All this suggests that there is a chance for a deep reordering of the earth’s power systems, in every sense of the word “power,” offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere, and they complement each other well; when sunlight diminishes in the northern latitudes at the approach of winter, the winds pick up. This energy is impossible to hoard and difficult to fight wars over. If you’re interested in abundance, the sun beams tens of thousands of times more energy at the earth than we currently need. Paradigm shifts like this don’t come along often: the Industrial Revolution, the computer revolution. But, when they do, they change the world in profound and unpredictable ways.
In fact, the sheer scope of that potential change seems to be motivating much of the current backlash against clean energy in the U.S. Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” is disconcerting on many fronts but none more so than in its attempt to repeal the energy future by ending the I.R.A. credits for solar panels and E.V.s; it has already put a serious crimp in what six months ago was a fast-developing domestic solar industry. (The stock price for Sunrun, the country’s biggest residential-solar developer, fell forty per cent on a single day in June, after a new version of the Senate bill cut tax credits even more dramatically than expected.) An analysis from the Rhodium Group think tank found that by 2035 the bill may have eliminated as much as seventy-two per cent of all the clean electricity that would have been produced in the U.S. under the current law. But, in a way, even this backlash is a backhanded recognition of the moment; the Administration, and its supporters in the fossil-fuel industry, clearly consider this the last possible moment to stifle the sun.
To understand how we got here, you don’t need to go very far back in time. In the postwar years, the U.S. enjoyed the greatest spurt of wealth in history, and most of it centered on fossil fuel. We built a new nation on cheap oil—one of sprawling suburbs, defined by countless cul-de-sacs and connected by a network of roads that eventually fed into the new interstate highways. You can see why Trump, who was young in those years, is still obsessed with petroleum. “I call it liquid gold,” he said in March. “We’re going to make more money than anybody’s ever made with energy.”
But, in those same postwar years, something else was developing. It was at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, that, on April 25, 1954, a trio of researchers announced the invention of the first practical photovoltaic cell: a silicon-based device that managed to convert about six per cent of the sunlight that fell on it into usable energy. The news made the front page of the Times, albeit below the fold (right next to a story about the launch of the field trials for Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine). Under the headline “Vast Power of the Sun Is Tapped by Battery Using Sand Ingredient,” the Times’ reporter described a “simple-looking apparatus made of strips of silicon, a principal ingredient of common sand. It may mark the beginning of a new era, leading eventually to the realization of one of mankind’s most cherished dreams—the harvesting of the almost limitless power of the sun for the uses of civilization.” The sun, the article noted, “pours out daily more than a quadrillion kilowatt hours of energy, greater than the energy contained in all the reserves of coal, oil, natural gas and uranium in the earth’s crust.”
At first, solar power was so expensive that it only made sense to use it where nothing else would work: in outer space, mainly, where it powered satellites. But, as the years went on, the cost came down fairly steadily. President Jimmy Carter gave the technology a big boost, proposing measures that, until the Reagan Administration reversed them, aimed to insure that by 2000 solar power supplied twenty per cent of America’s energy. Then, around the turn of this century, the German Green Party leveraged its parliamentary power to win a big government subsidy for rooftop solar power, creating a demand that led China, which was then building one coal plant after another for its own use, to start manufacturing solar panels in bulk for export to Europe. Solar cells were, like computer chips, a paradigmatic example of the learning curve: the more you produced, the better you got at it, making them constantly cheaper. Earlier this decade, power distilled from the sun and wind became cheaper to produce than the power that comes from fossil fuels; China was the first to realize this; hence its rapid conversion to renewables.
If you want to assign a precise moment when the results of that new economic reality became manifest, consider June, 2023. That month was when scientists reported that the earth’s temperature had suddenly begun not just to climb but to spike—the days around the solstice were the hottest ever measured, setting off a run of record-smashing heat that continues to this day. But June, 2023, also seems to be the month when people started putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels every day.
To get a sense of the deeper reason that the transition is so important, consider how a solar panel works. As The Economist described it recently, “a photovoltaic cell is a very simple thing: a square piece of silicon typically 182 millimetres on each side and about a fifth of a millimetre thick, with thin wires on the front and an electrical contact on the back. Shine light on it and an electronic potential—a voltage—will build up across the silicon. . . . Run a circuit between the front and the back, and in direct sunlight that potential can provide about seven watts of electric power.” There’s silver dust in the cells, and some boron and phosphorus, critical additives to increase conductivity and to provide the necessary environment for photons from sunlight to knock electrons loose from the silicon. That’s what creates the power: a tiny reaction which gets endlessly magnified.
Scientists call electricity produced this way “work energy,” as opposed to “heat energy,” which comes from burning wood or fossil fuels, and it is a far more efficient way of getting things done. As a report published last fall by the Rocky Mountain Institute explains, “Burning gas to light a room creates more heat than light. Burning coal to create electricity creates more heat than electricity. Burning oil to move a vehicle creates more heat than motion. We are sending more energy up smokestacks and out exhaust pipes than we are putting to work to power our economy.” This is not hyperbole: burning oil to power a car or burning coal to produce electricity is at best slightly more than thirty per cent efficient—or seventy per cent inefficient. For that reason, it takes two to three times more energy to run a standard car than to run an E.V., which is why even an E.V. charged with power from a coal-fired plant is still far more efficient than a vehicle run on an internal-combustion engine. E-biking—best thought of as biking without hills—may prove to be an even more important innovation. The e-bike is almost unbelievably efficient: to fully charge a five-hundred-watt e-bike costs, on average, about eight cents. That charge provides some thirty miles of range, so it costs about a penny to ride five miles.
Work energy turns out to be better than heat energy even for providing heat. An electric heat pump is three to five times as efficient as the gas boiler that sits in most American basements. Essentially, the pump takes the heat in the air outside your house, extracting it with a compressor to heat the air inside. (In the summer, it runs in reverse, to cool the house down.) It’s mostly pumping heat, not producing it. Last year, for the third year straight, heat pumps outsold furnaces in the U.S.