solar energy crisis essay

Solar Energy and Its Impact on Society Essay

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Technological Determinism

Social constructivism.

Bibliography

The utility of solar energy is perhaps one of the most important technological advances in recent history. Solar energy represents a form of renewable energy that will prove to be most beneficial especially in light of the energy crisis faced by many nations.

Over time the consumption of non-renewable energy has been problematic and is one that has had devastating economic effects on numerous countries throughout the world. In examining the impact of solar energy on the world, it is prudent that we create a theoretical framework for such an examination. This paper will examine solar energy utilizing the theoretical constructs of technological determinism and social constructivism. It will also view technology as a neutral entity. I will begin by first introducing the theoretical constructs and then establishing a relationship between the constructs and solar energy.

Technology continues to improve all aspects of the human experience. Developments in medical, communicative, media, and research technologies have improved people’s quality of life. While for most Americans this is true, some people are being left behind and the digital divide continues to separate the informed from the uniformed. There are several reasons why this problem exists and this research will try to explain why it occurs.

The father of technological determinism is Marshall McLuhan, a scientist from Canada who studied media and its different forms and uses. He studied the way individuals receive messages and the medium that delivered the message. From this, he developed several theories about different mediums and their effectiveness. He viewed technology as an extension of man. He believed that the wheel was the extension of our feet, the hammer was an extension of our hands, and technology is the extension of our mind and mentality.

McLuhan said, “The medium is the message.” 1 He thought that the medium in which an individual received the information was more important than the information itself. The medium communicates the message in a way that will affect the listener. In some instances, the medium increases the chance of connection and just the opposite in others. Radio, television, and the Internet all have changed how we receive information and process it.

McLuhan believed this was the most important factor for a receiver to remember a message and pass it along to other individuals to become opinion leaders in society. McLuhan also felt a new medium would come along and would not only affect the conscious level but it would change patterns of perceptions. This holds on technologies such as the Internet. Using a computer to seek and find information has revolutionized how we live in society. It is important to note whether or not that this effect is positive or negative.

Other researchers such as Hank Bromley thought that technology moves and that people cannot change a direction of technology. The only option available to individuals is to adapt to the changing technology. He said, “…new technologies arise as natural consequences of existing ones, with little social control of the course of development, and that the impact of new technologies is again a consequence of the features of the technology itself, with the outcomes largely insusceptible to human control.” 2 He felt that technology in many ways controls itself and that society has little to do with the development of new technologies. He felt that we adapt to the changing technology and use it to fit our needs and the needs of society. He felt that technology evolves throughout our existence from one medium to the next and that humans have very little control over this process. He thought that technology continues to grow and build upon itself rather than being a new type of media. 3

Social Constructivists, on the other hand, view all of our knowledge and reality as “constructed” since these are actively created by social relationships and interactions. Thus, Social constructivism argues that technology is meaningful in human development only when it has a significant relationship with human beings.

Feenberg (1982) is often regarded as a strict social constructivist. His main commentary on the use of technology was that technology is nothing but a means of achieving the goals human beings set. Thus, human beings’ desires are ahead of emerging technology, not vise versa. It is a human ideology that drives technological progress. Thus, social constructivists argue that technology is completely controlled by human action and is given its meaning through selecting how, when, and why it will be used. Feenberg discusses the notion of the use of the Internet as a political tool 4 but this same concept can be extended to include the use of solar energy.

When extended, Feenberg’s notion can be extended to mean no matter how good the concept of utilizing solar energy may be, it is of no use unless individuals use it in their daily lives. Thus, unlike Technological Determinism, the presence of solar energy as an alternative energy source does not necessitate its use.

After having reviewed the use of solar energy under the basic tenets of both technological determinism and social constructivism one can see that solar energy represents a renewable source of energy that is meant to augment the present sources of energy. It is not a source of energy that is meant to replace the existing sources. It proves to be valuable in that it utilizes technology in a manner that proves to be both beneficial to humans and one that holds the potential to solve the current energy crisis. The technological determinists view solar energy as a mere extension of the capabilities of man while the social constructionists view it as only being meaningful when it can be utilized by man.

The technological deterministic view of solar energy is most practical and offers potential for the use which unsurpassed that of any other form of renewable energy. In this vein, solar energy can be used as a source of energy for some of the fundamental needs and can be used to provide energy for residential & holiday homes, commercial properties, Central Power Stations, industrial applications, water pumping, lighting, and heating in the developing nations. In proving energy for residential and holiday homes, solar energy can be utilized to provide energy during the day to power small appliances such as televisions, microwaves, fluorescent lamps, etc.

The use of solar energy in commercial properties requires special solar panels to facilitate the use of solar energy. In terms of central power stations, solar energy can be utilized in the same manner as conventional energy sources. Currently, there are logistic problems with its utility in that it can only span a relatively small distance and can only be distributed in small aggregate amounts. Its use in central power stations is limited to pilot studies in the United States, Italy, and Spain. 5 In examining the utility of solar energy we can see that it represents an extension of the capabilities of man but with more advanced studies it can be made practical for the use by the majority of individuals on earth.

Bromley, Hank. “The Social Chicken and the Technological Egg: Educational Computing and the Technological/Society Divide.” Educational Theory 47.1 (1997): 51-65.

Rogers, Everett M. “The Extensions of Men: The correspondence of Marshall McLuhan and Edward T. Hall,” Mass Communication and Society 3.1 (2000): 119-135.

Feenberg, Andrew. “The Idea of Progress and the Politics of Technology.” Philosophy and Technology 5 (1982): 15-21.

Solar Buzz. “The Uses of Solar Energy”. Web.

• Everett M. Rogers, “The Extensions of Men: The correspondence of Marshall McLuhan and Edward T. Hall,” Mass Communication and Society, Vol. 3, Issue 1, (2000): 119.
• Hank Bromley, “The Social Chicken and the Technological Egg: Educational Computing and the Technological/Society Divide,” Educational Theory, 47, Issue 1 (1997): 59.
• Ibid, Rogers, 119.
• See Feenberg, Andrew. 1982. “The Idea of Progress and the Politics of Technology.” Philosophy and Technology 5:15-21.
• See Solar Buzz, “Uses of solar energy”. Web.
• Human Communication: The Medium Theory
• BBC's "Sherlock Holmes": The Medium Is the Message
• Technological Determinism Perspective Discussion
• Cloning Impact of Science & Technology on Society
• How the Internet Has Affected Amazon.com
• Technology's Role in Shaping Organizations
• The Impact of Collaborative Technologies on Companies
• E-Services' Effects on Dubai Community
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things

By Bill McKibben

On the last day of February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its most dire report yet. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, had, he said, “seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like this.” Setting aside diplomatic language, he described the document as “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” and added that “the world’s biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home.” Then, just a few hours later, at the opening of a rare emergency special session of the U.N. General Assembly, he catalogued the horrors of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine , and declared, “Enough is enough.” Citing Putin’s declaration of a nuclear alert , the war could, Guterres said, turn into an atomic conflict, “with potentially disastrous implications for us all.”

What unites these two crises is combustion. Burning fossil fuel has driven the temperature of the planet ever higher, melting most of the sea ice in the summer Arctic, bending the jet stream , and slowing the Gulf Stream. And selling fossil fuel has given Putin both the money to equip an army (oil and gas account for sixty per cent of Russia’s export earnings) and the power to intimidate Europe by threatening to turn off its supply. Fossil fuel has been the dominant factor on the planet for centuries, and so far nothing has been able to profoundly alter that. After Putin invaded, the American Petroleum Institute insisted that our best way out of the predicament was to pump more oil. The climate talks in Glasgow last fall, which John Kerry, the U.S. envoy, had called the “last best hope” for the Earth, provided mostly vague promises about going “net-zero by 2050”; it was a festival of obscurantism, euphemism, and greenwashing, which the young climate activist Greta Thunberg summed up as “blah, blah, blah.” Even people trying to pay attention can’t really keep track of what should be the most compelling battle in human history.

So let’s reframe the fight. Along with discussing carbon fees and green-energy tax credits, amid the momentary focus on disabling Russian banks and flattening the ruble, there’s a basic, underlying reality: the era of large-scale combustion has to come to a rapid close. If we understand that as the goal, we might be able to keep score, and be able to finally get somewhere. Last Tuesday, President Biden banned the importation of Russian oil. This year, we may need to compensate for that with American hydrocarbons, but, as a senior Administration official put it ,“the only way to eliminate Putin’s and every other producing country’s ability to use oil as an economic weapon is to reduce our dependency on oil.” As we are one of the largest oil-and-gas producers in the world, that is a remarkable statement. It’s a call for an end of fire.

We don’t know when or where humans started building fires; as with all things primordial there are disputes. But there is no question of the moment’s significance. Fire let us cook food, and cooked food delivers far more energy than raw; our brains grew even as our guts, with less processing work to do, shrank. Fire kept us warm, and human enterprise expanded to regions that were otherwise too cold. And, as we gathered around fires, we bonded in ways that set us on the path to forming societies. No wonder Darwin wrote that fire was “the greatest discovery ever made by man, excepting language.”

Darwin was writing in the years following the Industrial Revolution, as we learned how to turn coal into steam power, gas into light, and oil into locomotion, all by way of combustion. Our species depends on combustion; it made us human, and then it made us modern. But, having spent millennia learning to harness fire, and three centuries using it to fashion the world we know, we must spend the next years systematically eradicating it. Because, taken together, those blazes—the fires beneath the hoods of 1.4 billion vehicles and in the homes of billions more people, in giant power plants, and in the boilers of factories and the engines of airplanes ships—are more destructive than the most powerful volcanoes, dwarfing Krakatoa and Tambora. The smoke and smog from those engines and appliances directly kill nine million people a year, more deaths than those caused by war and terrorism, not to mention malaria and tuberculosis, together. (In 2020, fossil-fuel pollution killed three times as many people as COVID -19 did.) Those flames, of course, also spew invisible and odorless carbon dioxide at an unprecedented rate; that CO 2 is already rearranging the planet’s climate, threatening not only those of us who live on it now but all those who will come after us.

But here’s the good news, which makes this exercise more than merely rhetorical: rapid advances in clean-energy technology mean that all that destruction is no longer necessary. In the place of those fires we keep lit day and night, it’s possible for us to rely on the fact that there is a fire in the sky—a great ball of burning gas about ninety-three million miles away, whose energy can be collected in photovoltaic panels, and which differentially heats the Earth, driving winds whose energy can now be harnessed with great efficiency by turbines. The electricity they produce can warm and cool our homes, cook our food, and power our cars and bikes and buses. The sun burns, so we don’t need to.

Wind and solar power are not a replacement for everything, at least not yet. Three billion people still cook over fire daily, and will at least until sufficient electricity reaches them, and perhaps thereafter, since culture shifts slowly. Even then, flames will still burn—for birthday-cake candles, for barbecues, for joints (until you’ve figured out the dosing for edibles)—just as we still use bronze, though its age has long passed. And there are a few larger industries—intercontinental air travel, certain kinds of metallurgy such as steel production—that may require combustion, probably of hydrogen, for some time longer. But these are relatively small parts of the energy picture. And in time they, too, will likely be replaced by renewable electricity. (Electric-arc furnaces are already producing some kinds of steel, and Japanese researchers have just announced a battery so light that it might someday power passenger flights across oceans.) In fact, I can see only one sublime, long-term use for large-scale planned combustion, which I will get to. Mostly, our job as a species is clear: stop smoking.

As of 2022, this task is both possible and affordable. We have the technology necessary to move fast, and deploying it will save us money. Those are the first key ideas to internalize. They are new and counterintuitive, but a few people have been working to realize them for years, and their stories make clear the power of this moment.

