Image: Wikimedia

Our dark and dirty world is on carbon overload, yet we’re pumping the stuff out as if we were still in those heady oblivious days of the early industrial revolution. Coal, oil, and gas still juice our frantically expanding civilization. Meanwhile, the world’s scientists are officially 95 percent certain that our heavy carbon diet is the root cause of the fast-rising temperatures of recent decades, and that we’re on track to get a lot warmer still.

You get it: catastrophe looms, unless find another way to run our great tangle of mechanical stuff. It’s imperative. So, two UK scientists, David King and Richard Layard, have a proposal: Launch an international “sunpower programme” that calls on nations around the globe to pool their resources and fast-track solar power research and deployment.

The aim would be to provide 10 percent of the world’s energy supply with solar power by 2025 and a full quarter of it by 2030—at a cost cheaper than coal or natural gas—and to achieve two distinct breakthroughs in the solar field that would make around-the-clock reliance on solar possible.

They describe their plan in The Guardian:

“The goal would be by 2025 to deliver solar electricity at scale to the grid at a cost below the cost of fossil fuel. All countries would be invited to participate,” they write. “Those who did would commit, in their own countries, to major new programmes of research, internationally co-ordinated, and to share their findings for the benefit of the world.”

Every participating nation would have the goal of providing the “bulk” of their power with unsubsidized solar power in just ten years.

The focus of the utopian research coalition would be to precipitate the two major scientific breakthroughs that both researchers see as holding the key to universal solar power: battery storage and better electrical conductors:

• “The first is to make solar power available on a 24-hour basis, when the sun shines only part of the day and can be obscured by cloud. This requires a major breakthrough in the storage of electricity.
• “The second is to reduce the cost of transmitting electricity from areas of high luminosity and low land value to the major population centres of the world.”

All of this sounds pretty pie-in-the-sky, sure. 2025 is just over a decade away, and as of now, solar power accounts for less than 1 percent of the world’s energy supply. Getting to 10 percent is a hell of a project—especially with entrenched fossil fuel interests fighting government incentive programs, counterproductive international solar trade wars popping up, and a global community that is perpetually incapable of agreeing on measures to fight climate change. 

But there’s hope. The cost of solar panels is still plunging, thanks largely to those mad manufacturing operations in China. In fact, the cost of solar panels has dropped 99 percent since 1977—and they’re getting cheaper still. So that’s good news in the deployment department. 

In terms of battery technology, there’s reason to be optimistic, too—nighttime solar power is arriving in the US as we speak, at the Solano generating station in Arizona. It’s slated to go online asap. That concentrated solar power plant can store up to six hours’ worth of energy it soaked up during the day for use at night. Meanwhile, giant lithium ion batteries, fuel cells, and molten salt reactors are all in the running to provide 24-hour solar. But it’s generally agreed that breakthroughs are still necessary to make any of the above cost competitive. 

The second thrust is tough, too. If we could improve the efficiency of electric conductors, we wouldn’t lose so much power when the current traveled from desert solar plants to the communities that need it. Again, there are promising innovations here: carbon nanotubes, for one. Ultra-thin, sturdy carbon nanotubes don’t heat up the way metal does when an electrical current runs through it, which  makes it an intriguing candidate for use in microchips. Eventually, it may be able to transmit electricity over long distances more efficiently. Still, the day when nanotubes replace bundle conductors seems to be a long ways off.

King and Layard are right, however. They are correct that “time is desperately short.” They are right to note that, seeing as how the sun sends 5,000 times more energy to earth than we need, it is “inconceivable that we cannot collect enough of this energy for our needs, at a reasonable cost.” 

A Sun Power Program would be a beautiful thing; imbued with the sort of moonshot ethos so missing from state science programs, combined with the kind of international coalition that once united to ban the refrigerants that were destroying the ozone not so long ago. The sort of body that tends to band together in our science fiction when the nations of the world needs to overcome a common or alien threat. That’s not our world now, however. 

Ours is a bitterly divided world, one where the owners of the biggest pollution-belting coal plants and the largest fleets of exhaust-spewing cars refuse to sign treaties that would help prevent the globe from frying. Failures at Kyoto and Copenhagen, as well as the US/China solar trade warring, both make an effort to spur global cooperation on solar research unlikely.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Climate change is probably the thorniest problem mankind has yet created for itself—it’s near-invisible, ubiquitous, and requires an entire re-imagining of our industrial economy to combat effectively. We should be able to muster the will to accelerate solar in the face of incipient crisis. Hell, even Big Oil thinks solar power is going to win out—any ideas that might hasten that process are a welcome one.