How Solar Energy Became Cheap: A Model for Low-Carbon Innovation

"This is quite a technical book. I’m not going to pretend it’s not. However, what Gregory Nemet does is explain this really strange phenomenon, which is that solar power has got incredibly cheap. It’s got almost comedically cheap and continues to get cheaper. The question is, why did that happen? The trivial answer people come up with is that it’s all being subsidised by governments, but that’s simply not the full, or the correct, picture. Solar energy provides a usable framework for how to think about getting difficult, but powerful technologies, affordable, and more broadly available and accessible in ways that are generally very, very good for us. What I appreciated about the book was the historical analysis of a technology’s use and growth over the last 50 or 60 years. He very clearly describes, within a historical framework, the mechanisms of how and why this all happened. This is something I think that policymakers could pick up on. They could ask, ‘How do we apply this sort of framework elsewhere?’ There are so many important technologies that I think we could benefit from that would also benefit from being analysed in this way."