I found an advance copy of Bill McKibben's new book Here Comes the Sun in a Little Free Library (ah, Cambridge, where the streets are paved with books) and read it over the next two days. He has the facts and figures which show that, in all likelihood, the renewable transition is past the tipping point and picking up speed.
The book and the September 21, 2025 Sun Day event (http://sunday.earth) are more of Bill's creative responses to accelerate that process.
As such, it is the perfect counter to the fossil foolishness coming out of the Trmp administration and as Bill writes, "If fascism scares you the way it does me, figuring out how to break the centralized power of the fossil fuel industry is a key form of resistance."
Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization by Bill McKibben
NY: WW Norton, 2025
ISBN 978-1324106234
(2) Sometime in the early part of the 2020s we crossed an invisible line where the cost of producing energy from the sun dropped below the cost of fossil fuel.
(3) There’s no longer a technical or financial obstacle in the way; we already have the factory capacity, mostly in China, to produce as many solar panels as the climate scientists say we need.
(4) On the other side of the world, in Pakistan, a flood of cheap solar panels from China let homeowners and storekeepers and factory managers build the equivalent of a third of the country electric grid inside a year. Peasant farmers, often just laying the panels on the ground, started pumping their irrigation water with electricity instead of generators powered with fossil fuels; diesel sales dropped 30 percent in the course of a year.
(5) In February 2025 the energy analysts at the Rocky Mountain Institute reported that renewable energy was growing twice as fast in the developing world of the Global South as in the developed world of the Global North.
… If fascism scares you the way it does me, figuring out how to break the centralized power of the fossil fuel industry is a key form of resistance.
(7-8) … on the last day of February 2025 the Federal Energy Information Administration predicted that 93 percent of American electric generation built in Trump’s first year would be carbon-free, mostly from solar. In the first month of 2025, as Trump was taking office, sun and wind combined made up 98 percent of new generating capacity in the States.
(26) The world’s largest EV is a Swiss dump truck used to haul stone and lime to a cement factory. The empty truck climbs a 13 percent grade, is loaded with 65 tons of rock, and then drives back down, braking all the way. Each trip up the hill brings the battery down to 80 percent of capacity, and each trip back back down refills it to 88 percent. It’s about as close to perpetual motion as we’re likely to get.
Editorial Comment: There are also trains which use regenerative braking and batteries for energy: https://solarray.blogspot.com/2022/07/playing-with-electric-trains-as-climate.html
I can imagine a near-net zero transportation system that takes advantage of these ideas.
(28) … there are roughly 150 million dwellings in American alone…
Editorial Comment: Average lifetime of our buildings is 50-60 years, up to 100 for single family homes with a replacement rate below 2% per year.
(29)… just mining, refining, and transporting fossil fuels requires 11 percent of all the energy humans currently use.
(38) In April 2025, for instance, Spain announced it would slowly shut down its fleet of reactors because sun and wind generate “three to four times more power with the same amount of investment.”
(47) Those may sound like small revisions, but research indicates that each tenth of a degree increase will move about a hundred million more people out of a useful climate niche and into “unprecedented heat exposure.” By century’s end, “roughly one-third of people worldwide could be outside the human climate niche” - if you think a few million immigrants and refugees have discombobulated the world’s politics, prepare yourself for numbers a thousand times as large.
(48) Forty percent of the world’s ship traffic, for instance, consists of moving coal and gas and oil back and forth across the ocean to be burned, a delivery job the sun accomplishes each morning as it moves across the heavens.
(55) … Tongwei, CGL Technology Holdings, Xinte Energy, Longi Green Energy Technology, Trina Solar, JA Solar Technology, and JinkoSolar - were by 2024 producing more energy than the Seven Sisters of the oil industry.
… China, in 2020, set a goal of producing 1,200 gigawatts of clean power by 2030; in fact it hit that target in early 2024, six years ahead of schedule.
(60) In the US, 80 percent of new generating capacity in 2024 came from solar panels and batteries, and most of the rest from wind.
(62) Across Europe people are using solar panels for fencing, because they’re now the same price as traditional wooden pickets.
