Comment by danaris
3 days ago
A remarkably positive and hopeful article. It's really staggering seeing the figures of not just how much solar has grown in recent years, but how massively its growth has outstripped everyone's predictions from essentially any time in the past.
I also really liked this passage about the direct on-the-ground effects of being able to install solar panels:
> If you have travelled through rural Asia, you know the sound of diesel generators pumping the millions of deep tube wells that were a chief driver of the agricultural Green Revolution of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Now solar electricity is pumping the water—diesel sales in Pakistan apparently fell thirty per cent in 2024. If you’re a farmer, that’s kind of a miracle; fuel, one of your biggest costs, is simply gone.
Being able to pay a one-time up-front cost and just....never have to worry about paying for fuel for your irrigation system again. Truly remarkable.
It is, if you'll pardon the pun, quite a ray of sunshine in these otherwise dark and uncertain times.
If true, this is fantastic news for Pakistan. They are in the middle of an awful economic crisis, that includes a balance of payments crisis (central bank has too few dollars to support necessary imports, like oil and gas). Anything they do to reduce trade defects will be very helpful.
Batteries will soon follow the same trajectory, just lagged. The same economic forces will produce the same outcome. We now have cost-effective stationary storage solution with non-scarce inputs, manufacturers are just waiting for the demand.
It's hard to see this truth right now, because the demand isn't there for it to happen just yet. At the margin, energy developers will install solar instead of batteries, up until the point that the grid is saturated with solar, at which point they will switch to batteries. But very few energy grids have reached that point of saturation, so demand hasn't sent manufacturers the market signal to begin high-volume production of grid storage. That will change as more grids mature like California/Texas.