When Mark Jacobson was growing up in northern California in the nineteen-seventies, he showed a gift for science, and also for tennis. He travelled for tournaments to Los Angeles and San Diego, where, he told me recently, he was shocked by how dirty the air was: “You’d get scratchy eyes, your throat would start hurting. You couldn’t see very far. I thought, Why should people live like this?” He eventually wound up at Stanford, first as an undergraduate and then, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, as a professor of civil and environmental engineering, by which time it was clear that visible air pollution was only part of the problem. It was understood that the unseen gas produced by combustion—carbon dioxide—posed an even more comprehensive threat.

To get at both problems, Jacobson analyzed data to see if an early-model wind turbine sold by General Electric could compete with coal. He worked out its capacity by calculating its efficiency at average wind speeds; a paper he wrote, published in the journal Science in 2001, showed that you “could get rid of sixty per cent of coal in the U.S. with a modest number of turbines.” It was, he said, “the shortest paper I’ve ever written—three-quarters of a page in the journal—and it got the most feedback, almost all from haters.” He ignored them; soon he had a graduate student mapping wind speeds around the world, and then he expanded his work to other sources of renewable energy. In 2009, he and Mark Delucchi, a research scientist at the University of California, published a paper suggesting that hydroelectric, wind, and solar energy could conceivably supply enough power to meet all the world’s energy needs. The conventional wisdom at the time was that renewables were unreliable, because the sun insists on setting each night and the wind can turn fickle. In 2015, Jacobson wrote a paper for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , showing that, on the contrary, wind and solar energy could keep the electric grid running. That paper won a prestigious prize from the editors of the journal, but it didn’t prevent more pushback—a team of twenty academics from around the country published a rebuttal, stating that “policy makers should treat with caution any visions of a rapid, reliable, and low-cost transition to entire energy systems that relies almost exclusively on wind, solar, and hydroelectric power.”

Time, however, is proving Jacobson correct: a few nations—including Iceland, Costa Rica, Namibia, and Norway—are already producing more than ninety per cent of their electricity from clean sources. When Jacobson began his work, wind turbines were small fans atop California ridgelines, whirligigs that looked more like toys than power sources. Now G.E. routinely erects windmills about three times as tall as the Statue of Liberty, and, in August, a Chinese firm announced a new model, whose blades will sweep an area the size of six soccer fields, with each turbine generating enough power for twenty thousand homes. (An added benefit: bigger turbines kill fewer birds than smaller ones, though, in any event, tall buildings, power lines, and cats are responsible for far more avian deaths.) In December, Jacobson’s Stanford team published an updated analysis , stating that we have ninety-five per cent of the technology required to produce a hundred per cent of America’s power needs from renewable energy by 2035, while keeping the electric grid secure and reliable.

Making clean technology affordable is the other half of the challenge, and here the news is similarly upbeat. In September, after almost fifteen years of work, a team of researchers at Oxford University released a paper that is currently under peer review but which, fifty years from now, people may look back on as a landmark step in addressing the climate crisis. The lead author of the report is Oxford’s Rupert Way; the research team was led by an American named Doyne (pronounced “ dough -en”) Farmer.

Farmer grew up in New Mexico, a precocious physicist and mathematician. His first venture, formed while he was a graduate student at U.C. Santa Cruz, was called Eudaemonic Enterprises, after Aristotle’s term for the condition of human flourishing. The goal was to beat roulette wheels. Farmer wore a shoe (now housed in a German museum) with a computer in its sole, and watched as a croupier tossed a ball into a wheel; noting the ball’s initial position and velocity, he tapped his toe to send the information to the computer, which performed quick calculations, giving him a chance to make a considered bet in the few seconds the casino allowed. This achievement led him to building algorithms to beat the stock market—a statistical-arbitrage technique that underpinned an enterprise he co-founded called the Prediction Company, which was eventually sold to the Swiss banking giant UBS. Happily, Farmer eventually turned his talents to something of greater social worth: developing a way to forecast rates of technological progress. The basis for this work was research published in 1936, when Theodore Wright, an executive at the Curtiss Aeroplane Company, had noted that every time the production of airplanes doubled, the cost of building them fell by twenty per cent. Farmer and his colleagues were intrigued by this “learning curve” (and its semiconductor-era variant, Moore’s Law ); if you could figure out which technologies fit on the curve, and which didn’t, you’d be able to forecast the future.

“It was about fifteen years ago,” Farmer told me, in December. “I was at the Santa Fe Institute, and the head of the National Renewable Energy Lab came down. He said, ‘You guys are complex-systems people. Help us think outside the box—what are we missing?’ I had a Transylvanian postdoctoral fellow at the time, and he started putting together a database—he had high-school kids working on it, kids from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, anyone. And, as we looked at it, we saw this point about the improvement trends being persistent over time.” The first practical application of solar electricity was on the Vanguard I satellite, in 1958—practical if you had the budget of the space program. Yet the cost had been falling steadily, as people improved each generation of the technology—not because of one particular breakthrough or a single visionary entrepreneur but because of constant incremental improvement. Every time the number of solar panels manufactured doubles, the price drops another thirty per cent, which means that it’s currently falling about ten per cent every year.

But—and here’s the key—not all technologies follow this curve. “We looked at the price of coal over a hundred and forty years,” Farmer said. “Mines are much more sophisticated, the technology for locating new deposits is much better. But prices have not come down.” A likely explanation is that we got to all the easy stuff first: oil once bubbled up out of the ground; now we have to drill deep beneath the ocean for it. Whatever the reason, by 2013, the cost of a kilowatt-hour of solar energy had fallen by more than ninety-nine per cent since it was first used on the Vanguard I. Meanwhile, the price of coal has remained about the same. It was cheap to start, but it hasn’t gotten cheaper.

The more data sets that Farmer’s team members included, the more robust numbers they got, and by the autumn of 2021 they were ready to publish their findings. They found that the price trajectories of fossil fuels and renewables are already crossing. Renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel, and becoming more so. So a “decisive transition” to renewable energy, they reported, would save the world twenty-six trillion dollars in energy costs in the coming decades.

This is precisely the opposite of how we have viewed energy transition. It has long been seen as an economically terrifying undertaking: if we had to transition to avoid calamity (and obviously we did), we should go as slowly as possible. Bill Gates, just last year, wrote a book, arguing that consumers would need to pay a “green premium” for clean energy because it would be more expensive. But Emily Grubert, a Georgia Tech engineer who now works for the Department of Energy, has recently shown that it could cost less to replace every coal plant in the country with renewables than to simply maintain the existing coal plants. You could call it a “green discount.”

The constant price drops mean, Farmer said, that we might still be able to move quickly enough to meet the target set in the 2016 Paris climate agreement of trying to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. “One point five is going to suck,” he said. “But it sure beats three. We just need to put our money down and do it. So many people are pessimistic and despairing, and we need to turn that around.”

Numbers like Farmer’s make people who’ve been working in this field for years absolutely giddy. At COP 26, I retreated one day from Glasgow’s giant convention center to the relative quiet of the city’s university district for a pizza with a man named Kingsmill Bond. Bond is an Englishman and a former investment professional, and he looks the part: lean, in a bespoke suit, with a good haircut. His daughter, he said, was that day sitting her exams for Cambridge, the university he’d attended before a career at Citi and Deutsche Bank that had taken him to Hong Kong and Moscow. He’d quit some years ago, taking a cut in pay that he’s too modest to disclose. He’d worked first for the Carbon Tracker Initiative, in London, and now the Rocky Mountain Institute, based in Colorado, two groups working on energy transition.

He drew on a napkin excitedly, expounding on the numbers in the Oxford report. We would have to build out the electric grid to carry all the new power, and install millions of E.V. chargers, and so on, down a long list—amounting to maybe a trillion dollars in extra capital expenditure a year over the next two or three decades. But, in return, Bond said, we get an 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. Saudi Arabia can pull oil out of the ground for less than ten dollars a barrel and sell it at fifty or seventy-five dollars a barrel (or, during the emergency caused by Putin’s war, more than a hundred dollars); the difference is the rent they command. Bond insists that higher projections for the cost of the energy transition—a recent analysis from the consulting firm McKinsey predicted that it would cost trillions more than Farmer’s team did—ignore these rents, and also assume that, before long, renewable energy will veer from the steeply falling cost curve. Even if you’re pessimistic about how much it will cost to make the change, though, it’s clear that it would be far less expensive than not moving fast—that’s measured in hundreds of trillions of dollars but also in millions of lives and whatever value we place on maintaining an orderly civilization.

The new numbers turn the economic logic we’re used to upside down. A few years ago, at a petroleum-industry conference in Texas, the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, said something both terrible and true: that “no country would find a hundred and seventy-three billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there.” He was referring to Alberta’s tar sands, where a third of Canada’s natural gas is used to heat the oil trapped in the soil sufficiently to get it to flow to the surface and separate it from the sand. Just extracting the oil would put Canada over its share of the carbon budget set in Paris, and actually burning it would heat the planet nearly half a degree Celsius and use up about a third of the total remaining budget. (And Canadians account for only about one half of one per cent of the world’s population.)

Even on purely economic terms, such logic makes less sense with each passing quarter. That’s especially true for the eighty per cent of people in the world who live in countries that must import fossil fuels—for them it’s all cost and no gain. Even for petrostates, however, the spreadsheet is increasingly difficult to rationalize. Bond supplied some numbers: Canada has fossil-fuel reserves totalling a hundred and sixty-seven petawatt hours, which is a lot. (A petawatt is a quadrillion watts.) But, he said, it has potential renewable energy from wind and solar power alone of seventy-one petawatt hours a year . A reasonable question to ask Trudeau would be: What kind of country finds a windfall like that and simply leaves it in the sky?

Making the energy transition won’t be easy, of course. Because we’ve been burning fuel to power our economies for more than two hundred years, we have in place long and robust supply chains and deep technical expertise geared to a combustion economy. “We’ve tried to think about possible infrastructure walls that might get in the way,” Farmer said. That’s a virtue of this kind of learning-curve analysis: if renewable energy has overcome obstacles in the past to keep dropping in price, it will probably be able to do so again. A few years ago, for instance, a number of reports said that the windmill business might crash because it was running short of the balsa wood used in turbine blades. But, within a year of the shortages emerging, many of the big windmill makers had started substituting a synthetic foam.

Now the focus is on minerals, such as cobalt, that are used in solar panels and batteries. Late last year, the Times published a long investigation of the success that China has had in cornering the world’s supply of the metal, which is found most abundantly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Brian Menell, the C.E.O. of TechMet, a supplier of cobalt and other specialty metals, told me, “We run the risk that in five years, the factories for E.V.s will be sitting half idle, because those companies—the Fords and General Motors and Teslas and VWs—will not be able to secure the feedstock to maintain the capacity they’re building now.” But the fact that the Fords and G.M.s are in the hunt means that the political weight for what Menell calls a “massive and coördinated effort by government and end users” is likely to develop. Humans are good at solving the kind of dilemmas represented by scarcity. A Ford spokesman told the Times that the company is learning to recycle cobalt and to develop substitutes, adding, “We do not see cobalt as a constraining issue.”