Editorial Comment: A solar light and charger costs about $7 in Nigeria. Access to electricity for all those without (about 800,000) would cost about less than $1 billion at RETAIL prices using off the shelf products. See Basic Electricity for the Bottom Billion https://solarray.blogspot.com/2024/11/basic-electricity-for-bottom-billon.html
This is also a solar civil defense
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0mjqjgZ64E
(67-68) So far they’ve [Mark Z Jacobson’s Stanford group] produced plans to take 149 countries to 100% wind, water, and solar power by 2035. The latest countries added to his database, in the spring of 2024, were Madagascar, Rwanda, Uganda, and Eswatini, (the former Swaziland). For each of them, Jacobson has a model that can forecast the weather every 30 seconds, for decades ahead, taking into account the predictions of a warming climate. If, on some June day in 2050, it's going to be 80 degrees in the mountains of Madagascar, and you want it to be 70 degrees inside a home, he can calculate the insulation value of the wall of an average residential building there and show how much energy it will take to cool things down. Then he can show several combinations of wind, water, and solar that will provide it. Very occasionally, you'll find a place with so little land that it can't produce the energy it needs on its own soil. (He limits the acreage to be used for solar and wind production to about 2% of the nation's territory.) "Singapore, Gibraltar, places like that," he says. “And then we go offshore.” And, in interest of grid stability, he tries to couple wind and solar in relatively equal amounts. “That's because in a heat wave, you have high pressure, and lots and lots of sun, but the wind tends to die," he says. "And then the low pressure comes in, and with it storms, which cuts the solar energy, but the pressure gradient means strong winds." Hydro is a reliable source – essentially the biggest battery on the grid, because its power can be so easily stored for dispatch when needed – but when drought causes its availability to drop, that almost certainly means that there's been a lot of sun. "Everywhere in the world, we can find ways to match demand for energy by supply and storage," he says.
(70) As one analyst explained, batteries follow sun and wind as - well, as night follows day. “It’s a sequential reality of development right now,” he said. “We expect in every market that deploys a lot of wind and solar, storage comes right behind it. You need shock absorbers, and storage is a shock absorber.”
(71) Texas is further from perfect than Californa; among other things, per capita energy consumption in Texas is more than twice as high.
(71-72) Over the course of 2024, he [Jacobson] reported on New Year’s Day, _the state [CA] had used 25 percent less natural gas to generate electricity than it had the year before._ That’s the single most hopeful statistic I’ve seen in 40 years of writing about our predicament. That’s a number big enough to actually matter.
(73) “We already have 95 percent of what we need,” Jacobson told me. “Really, we can do everything except long-range aircraft right now,” and that’s barely more than 1 percent of emissions.
(74) The Chinese already have the factory capacity to build 1.1 terawatts of solar panels every year, which is actually slightly more than we need to hit the curve climate scientists are demanding, though in December 2024 the Chinese companies that own those factories announced an OPEC-like to rein in production in order to keep prices from plummeting further.
(75) Our job is to flood the world as fast as possible with electrons from the sun and wind, confident that the very availability of clean, cheap power in bulk will drive the rest of the process. In the US alone, as The Economist pointed out, we have a terawatt of new solar capactiy just waiting to be connected to the grid if regulators can get out of the way.
(76) Before our decade is out, we have to break the back of the fossil fuel system. We have to land the sun on the earth.
(80) Yes, the economy will have grown larger by century’s end, but a January 2025 report with the ominous title “Planetary Solvency,” from the London-based Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, found that by 2070 the world could face a 50 percent loss in its GDP from climate shocks. On the current path, it said, the earth’s systems could become so degraded that “humans could no longer receive enough of the critical services relied on” to support our civilization. “You can’t have an economy without a society,” the report’s lead author expalined to The Guardian.
(82) Forget the price of eggs for a minute - insurance premiums are going up to 40 percent faster than inflation.
(83) The latest global estimate is that by 2050 climate change could wipe out almost 10 percent of the value of the planet’s housing stock, or $25 trillion.
(94) Mark Jacobson’s calculations, from 145 countries, predict 55 million new jobs in sun and wind, far outdistancing the 27 million lost in coal and oil and gas.
(86) In 2014 The Economist held that “solar power is by far the most expensive way of reducing carbon emissions”; but a decade later, in 2024, The Economist put out a special issue devoted to solar energy that said, “An energy sources that gets cheaper the more you use it marks a turning point in industrial history.”
… That dive continues; indeed, the enraptured editors of The Economist now call it “the steepest drop in the price of one of the basic factors of production that the world has ever seen.” It’s a drop, they continued, that essentially faces no limit.
(87) [Doyne] Farmer’s team at Oxford released a report showing that the rapid transition to renewable energy would, net, save the world 26 trillion dollars in energy costs in the coming decades. Because you don’t have to pay for fuel.
