usually look at what the developed countries are doing with renewable energy, such as the fact that there were days during summer 2014 when Germany was generating three quarters of its power from solar panels (Germany!). But the most amazing miracles—and it doesn’t really stretch the word “miracle”—are happening in the poorest places, where for the very first time lights are blazing on.
Take rural Bangladesh, where fossil fuel has barely penetrated in the 200 years of its ascendancy in the West. There’s no grid—at night it just goes dark. Until the last few years, when low-cost solar panels and innovative financing arranged by groups such as the Grameen Bank have allowed the very rapid spread of solar panels. How rapid? As many as 80,000 new connections a month, which is far more than in the United States. Fifteen million Bangladeshis live in solar-powered houses already, and the government is hoping to have the entire nation hooked up by 2020.
That means that kids can study at night. It also means that families don’t have to waste as much as 30 percent of their income on kerosene. It also means that they don’t have to breathe those kerosene fumes, and that the black soot the lamps throw off won’t be melting glaciers. It also means that everyone can charge their cell phones, which are ubiquitous in Bangladesh. In fact, places like Bangladesh leapfrogged the whole telephone pole thing and went straight to mobile; now they’re leapfrogging coal and gas and going straight to solar.
It’s happening other places too, on scales large and small. In India, entrepreneurs are selling panels, batteries, and bulbs on an installment plan, with payments lower than they were for the kerosene the solar replaces; their technicians fan out on bikes to instantly fix any technical troubles. In Nepal, hammered by a horrible earthquake, the only working lights in much of the country were powered by the sun, and the local Red Cross had had the great foresight a year earlier to inaugurate a solar-powered blood bank.
This could happen across the world, and in very short order. It’s so much cheaper and easier to set up solar panels than it is to run wires and poles—and since those wires and poles connect back to polluting central power plants, the benefits of replacing that system are obvious. One in six Indian deaths is related to air pollution, and crop yields are dramatically depressed by the hazy miasma that hovers over the country. Solar is a great liberator for the very poor, but also for everyone who has to, you know, breathe.
The climate conference in Paris this December could make sure there is financing from the rich countries to spread this new solar blessing to every corner of the earth in very short order. Ten years ago, that would have cost too much; now it would cost far too much not to.
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