Harder to solve may be the human-rights challenges that come with new mining efforts, such as the use of so-called “artisanal” cobalt mining, in which impoverished workers pry the metal from the ground with spades, or the plan to build a lithium mine on a site in Nevada that is sacred to Indigenous peoples. But, as we work to tackle those problems, it’s worth remembering that a transition to renewable energy would, by some estimates, reduce the total global mining burden by as much as eighty per cent, because so much of what we dig up today is burned (and then we have to go dig up some more). You dig up lithium once, and put it to use for decades in a solar panel or battery. In fact, a switch to renewable energy will reduce the load on all kinds of systems. At the moment, roughly forty per cent of the cargo carried by ocean-going ships is coal, gas, oil, and wood pellets—a never-ending stream of vessels crammed full of stuff to burn. You need a ship to carry a wind turbine blade, too, if it’s coming from across the sea, but you only need it once. A solar panel or a windmill, once erected, stands for a quarter of a century or longer. The U.S. military is the world’s largest single consumer of fossil fuels, but seventy per cent of its logistical “lift capacity” is devoted solely to transporting the fossil fuels used to keep the military machine running.

Raw materials aren’t the only possible pinch point. We’re also short of some kinds of expertise. Saul Griffith is perhaps the world’s leading apostle of electrification. (His 2021 book is called “ Electrify .”) An Australian by birth, he has spent recent years in Silicon Valley, rallying entrepreneurs to the project of installing E.V. chargers, air-source heat pumps, induction cooktops, and the like. He can show that they save homeowners, landlords, and businesses money; he’s also worked out the numbers to show that banks can prosper by extending, in essence, mortgages for these improvements. But he told me that, to stay within the 1.5 degree Celsius range, “America is going to need a million more electricians this decade.” That’s not impossible . Working as an electrician is a good job, and community colleges and apprenticeship programs could train many more people to become one. But, as with the rest of the transition, it’s going to take leadership and coördination to make it happen.

Change on this scale would be difficult even if everyone was working in good faith, and not everyone is. So far, for instance, the climate provisions of the Build Back Better Act, which would help provide, among many other things, training for renewable-energy installers, have been blocked not just by the oil-dominated G.O.P. but by Joe Manchin , the Democrat who received more fossil-fuel donations in the past election cycle than anyone else in the Senate. The thirty-year history of the global-warming fight is largely a story of the efforts by the fossil-fuel industry to deny the need for change, or, more recently, to insist that it must come slowly.

The fossil-fuel industry wants to be able to keep burning something. That way, it can keep both its infrastructure and its business model usefully employed. It’s like an industry of rational pyromania. A decade or so ago, the thing it wanted to burn next was natural gas. Since it produces less carbon dioxide than coal does, it was billed as the “bridge fuel” that would get us to renewables. The logic seemed sound. But researchers, led by Bob Howarth, at Cornell University, found that producing large quantities of natural gas released large quantities of methane into the atmosphere. And methane (CH 4 ) is, like CO 2 , a potent heat-trapping gas, so it’s become clear that natural gas is a bridge fuel to nowhere—clear, that is, to everyone but the industry. The head of a big gas firm told a conference in Texas last week that he thought the domestic gas industry could be producing for the next hundred years.

Other parts of the industry want to go further back in time and burn wood; the European Union and the United States officially class “biomass burning” as carbon neutral. The city of Burlington, in my home state of Vermont, claims to source all its energy from renewables, but much of its electricity comes from a plant that burns trees. Again, the logic originally seemed sound: if you cut a tree, another grows in its place, and it will eventually soak up the carbon dioxide emitted from that burning the first tree. But, again, “eventually” is the problem . Burning wood is highly inefficient, and so it releases a huge pulse of carbon right now , when the world’s climate system is most vulnerable. Trees that grow back in a few generations’ time will come too late to save the ice caps. The world’s largest wood-burning plant is in England, run by a company called Drax; the plant used to burn coal, and it does scarcely less damage now than it did then. In January, news came that Enviva, a company based in Maryland that is the largest producer of wood pellets in the world, plans to double its output.

Or consider the huge sums of money in the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed last year, which will support another technology called carbon capture. This involves fitting power plants with enough filters and pipes so that they can go on burning coal or gas, but capture the CO 2 that pours out of the smokestacks and pipe it safely away—into an old salt mine, perhaps. (Or, ironically, into a depleted oil well, where it may be used to push more crude to the surface.) So far, these carbon-capture schemes don’t really work—but, even if they did, why spend the money to outfit systems with pipes and filters when solar power is already cheaper than coal power? We will have to remove some of the carbon in the atmosphere, and new generations of direct-air-capture machines may someday play a role, if their cost drops quickly. (They use chemicals to filter carbon straight from the ambient air; think of them as artificial trees.) But using this technology to lengthen the lifespan of coal-fired power plants is just one more gift to a politically connected industry.

Increasingly, the fossil-fuel industry is turning toward hydrogen as an out. Hydrogen does burn cleanly, without contributing to global warming, but the industry likes hydrogen because one way to produce it is by burning natural gas. And, as Howarth and Jacobson demonstrated in a recent paper, even if you combine burning that gas with expensive carbon capture, the methane that leaks from the frack wells is enough to render the whole process ruinous environmentally, and it makes no sense economically without huge subsidies.

There is another way to produce hydrogen, and, in time, it will almost certainly fuel the last big artificial fires on our planet. Through electrolysis, hydrogen can be separated from oxygen in water. And if the electricity used in the process is renewably produced then this “green hydrogen” would allow countries such as Japan, Singapore, and Korea, which may struggle to find enough space in their landscapes for renewable-energy generation, to power their grids. The Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest, the founder of the Fortescue Metals Group, is proposing to use solar power to produce green hydrogen that he can then ship to those countries. In January, Mukesh Ambani, the head of Reliance Industries and the richest man in India, announced plans to spend seventy-five billion dollars on the technology. Airbus recently predicted that green hydrogen could fuel its long-haul planes by 2035. And the good news—though Doyne Farmer cautions that the data sets are still pretty scanty—is that the electrolyzers which use solar energy to produce hydrogen seem to be on the same downward cost curve as solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries.

The fossil-fuel industry can be relied on to fight these shifts. Last autumn, a utility company in Oklahoma announced that it would charge fourteen hundred dollars to disconnect residential gas lines and move home stoves and furnaces to electricity. Within days, other utilities followed suit. That’s why the climate movement is increasingly taking on the banks that make loans for the expansion of fossil-fuel infrastructure. Last year, the International Energy Agency said that such expansion needed to end immediately if we are to meet the Paris targets, yet the world’s biggest banks, while making noises about “net zero by 2050,” continue to lend to new pipelines and wells. The issue came to the fore earlier this year, when Joe Biden nominated Sarah Bloom Raskin to the position of vice-chair for supervision at the Federal Reserve. “There is opportunity in pre-emptive, early and bold actions by federal economic policy makers looking to avoid catastrophe,” Raskin wrote in 2020. And it’s why certain lawmakers mobilized to stop her nomination . Senator Patrick Toomey, of Pennsylvania, who was the Senate’s sixth-biggest recipient of oil-and-gas contributions during his last campaign, in 2016 (he is not running for reëlection this year), said that Raskin “has specifically called for the Fed to pressure banks to choke off credit to traditional energy companies.” She’s tried, in other words, to extinguish the flames a little—and on Monday, for her pains, Manchin effectively derailed her nomination, saying that he would vote against her, because she “failed to satisfactorily address my concerns about the critical importance of financing an all-of-the-above energy policy.” On Tuesday, she withdrew her nomination .

The shift away from combustion is large and novel enough that it bumps up against everyone’s prior assumptions—environmentalists’, too. The fight against nuclear power, for example, was an early mainstay of the green movement, because it was easy to see that if something went wrong it could go badly wrong. I applauded, more than a decade ago, when the Vermont legislature voted to close the state’s old nuclear plant at the end of its working life, but I wouldn’t today. Indeed, for some years I’ve argued that existing nuclear reactors that can still be run with any margin of safety probably should be, as we’re making the transition—the spent fuel they produce is an evil inheritance for our descendants, but it’s not as dangerous as an overheated Earth, even if the scenes of Russian troops shelling nuclear plants added to the sense of horror enveloping the planet these past weeks. Yet the rapidly falling cost of renewables also indicates why new nuclear plants will have a hard time finding backers; it’s evaporating nuclear power’s one big advantage—that it’s always on. Farmer’s Oxford team ran the numbers. “If the cost of coal is flat, and the cost of solar is plummeting, nuclear is the rare technology whose cost is going up,” he said. Advocates will argue that this is because safety fears have driven up the cost of construction. “But the only place on Earth where you can find the cost of nuclear coming down is Korea,” Farmer said. “Even there, the rate of decline is one per cent a year. Compared to ten per cent for renewables, that’s not enough to matter.”

Accepting nuclear power for a while longer is not the only place environmentalists will need to bend. A reason I supported shutting down Vermont’s nuclear plant was because campaigners had promised that its output would be replaced with renewable energy. In the years that followed, though, advocates of scenery, wildlife, and forests managed to put the state’s mountaintops off limits to wind turbines. More recently, the state’s public-utility commission blocked construction of an eight-acre solar farm on aesthetic grounds. Those of us who live in and love rural areas have to accept that some of that landscape will be needed to produce energy. Not all of it, or even most of it—Jacobson’s latest numbers show that renewable power actually uses less land than fossil fuels, which require drilling fifty thousand new holes every year in North America alone. But we do need to see our landscape differently—as Ezra Klein wrote this week in the Times , “to conserve anything close to the climate we’ve had, we need to build as we’ve never built before.”

Corn fields, for instance, are a classic American sight, but they’re also just solar-energy collectors of another sort. (And ones requiring annual applications of nitrogen, which eventually washes into lakes and rivers, causing big algae blooms.) More than half the corn grown in Iowa actually ends up as ethanol in the tanks of cars and trucks—in other words, those fields are already growing fuel, just inefficiently. Because solar panels are far more efficient than photosynthesis, and because E.V.s are far more efficient than cars with gas engines, Jacobson’s data show that, by switching from ethanol to solar, you could produce eighty times the amount of automobile mileage using an equivalent area of land. And the transition could bring some advantages: the market for electrons is predictable, so solar panels can provide a fairly stable income for farmers, some of whom are learning to grow shade-tolerant crops or to graze animals around and beneath them.

Another concession will strike many environmentalists more deeply even than accepting a degraded landscape, and that’s the notion that reckoning with the climate crisis would force wholesale changes in the way that people live their lives. Remember, the long-held assumption was that renewable energy was going to be expensive and limited in supply. So, it was thought, this would move us in the direction of simpler, less energy-intensive ways of life, something that many of us welcomed, in part because there are deep environmental challenges that go beyond carbon and climate. Cheap new energy technologies may let us evade some of those more profound changes. Whenever I write about the rise of E.V.s, Twitter responds that we’d be better off riding bikes and electric buses. In many ways we would be, and some cities are thankfully starting to build extensive bike paths and rapid-transit lanes for electric buses. But, as of 2017, just two per cent of passenger miles in this country come from public transportation. Bike commuting has doubled in the past two decades—to about one per cent of the total. We could (and should) quintuple the number of people riding bikes and buses, and even then we’d still need to replace tens of millions of cars with E.V.s to meet the targets in the time the scientists have set to meet them. That time is the crucial variable. As hard as it will be to rewire the planet’s energy system by decade’s end, I think it would be harder—impossible, in fact—to sufficiently rewire social expectations, consumer preferences, and settlement patterns in that short stretch.

So one way to look at the work that must be done with the tools we have at hand is as triage. If we do it quickly, we will open up more possibilities for the generations to come. Just one example: Farmer says that it’s possible to see the cost of nuclear-fusion reactors, as opposed to the current fission reactors, starting to come steeply down the cost curve—and to imagine that a within a generation or two people may be taking solar panels off farm fields, because fusion (which is essentially the physics of the sun brought to Earth) may be providing all the power we need. If we make it through the bottleneck of the next decade, much may be possible.