(92) But, in return, [Kingsmill] Bond [of Ember] said, we get an almost incomprehensible economic gift: “We save about two trillion dollars a year on fossil fuel rents. Forever.” Fossil fuel rent is what economists call the money that goes from consumers to those who control the hydrocarbon supply.
Editorial Comment: No mention of ancillary health benefits from reducing fossil fuel combustion nor efficiency gains from electrification and expanded usage of heat pumps.
(93) But now, “a dollar, yuan, or euro spent on fossil fuels delivers substantially less useful energy to the end user than the same amount spent on renewable energy."
(104) As a Pakistani solar entrepreneur told American journalist David Roberts in February 2025, “A 3-kilowatt inverter with, you know, maybe four or five panels” is now routinely included in a bride’s dowry.
(110) As Tom Athanasiou, the director of the activist think tank EcoEquity and perhaps the earth’s most diligent environmental accountant, recently estimated, the US would have to cut its emissions 175 percent to make up for the climate damage it’s already caused - since that’s impossible, the only way to make up the shortfall is with money.
(111) Mark Jacobson, using data from island countries in the Caribbean, estimated that the average consumer would see their energy cost fall to a fifth of what they pay currently if they could rely on their wind and sun, not on a tanker pulling up in the harbor.
(113) Depending on how you calculate it, 10 solar panels per person is enough to give everyone American levels of energy. The Global South has 60 percent of the world’s population but 70 percent of the world’s renewable potential - remember, the solar power works better nearer the equator.
Editorial Comment: 2/3rds of USAmerican energy does no useful work, is lost mostly is fossil fuel combustion as waste heat, friction, in distribution and transmission...
(115) China, as of summer 2024, was building nearly two-thirds of the world’s wind and solar projects, but it was also figuring out how to sell that tech around the world. Not in the US, where tariffs keep Chinese panels, not to mention Chinese EVS, safely at bay, but in most of the rest of the planet.
… Meanwhile, strategic investments - China spent $329 on the clean energy technology supply chain between 2019 and 2023, according to Bloomberg, while the US and Europe spent $29 billion - have had strategic results.
(122) In other words, we’re not going to run out of lithium, or graphite, or any of the other minerals that are useful for this transition; a 2023 paper in the journal Joule looked at 75 different scenarios for a green energy transition and ran the numbers for 15 different minerals. For most, demand through 2050 amounts to less than 15 percent of global reserves. The earth, the eight-person team concluded, “should suffice to meet anticipated demands.” We may be a little short of tellurium, but I predict we’ll find it.
(123) Here’s how Bloomberg did the math in 2023: “Annual demand for transition metals will grow fivefold by mid-century,” they calculated. Yet that doesn’t mean we need to extract more stuff. In fact we need less. While EVs and clean energy infrastructure will mainly consume electricity and require lots of metal, the total amount of materials the world mines will fall.”
How much? According to a large-scale report from the Energy Transitions Commission, “All the refined metals needed to reach net zero by 2050 will add up to less than the amount of coal mined in 2023 alone."
(128) A 2024 report from the Rocky Mountain Institute predicted that by 2050 we’d have done _all the mining we’d ever need to do_ for battery minerals; we’d just take them out of service and recycle them, over and over again.
(133) Remember, nine million people a year die - one death in five - from breathing the particulates spewed out by fossil fuel combustion.
(137) The leading cause of whale deaths, it’s worth noting, is being hit by ships, and 40 percent of all maritime cargo on this planet is coal, oil, and gas; one container ship full of EVs will avoid the need for 84 tankers full of oil.
(139-140) One truth is, we actually don’t need very much land to provide the energy we need. At the moment, according to Stanford’s Mark Jacobson, fossil fuel infrastructure takes up about 1.3 percent of America’s land area - this includes active and abandoned oil and gas wells and coal mines (since, unlike the sun, these play out, you need new ones every year) and deforested strips for pipelines, power plants, and tank farms. By his calculation, converting entirely to clean energy would use less of the landscape.
(140) His [Jacobson’s] numbers, across 145 countries: “the total new land area for footprint required …. is about 0.17 percent” of their territory. By contrast, at the moment the US devotes about 41 percent of its land - both pasture and cropland - to feeding cows. We devote two million acres to golf courses and three million to airports.
(141) About 40 percent of America’s crop is turned to ethanol - in Iowa, on the richest topsoil in the world, that number is over 60 percent.
… Or to do the math one more way, you could supply _all the energy_ the US currently uses by covering 30 million acres with solar panels. How much land do we currently devote to growing corn ethanol? About 30 million acres.
