Climate Hacks Are What The World Needs Now
The biggest constraints to the rooftop revolution are a lack of local capacity and lack of a skilled workforce.
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- As the hottest summer ever comes to a close, there is some good news: Solar production is way up. There’s just one problem: It can be hard getting that power to market. To beat the bottlenecks, the public and private sectors need to work together to provide more investment, more training and more of what we like to call “climate hacks.”
New Energy Nexus, where I am CEO, is a nonprofit that has invested more than $52 million in almost 900 companies around the world. We help launch, fund and connect startups that are working to make solar power and related technologies more accessible — which is now the greatest challenge the industry faces.
Wind and solar capacity is not the urgent issue it used to be. The world is on pace to add a record 440 gigawatts of new capacity to global grids in 2023. Not only is this good for the climate, but there are also growing economic benefits: Clean energy is the cheapest new power source for more than 90% of the world’s consumers, according to the International Energy Agency.
Much of this new energy supply, and almost all the capital for it, flows to wealthier countries — even though most of the growth in demand is coming from so-called developing countries, where cheap clean energy can also improve health and economic prosperity. Big countries across Africa, as well as major energy consumers such as Pakistan and Indonesia, barely have a solar market, and few large growing developing countries are building any wind at all.
More investment capital would certainly help. Long-term and low-interest loans can enable developing countries to model Europe’s Green Deal and the US’s Inflation Reduction Act. Other needed changes include reforming global development banks to better address climate change and enabling sharia-compliant solar loans at the local level.
There are also challenges outside of finance. The biggest constraints to the rooftop revolution are a lack of local capacity and lack of a skilled workforce. In short, we can make enough solar panels — but we do not have companies to sell them or electricians to install them.
In Indonesia, for example, more than 200 gigawatts of rooftop potential has been mapped on the buildings of Java and Sumatra alone, which would be more than enough for the nation. But I know from my conversations with people at the Indonesia Solar Energy Association that the country has fewer than 1,000 solar companies. Neighboring Australia, with one-tenth of Indonesia’s population, has 10 times the number of solar companies. In all of Africa, meanwhile, there are only half a dozen training organizations for the solar industry, which needs to serve a billion people.
In Thailand, where renewables should be booming, New Energy Nexus and our partner OpenSolar operate training sessions for designers, salespeople, installers and maintenance folks. We get about 50 students each month in and around Bangkok. At that rate, it’ll take us till next century to serve the market’s demand.
Which is why we need to take these skill-building efforts online. We’ve piloted this approach in the Philippines with our New Energy Academy, but the world needs much more training, curriculum development and exchange. Not only would this help provide more trained technicians to the solar industry, but it could also help engender new ideas and technologies around the deployment of solar and storage.
It’s critical that entrepreneurs and inventors continue to focus on speeding adoption and lowering costs of already commercialized technologies — there need to be more ingenious ways to integrate this low-cost power supply into our grids and lives. Rewiring the world around it is a truly wicked problem.
But it is not insurmountable. In Arizona, for example, the Gila River Indian community is working to cover irrigation canals with solar panels — helping to make the panels more efficient and reducing evaporation — in a way that allows for maintenance equipment to fit underneath.
Such climate hacks help overcome barriers and reward investors. We need to find and support more of them, so we can fully capture the coming rush of renewables.
The IEA has called for a tripling of installed wind and solar capacity by 2030. Meeting that goal will first require money. But it will also require us to ensure that we have the workforce and expertise necessary to get there.
Elsewhere on Bloomberg Opinion:
- Africa Could Be a Climate Savior, Not a Victim: Lara Williams
- It Will Cost $200 Trillion to Stop Global Warming, and That’s a Bargain: Mark Gongloff
- To Beat the Heat, We’ll Need to Turn Our Homes Into Batteries: David Fickling
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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Danny Kennedy is CEO of New Energy Nexus and cohost of the "Climate of Change" podcast with Cate Blanchett.
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