There is one ethical element of the energy transition that we can’t set aside: the climate crisis is deeply unfair—by and large, the less you did to cause it, the harder and faster it hits you—but in the course of trying to fix it we do have an opportunity to also remedy some of that unfairness. For Americans, the best part of the Build Back Better bill may be that it tries to target significant parts of its aid to communities hardest hit by poverty and environmental damage, a residue of the Green New Deal that is its parent. And advocates are already pressing to insure that at least some of the new technology is owned by local communities—by churches and local development agencies, not by the solar-era equivalents of Koch Industries or Exxon.

Advocates are also calling for some of the first investments in green transformations to happen in public-housing projects, on reservations, and in public schools serving low-income students. There can be some impatience from environmentalists who worry that such considerations might slow down the transition. But, as Naomi Klein recently told me, “The hard truth is that environmentalists can’t win the emission-reduction fight on our own. Winning will take sweeping alliances beyond the self-identified green bubble—with trade unions, housing-rights advocates, racial-justice organizers, teachers, transit workers, nurses, artists, and more. But, to build that kind of coalition, climate action needs to hold out the promise of making daily life better for the people who are most neglected right away—not far off in the future. Green, affordable homes and water that is safe to drink is something people will fight for a hell of a lot harder than carbon pricing.”

These are principles that must apply around the world, for basic fairness and because solving the climate crisis in just the U.S. would be the most pyrrhic of victories. (They don’t call it “global warming” for nothing.) In Glasgow, I sat down with Mohamed Nasheed, the former President of the Maldives and the current speaker of the People’s Majlis, the nation’s legislative body. He has been at the forefront of climate action for decades, because the highest land in his country, an archipelago that stretches across the equator in the Indian Ocean, is just a few metres above sea level. At COP 26, he was representing the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a consortium of fifty-five of the nations with the most to lose as temperatures rise. As he noted, poor countries have gone deeply into debt trying to deal with the effects of climate change. If they need to move an airport or shore up seawalls, or recover from a devastating hurricane or record rainfall, borrowing may be their only recourse. And borrowing gets harder, in part, because the climate risks mean that lenders demand more. The climate premium on loans may approach ten per cent, Nasheed said; some nations are already spending twenty per cent of their budgets just paying interest. He suggested that it might be time for a debt strike by poor nations.

The rapid fall in renewable-energy prices makes it more possible to imagine the rest of the world chipping in. So far, though, the rich countries haven’t even come up with the climate funds they promised the Global South more than a decade ago, much less any compensation for the ongoing damage that they have done the most to cause. (All of sub-Saharan Africa is responsible for less than two per cent of the carbon emissions currently heating the earth; the United States is responsible for twenty-five per cent.)

Tom Athanasiou’s Berkeley-based organization EcoEquity, as part of the Climate Equity Reference Project, has done the most detailed analyses of who owes what in the climate fight. He found that the U.S. would have to cut its emissions a hundred and seventy-five per cent to make up for the damage it’s already caused—a statistical impossibility. Therefore, the only way it can meet that burden is to help the rest of the world transition to clean energy, and to help bear the costs that global warming has already produced. As Athanasiou put it, “The pressing work of decarbonization is only going to be embraced by the people of the Global South if it comes as part of a package that includes adaptation aid and disaster relief.”

I said at the start that there is one sublime exception to the rule that we should be dousing fires, and that is the use of flame to control flame, and to manage land—a skill developed over many millennia by the original inhabitants of much of the world. Of all the fires burning on Earth, none are more terrifying than the conflagrations that light the arid West, the Mediterranean, the eucalyptus forests of Australia, and the boreal woods of Siberia and the Canadian north. By last summer, blazes in Oregon and Washington and British Columbia were fouling the air across the continent in New York and New England. Smoke from fires in the Russian far north choked the sky above the North Pole. For people in these regions, fire has become a scary psychological companion during the hot and dry months—and those months stretch out longer each year. The San Francisco Chronicle recently asked whether parts of California, once the nation’s idyll, were now effectively uninhabitable. In Siberia, even last winter’s icy cold was not enough to blot out the blazes; researchers reported “zombie fires” smoking and smoldering beneath feet of snow. There’s no question that the climate crisis is driving these great blazes—and also being driven by them, since they put huge clouds of carbon into the air.

There’s also little question, at least in the West, that the fires, though sparked by our new climate, feed on an accumulation of fuel left there by a century of a strict policy which treated any fire as a threat to be extinguished immediately. That policy ignored millennia of Indigenous experience using fire as a tool, an experience now suddenly in great demand. Indigenous people around the world have been at the forefront of the climate movement, and they have often been skilled early adopters of renewable energy. But they have also, in the past, been able to use fire to fight fire: to burn when the risk is low, in an effort to manage landscapes for safety and for productivity.

Frank Lake, a descendant of the Karuk tribe indigenous to what is now northern California, works as a research ecologist at the U.S. Forest Service, and he is helping to recover this old and useful technology. He described a controlled burn in the autumn of 2015 near his house on the Klamath River. “I have legacy acorn trees on my property,” he said—meaning the great oaks that provided food for tribal people in ages past—but those trees were hemmed in by fast-growing shrubs. “So we had twenty-something fire personnel there that day, and they had their equipment, and they laid hose. And I gave the operational briefing. I said, ‘We’re going to be burning today to reduce hazardous fuels. And also so we can gather acorns more easily, without the undergrowth, and the pests attacking the trees.’ My wife was there and my five-year-old son and my three-year-old daughter. And I lit a branch from a lightning-struck sugar pine—it conveys its medicine from the lightning—and with that I lit everyone’s drip torches, and then they went to work burning. My son got to walk hand-in-hand down the fire line with the burn boss.”

Lake’s work at the Forest Service involves helping tribes burn again. It’s not always easy; some have been so decimated by the colonial experience that they’ve lost their traditions. “Maybe they have two or three generations that haven’t been allowed to burn,” he said. There are important pockets of residual knowledge, often among elders, but they can be reluctant to share that knowledge with others, Lake told me, “fearful that it will be co-opted and that they’ll be kept out of the leadership and decision-making.” But, for half a decade, the Indigenous Peoples Burning Network—organized by various tribes, the Nature Conservancy, and government agencies, including the Forest Service—has slowly been expanding across the country. There are outposts in Oregon, Minnesota, New Mexico, and in other parts of the world. Lake has travelled to Australia to learn from aboriginal practitioners. “It’s family-based burning. The kids get a Bic lighter and burn a little patch of eucalyptus. The teen-agers a bigger area, adults much bigger swaths. I just saw it all unfold.” As that knowledge and confidence is recovered, it’s possible to imagine a world in which we’ve turned off most of the man-made fires, and Indigenous people teach the rest of us to use fire as the important force it was when we first discovered it.

Amy Cardinal Christianson, who works for the Canadian equivalent of the Forest Service, is a member of the Métis Nation. Her family kept trapping lines near Fort McMurray, in northern Alberta, but left them for the city because the development of the vast tar-sands complex overwhelmed the landscape. (That’s the hundred and seventy-three billion barrels that Justin Trudeau says no country would leave in the ground—a pool of carbon so vast the climate scientist James Hansen said that pumping it from the ground would mean “game over for the climate.”) The industrial fires it stoked have helped heat the Earth, and one result was a truly terrifying forest fire that overtook Fort McMurray in 2016, after a stretch of unseasonably high temperatures. The blaze forced the evacuation of eighty-eight thousand people, and became the costliest disaster in Canadian history.

“What we’re seeing now is bad fire,” Christianson said. “When we talk about returning fire to the landscape, we’re talking about good fire. I heard an elder describe it once as fire you could walk next to, fire of a low intensity.” Fire that builds a mosaic of landscapes that, in turn, act as natural firebreaks against devastating blazes; fire that opens meadows where wildlife can flourish. “Fire is a kind of medicine for the land. And it lets you carry out your culture—like, why you are in the world, basically.”

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Article Contents

Introduction, 1 installed capacity and application of solar energy worldwide, 2 the role of solar energy in sustainable development, 3 the perspective of solar energy, 4 conclusions, conflict of interest statement.

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Solar energy technology and its roles in sustainable development

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Ali O M Maka, Jamal M Alabid, Solar energy technology and its roles in sustainable development, Clean Energy , Volume 6, Issue 3, June 2022, Pages 476–483, https://doi.org/10.1093/ce/zkac023

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Solar energy is environmentally friendly technology, a great energy supply and one of the most significant renewable and green energy sources. It plays a substantial role in achieving sustainable development energy solutions. Therefore, the massive amount of solar energy attainable daily makes it a very attractive resource for generating electricity. Both technologies, applications of concentrated solar power or solar photovoltaics, are always under continuous development to fulfil our energy needs. Hence, a large installed capacity of solar energy applications worldwide, in the same context, supports the energy sector and meets the employment market to gain sufficient development. This paper highlights solar energy applications and their role in sustainable development and considers renewable energy’s overall employment potential. Thus, it provides insights and analysis on solar energy sustainability, including environmental and economic development. Furthermore, it has identified the contributions of solar energy applications in sustainable development by providing energy needs, creating jobs opportunities and enhancing environmental protection. Finally, the perspective of solar energy technology is drawn up in the application of the energy sector and affords a vision of future development in this domain.

With reference to the recommendations of the UN, the Climate Change Conference, COP26, was held in Glasgow , UK, in 2021. They reached an agreement through the representatives of the 197 countries, where they concurred to move towards reducing dependency on coal and fossil-fuel sources. Furthermore, the conference stated ‘the various opportunities for governments to prioritize health and equity in the international climate movement and sustainable development agenda’. Also, one of the testaments is the necessity to ‘create energy systems that protect and improve climate and health’ [ 1 , 2 ].

The Paris Climate Accords is a worldwide agreement on climate change signed in 2015, which addressed the mitigation of climate change, adaptation and finance. Consequently, the representatives of 196 countries concurred to decrease their greenhouse gas emissions [ 3 ]. The Paris Agreement is essential for present and future generations to attain a more secure and stable environment. In essence, the Paris Agreement has been about safeguarding people from such an uncertain and progressively dangerous environment and ensuring everyone can have the right to live in a healthy, pollutant-free environment without the negative impacts of climate change [ 3 , 4 ].

In recent decades, there has been an increase in demand for cleaner energy resources. Based on that, decision-makers of all countries have drawn up plans that depend on renewable sources through a long-term strategy. Thus, such plans reduce the reliance of dependence on traditional energy sources and substitute traditional energy sources with alternative energy technology. As a result, the global community is starting to shift towards utilizing sustainable energy sources and reducing dependence on traditional fossil fuels as a source of energy [ 5 , 6 ].

In 2015, the UN adopted the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and recognized them as international legislation, which demands a global effort to end poverty, safeguard the environment and guarantee that by 2030, humanity lives in prosperity and peace. Consequently, progress needs to be balanced among economic, social and environmental sustainability models [ 7 ].

Many national and international regulations have been established to control the gas emissions and pollutants that impact the environment [ 8 ]. However, the negative effects of increased carbon in the atmosphere have grown in the last 10 years. Production and use of fossil fuels emit methane (CH 4 ), carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and carbon monoxide (CO), which are the most significant contributors to environmental emissions on our planet. Additionally, coal and oil, including gasoline, coal, oil and methane, are commonly used in energy for transport or for generating electricity. Therefore, burning these fossil fuel s is deemed the largest emitter when used for electricity generation, transport, etc. However, these energy resources are considered depleted energy sources being consumed to an unsustainable degree [ 9–11 ].