(146-147) A recent survey found 72 percent of German farmers considering the deployment of agrovoltaic arrays on their land, and the French energy giant TotalEnergies recently set up a Center for Expertise in the art of growing food next to PV panels - and no wonder since a 2024 study found that the presence of solar panels can increase yields for Chardonnay grapes by as much as 60 percent. There are a lot of studies like that, and they serve as a reminder that for many crops some shade and some extra humidity are a blessing, especaily as temperatures rise. Near Phoenix, temperatures topped 110 degrees for 31 straight days in the summer of 2024, smashing old records. The solar arrays help reduce our water use,” a USDA agronomist told a local reporter. “Plants don’t really need as much sun as they get in the West.” Even skipping irrigation every other day, soil moisture under the panels was 15 percent higher than nearby unshaded plots, and black-eyed peas were growing faster because they were less stressed.
… As an Englishman putting an 100-acre array on his Cambridgeshire farm explained to reporters, “It’s not ‘produce ten units of energy’ or ‘produce ten units of food.’ It could be six units of both. And then, all of a sudden, your two halves are greater than the whole.” Indeed: Australian trials found that wool from merino sheep improved in both quality and quanitity on farms with solar panels - as the Independent newspaper explained, the panels provided “shelter for the sheep and the grass.”
Editorial Comment: Photosynthesis has a light saturation point after which more light will not produce more growth. That means most crops can be shaded up to about a third without significant loss of growth. See https://solarray.blogspot.com/2019/09/agrophotovoltaics-agriphotovoltaics.html for more.
(148) Even when you're not growing food or grazing animals, though, there's increasing evidence that solar arrays can help the land where they're installed. In Phoenix, surrounded by desert, windstorms increasingly blow dust hundreds of feet into the air – that's because the crust of the desert soil is so easily broken, even by a footstep. But this “biocrust" seems to be naturally regrowing under solar panels, which researchers at Arizona State described as "beach umbrellas." Indeed they're now growing these crusts under solar arrays to replant in damaged desert areas; "crustivoltaics," they're calling it. In China, where great dust storms have swept off the Gobi into the cities of the north for decades, they are finding the same thing: the ground under solar arrays had higher plant and microbial by diversity than the surrounding desert. Indeed the arrays themselves were acting as windbreaks, keeping the dust out of the air.
Editorial Comment: 2 GW agrivoltaic project in China
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/19/massive-2-gw-agrivoltaic-project-aims-to-restore-desert-in-china/
Editorial Comment: I learned a new word: ecovoltaic - rebuilding soil health while restoring natural habitats and native plant species
(158) Carter’s proposed 1980 budget called for a billion-dollar Solar Bank to fund research and offer loans to homeowners who wanted to put solar panels on their roofs. The point of his plan, he said publicly, was that by the year 2000 a fifth of the country’s electricity should come from solar power. That was clearly the timeline he had in mind in 1979 when he climbed atop the White House to inaugurate its first solar panels. “A generation from now,” he said, these will either be “a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest adventures every undertaken by the American people."
(163) And by the way, every place that I know of solar developers have to put down a bond to pay for that eventual removal [of solar panels].
Editorial Comment: SEIA Solar Circular Economy http://www.seia.org/circulareconomy
(164) A unique organizing project called Greenlight America has spent the last few years teaching residents how to stand up at public meetings and tell the truth.
(169) A third of homes in Australia have solar panels on top, compared with about 7 percent in America.
… The difference is that it costs three times as much to put solar on the roof in America as it does in Europe or Australia, and that’s mostly down to what the industry calls soft costs, which is to say everything that isn’t a panel or a wire.
(171-172) A global poll in 2023 found 68 percent of us favoring solar energy, “five times more than public support for fossil fuels.” Even in the US, 2022 surveys found almost 70 percent of adults backing more sun and wind over more fossil fuel - that was down from 80 percent two years earlier, reflecting the endless Republican propaganda campaign.
Editorial Comment: Since the first Energy Crisis in 1972, public support of renewables has generally been around 70% except during the second Reagan term when it dropped into the 60s
(181-182) My dear colleague Svitlana Romanko, who used to work for the Catholic climate movement, spent the war years creating a remarkable nonprofit called Razom We Stand; it has a plan for rebuilding Ukraine with clean energy after the war, and indeed in the fall of 2024 it brought a dozen Ukrainian mayors to Washington and Wall Street in search of investors. Their goal, says Romanko, is that Ukraine becomes “the first post-war country in the world to have renewable energy as the basis of its reconstruction."
(198) It [the sun] provides us each year with about 720 times more energy than humans currently use.
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