Energy is an essential need for the existence and growth of human communities. Consequently, the need for energy has increased gradually as human civilization has progressed. Additionally, in the past few decades, the rapid rise of the world’s population and its reliance on technological developments have increased energy demands. Furthermore, green technology sources play an important role in sustainably providing energy supplies, especially in mitigating climate change [ 5 , 6 , 8 ].

Currently, fossil fuels remain dominant and will continue to be the primary source of large-scale energy for the foreseeable future; however, renewable energy should play a vital role in the future of global energy. The global energy system is undergoing a movement towards more sustainable sources of energy [ 12 , 13 ].

Power generation by fossil-fuel resources has peaked, whilst solar energy is predicted to be at the vanguard of energy generation in the near future. Moreover, it is predicted that by 2050, the generation of solar energy will have increased to 48% due to economic and industrial growth [ 13 , 14 ].

In recent years, it has become increasingly obvious that the globe must decrease greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, ideally towards net zero, if we are to fulfil the Paris Agreement’s goal to reduce global temperature increases [ 3 , 4 ]. The net-zero emissions complement the scenario of sustainable development assessment by 2050. According to the agreed scenario of sustainable development, many industrialized economies must achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. However, the net-zero emissions 2050 brought the first detailed International Energy Agency (IEA) modelling of what strategy will be required over the next 10 years to achieve net-zero carbon emissions worldwide by 2050 [ 15–17 ].

The global statistics of greenhouse gas emissions have been identified; in 2019, there was a 1% decrease in CO 2 emissions from the power industry; that figure dropped by 7% in 2020 due to the COVID-19 crisis, thus indicating a drop in coal-fired energy generation that is being squeezed by decreasing energy needs, growth of renewables and the shift away from fossil fuels. As a result, in 2020, the energy industry was expected to generate ~13 Gt CO 2 , representing ~40% of total world energy sector emissions related to CO 2 . The annual electricity generation stepped back to pre-crisis levels by 2021, although due to a changing ‘fuel mix’, the CO 2 emissions in the power sector will grow just a little before remaining roughly steady until 2030 [ 15 ].

Therefore, based on the information mentioned above, the advantages of solar energy technology are a renewable and clean energy source that is plentiful, cheaper costs, less maintenance and environmentally friendly, to name but a few. The significance of this paper is to highlight solar energy applications to ensure sustainable development; thus, it is vital to researchers, engineers and customers alike. The article’s primary aim is to raise public awareness and disseminate the culture of solar energy usage in daily life, since moving forward, it is the best. The scope of this paper is as follows. Section 1 represents a summary of the introduction. Section 2 represents a summary of installed capacity and the application of solar energy worldwide. Section 3 presents the role of solar energy in the sustainable development and employment of renewable energy. Section 4 represents the perspective of solar energy. Finally, Section 5 outlines the conclusions and recommendations for future work.

1.1 Installed capacity of solar energy

The history of solar energy can be traced back to the seventh century when mirrors with solar power were used. In 1893, the photovoltaic (PV) effect was discovered; after many decades, scientists developed this technology for electricity generation [ 18 ]. Based on that, after many years of research and development from scientists worldwide, solar energy technology is classified into two key applications: solar thermal and solar PV.

PV systems convert the Sun’s energy into electricity by utilizing solar panels. These PV devices have quickly become the cheapest option for new electricity generation in numerous world locations due to their ubiquitous deployment. For example, during the period from 2010 to 2018, the cost of generating electricity by solar PV plants decreased by 77%. However, solar PV installed capacity progress expanded 100-fold between 2005 and 2018. Consequently, solar PV has emerged as a key component in the low-carbon sustainable energy system required to provide access to affordable and dependable electricity, assisting in fulfilling the Paris climate agreement and in achieving the 2030 SDG targets [ 19 ].

The installed capacity of solar energy worldwide has been rapidly increased to meet energy demands. The installed capacity of PV technology from 2010 to 2020 increased from 40 334 to 709 674 MW, whereas the installed capacity of concentrated solar power (CSP) applications, which was 1266 MW in 2010, after 10 years had increased to 6479 MW. Therefore, solar PV technology has more deployed installations than CSP applications. So, the stand-alone solar PV and large-scale grid-connected PV plants are widely used worldwide and used in space applications. Fig. 1 represents the installation of solar energy worldwide.

Installation capacity of solar energy worldwide [ 20 ].

1.2 Application of solar energy

Energy can be obtained directly from the Sun—so-called solar energy. Globally, there has been growth in solar energy applications, as it can be used to generate electricity, desalinate water and generate heat, etc. The taxonomy of applications of solar energy is as follows: (i) PVs and (ii) CSP. Fig. 2 details the taxonomy of solar energy applications.

The taxonomy of solar energy applications.

Solar cells are devices that convert sunlight directly into electricity; typical semiconductor materials are utilized to form a PV solar cell device. These materials’ characteristics are based on atoms with four electrons in their outer orbit or shell. Semiconductor materials are from the periodic table’s group ‘IV’ or a mixture of groups ‘IV’ and ‘II’, the latter known as ‘II–VI’ semiconductors [ 21 ]. Additionally, a periodic table mixture of elements from groups ‘III’ and ‘V’ can create ‘III–V’ materials [ 22 ].

PV devices, sometimes called solar cells, are electronic devices that convert sunlight into electrical power. PVs are also one of the rapidly growing renewable-energy technologies of today. It is therefore anticipated to play a significant role in the long-term world electricity-generating mixture moving forward.

Solar PV systems can be incorporated to supply electricity on a commercial level or installed in smaller clusters for mini-grids or individual usage. Utilizing PV modules to power mini-grids is a great way to offer electricity to those who do not live close to power-transmission lines, especially in developing countries with abundant solar energy resources. In the most recent decade, the cost of producing PV modules has dropped drastically, giving them not only accessibility but sometimes making them the least expensive energy form. PV arrays have a 30-year lifetime and come in various shades based on the type of material utilized in their production.

The most typical method for solar PV desalination technology that is used for desalinating sea or salty water is electrodialysis (ED). Therefore, solar PV modules are directly connected to the desalination process. This technique employs the direct-current electricity to remove salt from the sea or salty water.

The technology of PV–thermal (PV–T) comprises conventional solar PV modules coupled with a thermal collector mounted on the rear side of the PV module to pre-heat domestic hot water. Accordingly, this enables a larger portion of the incident solar energy on the collector to be converted into beneficial electrical and thermal energy.

A zero-energy building is a building that is designed for zero net energy emissions and emits no carbon dioxide. Building-integrated PV (BIPV) technology is coupled with solar energy sources and devices in buildings that are utilized to supply energy needs. Thus, building-integrated PVs utilizing thermal energy (BIPV/T) incorporate creative technologies such as solar cooling [ 23 ].

A PV water-pumping system is typically used to pump water in rural, isolated and desert areas. The system consists of PV modules to power a water pump to the location of water need. The water-pumping rate depends on many factors such as pumping head, solar intensity, etc.

A PV-powered cathodic protection (CP) system is designed to supply a CP system to control the corrosion of a metal surface. This technique is based on the impressive current acquired from PV solar energy systems and is utilized for burying pipelines, tanks, concrete structures, etc.

Concentrated PV (CPV) technology uses either the refractive or the reflective concentrators to increase sunlight to PV cells [ 24 , 25 ]. High-efficiency solar cells are usually used, consisting of many layers of semiconductor materials that stack on top of each other. This technology has an efficiency of >47%. In addition, the devices produce electricity and the heat can be used for other purposes [ 26 , 27 ].

For CSP systems, the solar rays are concentrated using mirrors in this application. These rays will heat a fluid, resulting in steam used to power a turbine and generate electricity. Large-scale power stations employ CSP to generate electricity. A field of mirrors typically redirect rays to a tall thin tower in a CSP power station. Thus, numerous large flat heliostats (mirrors) are used to track the Sun and concentrate its light onto a receiver in power tower systems, sometimes known as central receivers. The hot fluid could be utilized right away to produce steam or stored for later usage. Another of the great benefits of a CSP power station is that it may be built with molten salts to store heat and generate electricity outside of daylight hours.

Mirrored dishes are used in dish engine systems to focus and concentrate sunlight onto a receiver. The dish assembly tracks the Sun’s movement to capture as much solar energy as possible. The engine includes thin tubes that work outside the four-piston cylinders and it opens into the cylinders containing hydrogen or helium gas. The pistons are driven by the expanding gas. Finally, the pistons drive an electric generator by turning a crankshaft.

A further water-treatment technique, using reverse osmosis, depends on the solar-thermal and using solar concentrated power through the parabolic trough technique. The desalination employs CSP technology that utilizes hybrid integration and thermal storage allows continuous operation and is a cost-effective solution. Solar thermal can be used for domestic purposes such as a dryer. In some countries or societies, the so-called food dehydration is traditionally used to preserve some food materials such as meats, fruits and vegetables.

Sustainable energy development is defined as the development of the energy sector in terms of energy generating, distributing and utilizing that are based on sustainability rules [ 28 ]. Energy systems will significantly impact the environment in both developed and developing countries. Consequently, the global sustainable energy system must optimize efficiency and reduce emissions [ 29 ].

The sustainable development scenario is built based on the economic perspective. It also examines what activities will be required to meet shared long-term climate benefits, clean air and energy access targets. The short-term details are based on the IEA’s sustainable recovery strategy, which aims to promote economies and employment through developing a cleaner and more reliable energy infrastructure [ 15 ]. In addition, sustainable development includes utilizing renewable-energy applications, smart-grid technologies, energy security, and energy pricing, and having a sound energy policy [ 29 ].

The demand-side response can help meet the flexibility requirements in electricity systems by moving demand over time. As a result, the integration of renewable technologies for helping facilitate the peak demand is reduced, system stability is maintained, and total costs and CO 2 emissions are reduced. The demand-side response is currently used mostly in Europe and North America, where it is primarily aimed at huge commercial and industrial electricity customers [ 15 ].

International standards are an essential component of high-quality infrastructure. Establishing legislative convergence, increasing competition and supporting innovation will allow participants to take part in a global world PV market [ 30 ]. Numerous additional countries might benefit from more actively engaging in developing global solar PV standards. The leading countries in solar PV manufacturing and deployment have embraced global standards for PV systems and highly contributed to clean-energy development. Additional assistance and capacity-building to enhance quality infrastructure in developing economies might also help support wider implementation and compliance with international solar PV standards. Thus, support can bring legal requirements and frameworks into consistency and give additional impetus for the trade of secure and high-quality solar PV products [ 19 ].

Continuous trade-led dissemination of solar PV and other renewable technologies will strengthen the national infrastructure. For instance, off-grid solar energy alternatives, such as stand-alone systems and mini-grids, could be easily deployed to assist healthcare facilities in improving their degree of services and powering portable testing sites and vaccination coolers. In addition to helping in the immediate medical crisis, trade-led solar PV adoption could aid in the improving economy from the COVID-19 outbreak, not least by providing jobs in the renewable-energy sector, which are estimated to reach >40 million by 2050 [ 19 ].

The framework for energy sustainability development, by the application of solar energy, is one way to achieve that goal. With the large availability of solar energy resources for PV and CSP energy applications, we can move towards energy sustainability. Fig. 3 illustrates plans for solar energy sustainability.

Framework for solar energy applications in energy sustainability.

The environmental consideration of such applications, including an aspect of the environmental conditions, operating conditions, etc., have been assessed. It is clean, friendly to the environment and also energy-saving. Moreover, this technology has no removable parts, low maintenance procedures and longevity.

Economic and social development are considered by offering job opportunities to the community and providing cheaper energy options. It can also improve people’s income; in turn, living standards will be enhanced. Therefore, energy is paramount, considered to be the most vital element of human life, society’s progress and economic development.

As efforts are made to increase the energy transition towards sustainable energy systems, it is anticipated that the next decade will see a continued booming of solar energy and all clean-energy technology. Scholars worldwide consider research and innovation to be substantial drivers to enhance the potency of such solar application technology.

2.1 Employment from renewable energy

The employment market has also boomed with the deployment of renewable-energy technology. Renewable-energy technology applications have created >12 million jobs worldwide. The solar PV application came as the pioneer, which created >3 million jobs. At the same time, while the solar thermal applications (solar heating and cooling) created >819 000 jobs, the CSP attained >31 000 jobs [ 20 ].

According to the reports, although top markets such as the USA, the EU and China had the highest investment in renewables jobs, other Asian countries have emerged as players in the solar PV panel manufacturers’ industry [ 31 ].

Solar energy employment has offered more employment than other renewable sources. For example, in the developing countries, there was a growth in employment chances in solar applications that powered ‘micro-enterprises’. Hence, it has been significant in eliminating poverty, which is considered the key goal of sustainable energy development. Therefore, solar energy plays a critical part in fulfilling the sustainability targets for a better plant and environment [ 31 , 32 ]. Fig. 4 illustrates distributions of world renewable-energy employment.

World renewable-energy employment [ 20 ].

The world distribution of PV jobs is disseminated across the continents as follows. There was 70% employment in PV applications available in Asia, while 10% is available in North America, 10% available in South America and 10% availability in Europe. Table 1 details the top 10 countries that have relevant jobs in Asia, North America, South America and Europe.

List of the top 10 countries that created jobs in solar PV applications [ 19 , 33 ]

Solar energy investments can meet energy targets and environmental protection by reducing carbon emissions while having no detrimental influence on the country’s development [ 32 , 34 ]. In countries located in the ‘Sunbelt’, there is huge potential for solar energy, where there is a year-round abundance of solar global horizontal irradiation. Consequently, these countries, including the Middle East, Australia, North Africa, China, the USA and Southern Africa, to name a few, have a lot of potential for solar energy technology. The average yearly solar intensity is >2800 kWh/m 2 and the average daily solar intensity is >7.5 kWh/m 2 . Fig. 5 illustrates the optimum areas for global solar irradiation.

World global solar irradiation map [ 35 ].

The distribution of solar radiation and its intensity are two important factors that influence the efficiency of solar PV technology and these two parameters vary among different countries. Therefore, it is essential to realize that some solar energy is wasted since it is not utilized. On the other hand, solar radiation is abundant in several countries, especially in developing ones, which makes it invaluable [ 36 , 37 ].

Worldwide, the PV industry has benefited recently from globalization, which has allowed huge improvements in economies of scale, while vertical integration has created strong value chains: as manufacturers source materials from an increasing number of suppliers, prices have dropped while quality has been maintained. Furthermore, the worldwide incorporated PV solar device market is growing fast, creating opportunities enabling solar energy firms to benefit from significant government help with underwriting, subsides, beneficial trading licences and training of a competent workforce, while the increased rivalry has reinforced the motivation to continue investing in research and development, both public and private [ 19 , 33 ].

The global outbreak of COVID-19 has impacted ‘cross-border supply chains’ and those investors working in the renewable-energy sector. As a result, more diversity of solar PV supply-chain processes may be required in the future to enhance long-term flexibility versus exogenous shocks [ 19 , 33 ].

It is vital to establish a well-functioning quality infrastructure to expand the distribution of solar PV technologies beyond borders and make it easier for new enterprises to enter solar PV value chains. In addition, a strong quality infrastructure system is a significant instrument for assisting local firms in meeting the demands of trade markets. Furthermore, high-quality infrastructure can help reduce associated risks with the worldwide PV project value chain, such as underperforming, inefficient and failing goods, limiting the development, improvement and export of these technologies. Governments worldwide are, at various levels, creating quality infrastructure, including the usage of metrology i.e. the science of measurement and its application, regulations, testing procedures, accreditation, certification and market monitoring [ 33 , 38 ].

The perspective is based on a continuous process of technological advancement and learning. Its speed is determined by its deployment, which varies depending on the scenario [ 39 , 40 ]. The expense trends support policy preferences for low-carbon energy sources, particularly in increased energy-alteration scenarios. Emerging technologies are introduced and implemented as quickly as they ever have been before in energy history [ 15 , 33 ].

The CSP stations have been in use since the early 1980s and are currently found all over the world. The CSP power stations in the USA currently produce >800 MW of electricity yearly, which is sufficient to power ~500 000 houses. New CSP heat-transfer fluids being developed can function at ~1288 o C, which is greater than existing fluids, to improve the efficiency of CSP systems and, as a result, to lower the cost of energy generated using this technology. Thus, as a result, CSP is considered to have a bright future, with the ability to offer large-scale renewable energy that can supplement and soon replace traditional electricity-production technologies [ 41 ]. The DESERTEC project has drawn out the possibility of CSP in the Sahara Desert regions. When completed, this investment project will have the world’s biggest energy-generation capacity through the CSP plant, which aims to transport energy from North Africa to Europe [ 42 , 43 ].

The costs of manufacturing materials for PV devices have recently decreased, which is predicted to compensate for the requirements and increase the globe’s electricity demand [ 44 ]. Solar energy is a renewable, clean and environmentally friendly source of energy. Therefore, solar PV application techniques should be widely utilized. Although PV technology has always been under development for a variety of purposes, the fact that PV solar cells convert the radiant energy from the Sun directly into electrical power means it can be applied in space and in terrestrial applications [ 38 , 45 ].

In one way or another, the whole renewable-energy sector has a benefit over other energy industries. A long-term energy development plan needs an energy source that is inexhaustible, virtually accessible and simple to gather. The Sun rises over the horizon every day around the globe and leaves behind ~108–1018 kWh of energy; consequently, it is more than humanity will ever require to fulfil its desire for electricity [ 46 ].

The technology that converts solar radiation into electricity is well known and utilizes PV cells, which are already in use worldwide. In addition, various solar PV technologies are available today, including hybrid solar cells, inorganic solar cells and organic solar cells. So far, solar PV devices made from silicon have led the solar market; however, these PVs have certain drawbacks, such as expenditure of material, time-consuming production, etc. It is important to mention here the operational challenges of solar energy in that it does not work at night, has less output in cloudy weather and does not work in sandstorm conditions. PV battery storage is widely used to reduce the challenges to gain high reliability. Therefore, attempts have been made to find alternative materials to address these constraints. Currently, this domination is challenged by the evolution of the emerging generation of solar PV devices based on perovskite, organic and organic/inorganic hybrid materials.

This paper highlights the significance of sustainable energy development. Solar energy would help steady energy prices and give numerous social, environmental and economic benefits. This has been indicated by solar energy’s contribution to achieving sustainable development through meeting energy demands, creating jobs and protecting the environment. Hence, a paramount critical component of long-term sustainability should be investigated. Based on the current condition of fossil-fuel resources, which are deemed to be depleting energy sources, finding an innovative technique to deploy clean-energy technology is both essential and expected. Notwithstanding, solar energy has yet to reach maturity in development, especially CSP technology. Also, with growing developments in PV systems, there has been a huge rise in demand for PV technology applications all over the globe. Further work needs to be undertaken to develop energy sustainably and consider other clean energy resources. Moreover, a comprehensive experimental and validation process for such applications is required to develop cleaner energy sources to decarbonize our planet.

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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The world’s energy problem

The world faces two energy problems: most of our energy still produces greenhouse gas emissions, and hundreds of millions lack access to energy..

The world lacks safe, low-carbon, and cheap large-scale energy alternatives to fossil fuels. Until we scale up those alternatives the world will continue to face the two energy problems of today. The energy problem that receives most attention is the link between energy access and greenhouse gas emissions. But the world has another global energy problem that is just as big: hundreds of millions of people lack access to sufficient energy entirely, with terrible consequences to themselves and the environment.

The problem that dominates the public discussion on energy is climate change. A climate crisis endangers the natural environment around us, our wellbeing today and the wellbeing of those who come after us.

It is the production of energy that is responsible for 87% of global greenhouse gas emissions and as the chart below shows, people in the richest countries have the very highest emissions.

This chart here will guide us through the discussion of the world's energy problem. It shows the per capita CO2 emissions on the vertical axis against the average income in that country on the horizontal axis.

In countries where people have an average income between $15,000 and $20,000, per capita CO 2 emissions are close to the global average ( 4.8 tonnes CO 2 per year). In every country where people's average income is above $25,000 the average emissions per capita are higher than the global average.

The world’s CO 2 emissions have been rising quickly and reached 36.6 billion tonnes in 2018 . As long as we are emitting greenhouse gases their concentration in the atmosphere increases . To bring climate change to an end the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere needs to stabilize and to achieve this the world’s greenhouse gas emissions have to decline towards net-zero.

To bring emissions down towards net-zero will be one of the world’s biggest challenges in the years ahead. But the world’s energy problem is actually even larger than that, because the world has not one, but two energy problems.

The twin problems of global energy

The first energy problem: those that have low carbon emissions lack access to energy.

The first global energy problem relates to the left-hand side of the scatter-plot above.

People in very poor countries have very low emissions. On average, people in the US emit more carbon dioxide in 4 days than people in poor countries – such as Ethiopia, Uganda, or Malawi – emit in an entire year. 1

The reason that the emissions of the poor are low is that they lack access to modern energy and technology. The energy problem of the poorer half of the world is energy poverty . The two charts below show that large shares of people in countries with a GDP per capita of less than $25,000 do not have access to electricity and clean cooking fuels. 2

The lack of access to these technologies causes some of the worst global problems of our time.

When people lack access to modern energy sources for cooking and heating, they rely on solid fuel sources – mostly firewood, but also dung and crop waste. This comes at a massive cost to the health of people in energy poverty: indoor air pollution , which the WHO calls "the world's largest single environmental health risk." 3 For the poorest people in the world it is the largest risk factor for early death and global health research suggests that indoor air pollution is responsible for 1.6 million deaths each year, twice the death count of poor sanitation. 4

The use of wood as a source of energy also has a negative impact on the environment around us. The reliance on fuelwood is the reason why poverty is linked to deforestation. The FAO reports that on the African continent the reliance on wood as fuel is the single most important driver of forest degradation. 5 Across East, Central, and West Africa fuelwood provides more than half of the total energy. 6

Lastly, the lack of access to energy subjects people to a life in poverty. No electricity means no refrigeration of food; no washing machine or dishwasher; and no light at night. You might have seen the photos of children sitting under a street lamp at night to do their homework. 7

The first energy problem of the world is the problem of energy poverty – those that do not have sufficient access to modern energy sources suffer poor living conditions as a result.

The second energy problem: those that have access to energy produce greenhouse gas emissions that are too high

The second energy problem is the one that is more well known, and relates to the right hand-side of the scatterplot above: greenhouse gas emissions are too high.

Those that need to reduce emissions the most are the extremely rich. Diana Ivanova and Richard Wood (2020) have just shown that the richest 1% in the EU emit on average 43 tonnes of CO 2 annually – 9-times as much as the global average of 4.8 tonnes. 8

The focus on the rich, however, can give the impression that it is only the emissions of the extremely rich that are the problem. What isn’t made clear enough in the public debate is that for the world's energy supply to be sustainable the greenhouse gas emissions of the majority of the world population are currently too high. The problem is larger for the extremely rich, but it isn’t limited to them.

The Paris Agreement's goal is to keep the increase of the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and “to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C”. 9

To achieve this goal emissions have to decline to net-zero within the coming decades.

Within richer countries, where few are suffering from energy poverty, even the emissions of the very poorest people are far higher. The paper by Ivanova and Wood shows that in countries like Germany, Ireland, and Greece more than 99% of households have per capita emissions of more than 2.4 tonnes per year.

The only countries that have emissions that are close to zero are those where the majority suffers from energy poverty. 10 The countries that are closest are the very poorest countries in Africa : Malawi, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But this comes at a large cost to themselves as this chart shows. In no poor country do people have living standards that are comparable to those of people in richer countries.

And since living conditions are better where GDP per capita is higher, it is also the case that CO 2 emissions are higher where living conditions are better. Emissions are high where child mortality is the lowest , where children have good access to education, and where few of them suffer from hunger .

The reason for this is that as soon as people get access to energy from fossil fuels their emissions are too high to be sustainable over the long run (see here ).

People need access to energy for a good life. But in a world where fossil fuels are the dominant source of energy, access to modern energy means that carbon emissions are too high.

The more accurate description of the second global energy problem is therefore: the majority of the world population – all those who are not very poor – have greenhouse gas emissions that are far too high to be sustainable over the long run.

The current alternatives are energy poverty or fossil-fuels and greenhouse gases

The chart here is a version of the scatter plot above and summarizes the two global energy problems: In purple are those that live in energy poverty, in blue those whose greenhouse gas emissions are too high if we want to avoid severe climate change.

So far I have looked at the global energy problem in a static way, but the world is changing  of course.

For millennia all of our ancestors lived in the pink bubble: the reliance on wood meant they suffered from indoor air pollution; the necessity of acquiring fuelwood and agricultural land meant deforestation; and minimal technology meant that our ancestors lived in conditions of extreme poverty.

In the last two centuries more and more people have moved from the purple to the blue area in the chart. In many ways this is a very positive development. Economic growth and increased access to modern energy improved people's living conditions. In rich countries almost no one dies from indoor air pollution and living conditions are much better in many ways as we've seen above. It also meant that we made progress against the ecological downside of energy poverty: The link between poverty and the reliance on fuelwood is one of the key reasons why deforestation declines with economic growth. 11 And progress in that direction has been fast: on any average day in the last decade 315,000 people in the world got access to electricity for the first time in their life.

But while living conditions improved, greenhouse gas emissions increased.

The chart shows what this meant for greenhouse gas emissions over the last generation. The chart is a version of the scatter plot above, but it shows the change over time – from 1990 to the latest available data.

The data is now also plotted on log-log scales which has the advantage that you can see the rates of change easily. On a logarithmic axis the steepness of the line corresponds to the rate of change. What the chart shows is that low- and middle-income countries increased their emissions at very similar rates.

By default the chart shows the change of income and emission for the 14 countries that are home to more than 100 million people, but you can add other countries to the chart.

What has been true in the past two decades will be true in the future. For the poorer three-quarters of the world income growth means catching up with the good living conditions of the richer world, but unless there are cheap alternatives to fossil fuels it also means catching up with the high emissions of the richer world.

Our challenge: find large-scale energy alternatives to fossil fuels that are affordable, safe and sustainable

The task for our generation is therefore twofold: since the majority of the world still lives in poor conditions, we have to continue to make progress in our fight against energy poverty. But success in this fight will only translate into good living conditions for today’s young generation when we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the same time.

Key to making progress on both of these fronts is the source of energy and its price . Those living in energy poverty cannot afford sufficient energy and those that left the worst poverty behind rely on fossil fuels to meet their energy needs.

Once we look at it this way it becomes clear that the twin energy problems are really the two sides of one big problem. We lack large-scale energy alternatives to fossil fuels that are cheap, safe, and sustainable.

This last version of the scatter plot shows what it would mean to have such energy sources at scale. It would allow the world to leave the unsustainable current alternatives behind and make the transition to the bottom right corner of the chart: the area marked with the green rectangle where emissions are net-zero and everyone has left energy poverty behind.

Without these technologies we are trapped in a world where we have only bad alternatives: Low-income countries that fail to meet the needs of the current generation; high-income countries that compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs; and middle-income countries that fail on both counts.

Since we have not developed all the technologies that are required to make this transition possible large scale innovation is required for the world to make this transition. This is the case for most sectors that cause carbon emissions , in particular in the transport (shipping, aviation, road transport) and heating sectors, but also cement production and agriculture.

One sector where we have developed several alternatives to fossil fuels is electricity. Nuclear power and renewables emit far less carbon (and are much safer) than fossil fuels. Still, as the last chart shows, their share in global electricity production hasn't changed much: only increasing from 36% to 38% in the last three decades.

But it is possible to do better. Some countries have scaled up nuclear power and renewables and are doing much better than the global average. You can see this if you change the chart to show the data for France and Sweden – in France 92% of electricity comes from low carbon sources, in Sweden it is 99%. The consequence of countries doing better in this respect should be that they are closer to the sustainable energy world of the future. The scatter plot above shows that this is the case.

But for the global energy supply – especially outside the electricity sector – the world is still far away from a solution to the world's energy problem.

Every country is still very far away from providing clean, safe, and affordable energy at a massive scale and unless we make rapid progress in developing these technologies we will remain stuck in the two unsustainable alternatives of today: energy poverty or greenhouse gas emissions.

As can be seen from the chart, the ratio of emissions is 17.49t / 0.2t = 87.45. And 365 days/87.45=4.17 days

It is worth looking into the cutoffs for what it means – according to these international statistics – to have access to energy. The cutoffs are low.

See Raising Global Energy Ambitions: The 1,000 kWh Modern Energy Minimum and IEA (2020) – Defining energy access: 2020 methodology, IEA, Paris.

WHO (2014) – Frequently Asked Questions – Ambient and Household Air Pollution and Health . Update 2014

While it is certain that the death toll of indoor air pollution is high, there are widely differing estimates. At the higher end of the spectrum, the WHO estimates a death count of more than twice that. We discuss it in our entry on indoor air pollution .

The 2018 estimate for premature deaths due to poor sanitation is from the same analysis, the Global Burden of Disease study. See here .

FAO and UNEP. 2020. The State of the World’s Forests 2020. Forests, biodiversity and people. Rome. https://doi.org/10.4060/ca8642en

The same report also reports that an estimated 880 million people worldwide are collecting fuelwood or producing charcoal with it.

This is according to the IEA's World Energy Balances 2020. Here is a visualization of the data.

The second largest energy source across the three regions is oil and the third is gas.

The photo shows students study under the streetlights at Conakry airport in Guinea. It was taken by Rebecca Blackwell for the Associated Press.

It was published by the New York Times here .

The global average is 4.8 tonnes per capita . The richest 1% of individuals in the EU emit 43 tonnes per capita – according to Ivanova D, Wood R (2020). The unequal distribution of household carbon footprints in Europe and its link to sustainability. Global Sustainability 3, e18, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2020.12

On Our World in Data my colleague Hannah Ritchie has looked into a related question and also found that the highest emissions are concentrated among a relatively small share of the global population: High-income countries are home to only 16% of the world population, yet they are responsible for almost half (46%) of the world’s emissions.

Article 2 of the Paris Agreement states the goal in section 1a: “Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.”

It is an interesting question whether there are some subnational regions in richer countries where a larger group of people has extremely low emissions; it might possibly be the case in regions that rely on nuclear energy or renewables (likely hydro power) or where aforestation is happening rapidly.

Crespo Cuaresma, J., Danylo, O., Fritz, S. et al. Economic Development and Forest Cover: Evidence from Satellite Data. Sci Rep 7, 40678 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep40678

Bruce N, Rehfuess E, Mehta S, et al. Indoor Air Pollution. In: Jamison DT, Breman JG, Measham AR, et al., editors. Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries. 2nd edition. Washington (DC): The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank; 2006. Chapter 42. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11760/ Co-published by Oxford University Press, New York.

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• Inside Clean Energy

Solar Panel Prices Are Low Again. Here’s Who’s Winning and Losing

Whether for utility-scale or rooftop projects, photovoltaic panels are cheaper than ever..

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First-in-the-Nation Geothermal Heating and Cooling System Comes to Massachusetts

California Regulators Approve Community Solar Decision Opposed by Solar Advocates

Toyota Opens a ‘Megasite’ for EV Batteries in a Struggling N.C. Community, Fueled by Biden’s IRA

For decades, one of the near-constants in the shift to renewable energy was that solar panel prices were decreasing.

This downward curve hit a bump in 2020. Global prices began to rise, largely due to supply disruptions resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the time, analysts said the price increases likely were a short-term phenomenon as the supply adjusted to meet demand. Now we can say conclusively that those analysts were correct. Prices have gone down, and down, and down.

I set out this week to understand the reasons for the price fluctuations and get an idea of who stands to benefit as prices fall.

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Inexpensive panels are good for developers and consumers because projects cost less. But businesses that make and sell panels are having a rough time, especially those that had a lot of inventory left over from when prices were higher.

Global panel prices are now at all-time lows due to a glut of supply and improvements in the efficiency of manufacturing.

However, there is a large gap between the prices in the U.S. and globally because of U.S. trade policy.

As of last week, the average price was 11 cents per watt for photovoltaic panels, which is a global price, largely based on the market of the leading producer, China, according to BloombergNEF. The average price for panels in the United States was 31 cents per watt.

“P.V. module prices are much higher in the U.S. because, since 2012, the U.S. has essentially barred cheap, best-in-class modules from China from entering the U.S. market with prohibitively high tariffs,” said Pol Lezcano, a solar analyst at BloombergNEF.

He expects global and U.S. prices to continue to decline, with the substantial caveat that this outlook will change if the Biden administration announces new tariffs.

At the height of the 2021 price increase, panels coming from China sold for 28 cents per watt and panels in the United States sold for 38 cents per watt. 

Another dynamic is technological change, as a recent chemical formulation for polysilicon panels has taken hold in the market. The newer “TOPCon” panels have a higher efficiency than the old “PERC” panels, without much of a difference in price. Higher efficiency in this case means a panel can produce more electricity per unit of surface area.

The shift to TOPCon has meant that some companies with large stocks of PERC panels are having the equivalent of a clearance sale. (For more on the two panel technologies, this Solar Power World article by Kelly Pickerel is helpful .)

Any discussion of solar prices in the United States quickly turns into a talk about trade policy, and how the Biden administration’s strategy for clean energy jobs is sometimes at odds with its climate strategy. 

The Inflation Reduction Act, the administration’s landmark clean energy law, has incentives that aim to boost domestic manufacturing of solar panels. Biden wants to increase manufacturing jobs and make the United States less dependent on imports from Asia. Since the law took effect, manufacturing capacity at operating and announced plants has grown to 125 gigawatts of solar panels per year, up from 7 gigawatts per year before the law , according to the White House.

The administration also wants to dramatically increase the country’s use of renewable energy as part of a plan to reduce emissions and avoid the worst effects of climate change. This goal is much more feasible if solar panels are inexpensive and tariffs are minimal.

Last month, the administration announced actions to strengthen solar tariffs , including allowing the expiration of a 24-month pause in tariffs for panels imported from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. A previous investigation found that some companies had been circumventing tariffs on Chinese solar panels by shipping them to those four countries and then on to the United States.

U.S. officials also reversed a Trump administration order that said bifacial—or double-sided—solar panels were exempt from tariffs that mainly apply to manufacturers in China.

The administration is considering additional tariffs that would try to counteract the dumping of low-cost solar panels into the global market by companies in Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. This would be on top of the now-unpaused tariffs that are for other violations of trade rules.

The Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group, said it is “deeply concerned” about the potential for new tariffs to add to instability at a time when solar companies are already adapting to a lot of change.

So far, the issues I’m describing apply mostly to utility-scale solar, in which large companies buy and sell millions of panels and are sensitive to even the smallest changes in panel prices.

To get an idea of how the price swings are affecting rooftop solar, I spoke with Spencer Fields of EnergySage, a company that runs a consumer-focused website and also has an online marketplace for rooftop solar and energy storage.

“We’re seeing prices come down pretty much across the board,” he said, referring to the hundreds of thousands of bid prices on his site’s marketplace.

One reason for the price decrease, other than falling prices for panels themselves, is that the supply of installers and equipment for rooftop solar has grown to the point that it is outpacing demand from customers who are ready to buy, he said. Competition among installers is helping to push prices lower.

High interest rates also are a big issue, for the people buying systems and for the companies that install them.

“The majority of people who invest in solar ultimately end up financing it through a loan,” Fields said. “Given the current interest rate environment and where mortgage rates are, people are less inclined to finance these big purchases than they were when it was much cheaper to borrow money.”

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The cost of a solar project varies a lot based on the size. Large utility-scale projects have costs per watt that are roughly one-fourth the costs of per watt of a typical residential rooftop project, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Despite all of those differences, all types of solar photovoltaic projects have costs that are moving in the same direction: down.

For now, I’m going to say this is a good thing, or at least the positive ramifications of cheap solar outweigh the negative ones for struggling solar companies.

I’m watching to see how this market will swing into balance and whether we can ever get to an equilibrium of affordable solar provided by companies that are financially sustainable.

Other stories about the energy transition to take note of this week:

The World Is Not on Track to Hit the Target of Tripling Renewable Energy Generation by 2030: Countries have not taken the actions necessary to meet the goal of tripling renewable energy generation by 2030, according to an analysis of national policies by the International Energy Agency, as Fiona Harvey reports for The Guardian . “The tripling target is ambitious but achievable—though only if governments quickly turn promises into plans of action,” said Fatih Birol, the executive director of the IEA, in a statement. Governments agreed last December at COP28 to pursue the goal as part of an attempt to avoid the most harmful effects of climate change. 

U.S. Utilities Are Slow to Embrace Grid Enhancing Technologies: Operators of transmission lines and other grid hardware have many tools available to boost the capacity of existing infrastructure, but U.S. companies have been slow to try these technologies, as Peter Behr reports for E&E News . The catch-all term for these tools is “grid-enhancing technologies,” which can include sensors, software and cables. The Biden administration and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission have taken steps to increase the use of the technologies, but they are running into reluctance from utility companies that have track records of taking a while to warm up to new ways of doing things.

As Solar Power Surges, U.S. Wind Is in Trouble: The Inflation Reduction Act contains incentives to encourage construction of solar, wind and other carbon-free electricity sources. So far, solar power has grown a lot while wind power is now growing less than before the law was passed, as Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich report for The New York Times . The story looks at data showing wind’s tepid growth and explains some reasons why onshore and offshore wind are having problems, including financial challenges and a slow regulatory process for offshore wind.

The Chevrolet Equinox EV Is Exactly What the Market Needs: Positive reviews are coming in for the Chevrolet Equinox EV, a new model that has begun arriving at dealerships. Patrick George of InsideEVs declares the model to be a “home run” with its combination of 300-plus miles of range and pricing in the mid-$30,000 range. Carlos Lago of Car and Driver writes that the Equinox EV “appears to be the kind of electric vehicle most people want.” He found that the vehicle’s outstanding range is a strong selling point, while he was critical of its “lazy acceleration” and inadequate storage space. I see these early reviews as a good sign for General Motors, which needs a strong seller as competition in the EV market grows much more intense.

Toyota Opens a ‘Megasite’ for EV Batteries in a Struggling N.C. Community, Fueled by Biden’s IRA: Toyota’s massive investment in North Carolina to build a battery plant is contributing to an economic revitalization of the area, as Nicole Norman reports for ICN . The community has ramped up job training programs to help to prepare residents for the thousands of jobs anticipated at the plant.

Inside Clean Energy  is ICN’s weekly bulletin of news and analysis about the energy transition. Send news tips and questions to  [email protected] .

Dan Gearino

Reporter, clean energy.

Dan Gearino covers the midwestern United States, part of ICN’s National Environment Reporting Network. His coverage deals with the business side of the clean-energy transition and he writes ICN’s Inside Clean Energy newsletter. He came to ICN in 2018 after a nine-year tenure at The Columbus Dispatch, where he covered the business of energy. Before that, he covered politics and business in Iowa and in New Hampshire. He grew up in Warren County, Iowa, just south of Des Moines, and lives in Columbus, Ohio.

• @DanGearino
• [email protected]

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The global energy crisis

• Executive summary

Key findings

• An updated roadmap to Net Zero Emissions by 2050
• Energy security in energy transitions
• Outlook for energy demand
• Outlook for electricity
• Outlook for liquid fuels
• Outlook for gaseous fuels
• Outlook for solid fuels

Cite report

IEA (2022), World Energy Outlook 2022 , IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2022, Licence: CC BY 4.0 (report); CC BY NC SA 4.0 (Annex A)

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Introduction.

The world is in the middle of a global energy crisis of unprecedented depth and complexity. Europe is at the centre of this crisis, but it is having major implications for markets, policies and economies worldwide. As so often is the case, the poorest and most vulnerable are likely to suffer most. The strains did not begin with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but they have been sharply exacerbated by it. Extraordinarily high prices are sparking a reappraisal of energy policies and priorities. The Europe-Russia energy relationship lies in tatters, calling into question the viability of decades of fossil fuel infrastructure and investment decisions built on this foundation. A profound reorientation of international energy trade is underway, bringing new market risks even as it addresses longstanding vulnerabilities.

Many of the contours of this new world are not yet fully defined, but there is no going back to the way things were. And we know from past energy crises that the process of adjustment is unlikely to be a smooth one. That adjustment will also be taking place in the context of commitments made by governments to clean energy transitions. A central theme of this World Energy Outlook 2022 is how the levers of technological change and innovation, trade and investment and behavioural shifts might drive a secure transition towards a net zero emissions energy system, while minimising the potential risks and trade-offs between various policy objectives.

• The recovery in global energy consumption that followed the pandemic-induced drop in 2020 ended prematurely with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, plunging global energy markets into turmoil, stoking inflationary pressures and slowing economic growth. The strains on markets did not begin with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but they have been sharply exacerbated by it. This has led to volatility and steep spikes in energy prices, particularly for natural gas in European markets, and the menace of further disruption to supply looms large. Amid this turmoil, growth in renewables has held up well.
• The crisis has shattered energy relationships with Russia built on the assumption of trust and secure supplies, and led to a reappraisal of energy security needs in many countries. This is leading to a recasting of the energy trade and investment landscape in profound ways. It has already prompted a host of measures aimed at strengthening energy security, including support to build domestic production capability in key sectors.
• One key question is whether today’s crisis will lead to acceleration in energy transitions, or whether a combination of economic turmoil and short-term policy choices will slow momentum. On the one hand, high fossil fuel prices and record levels of emissions offer strong reasons to move away from reliance on these fuels or to use them more efficiently. On the other, energy security concerns may spur renewed investments in fossil fuel supply and infrastructure. This Outlook considers the implications of different policy choices.
• Today’s energy crisis shares some parallels with the 1970s oil price shocks, but there are also important differences. The crises in the 1970s were concentrated in oil markets and the global economy was much more dependent on oil than it is today. However, the intensity of use of other fossil fuels has not declined to the same extent; for natural gas it has risen in many cases. The global nature of the current crisis, its spread across all fossil fuels and the knock-on effects on electricity prices are all warning signs of broader economic impacts.
• Governments made a host of commitments to sustainability in the run-up to the COP26 meeting in Glasgow in 2021, and these remain the bedrock for many energy strategies. In some cases, these ambitions have now been reinforced by new measures seeking to reinforce long-term energy security and accelerate energy transitions, including the US Inflation Reduction Act and the REPowerEU Plan. The total amount of government spending committed to clean energy transitions since the start of the pandemic amounts to USD 1.1 trillion.
• Near-term borrowing costs are likely to rise as monetary policy tightens in many countries. This could disadvantage some clean energy projects for which financing costs play a major role in levelised costs. Nonetheless, clean technologies remain the most cost-efficient option for new power generation in many countries, even before taking account of the exceptionally high prices seen in 2022 for coal and gas.
• This Outlook explores three scenarios – fully updated – that provide a framework for thinking about the future of energy and exploring the implications of various policy choices, investment trends and technology dynamics. The scenarios, which should not be considered as IEA forecasts, are:
• Stated Policies Scenario , which looks not at what governments say they will achieve, but at what they are actually doing to achieve the targets and objectives they have set out, and assesses where this leads the energy sector.
• Announced Pledges Scenario, which examines where all current announced energy and climate commitments – including net zero emissions pledges as well as commitments in areas such as energy access – would take the energy sector if implemented in full and on time.
• Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario , which maps out a way to achieve a 1.5 °C stabilisation in global average temperature and meet key energy-related UN Sustainable Development Goals.
• Rising demand for energy services to 2040 is underpinned by economic growth, which is lower to 2030 than in last year’s Outlook but which averages 2.8% per year through to 2050. The world’s population rises from 7.8 billion people in 2021 to 9.7 billion in 2050, an increase of almost one-quarter. These economic and demographic assumptions are kept constant across the various scenarios, while energy and climate policies, technology costs and prices vary.
• Cost pressures are being felt across the energy sector from persistent strains on supply chains and from higher prices for critical minerals and essential construction materials such as cement and steel. We expect recent rises in clean technology costs to be temporary, and to recede in the face of the forces of innovation and improvements in manufacturing and installation processes. Current trends are, however, prompting governments to pay closer attention to the resilience and diversity of clean energy supply chains, which cannot be taken for granted.
• Today’s exceptionally high fossil fuel prices are projected to ease as economies slow and markets rebalance, although natural gas markets remain tight for several years as Europe competes for available LNG cargoes to compensate for curtailed Russian supply. The speed of adjustment and the longer-term price trajectories differ by scenario, depending on the strength of policy action to curb demand. 
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Essay on Solar Panel

Students are often asked to write an essay on Solar Panel in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Solar Panel

What are solar panels.

Solar panels are devices that convert sunlight into electricity. They are made of small units called solar cells. These cells are made from materials that can absorb light.

How do Solar Panels Work?

When sunlight hits a solar cell, it causes the cell to produce an electric current. This current is used to power electrical devices and to charge batteries.

Benefits of Solar Panels

Solar panels are a renewable source of energy. They do not produce harmful emissions, which helps to protect the environment. They can also save money on electricity bills.

Also check:

• Advantages and Disadvantages of Solar Panel
• Speech on Solar Panel

250 Words Essay on Solar Panel

Introduction to solar panels.

Solar panels, also known as photovoltaic panels, are devices that convert sunlight into electricity. They are a cornerstone of sustainable energy solutions, offering a renewable and abundant source of power.

Working Mechanism

Solar panels work through the photovoltaic effect, where sunlight photons knock electrons free from atoms, generating a flow of electricity. The panels are made of many smaller units called photovoltaic cells, each made of semiconductor materials, typically silicon.

Types of Solar Panels

There are three primary types of solar panels: monocrystalline, polycrystalline, and thin-film. Monocrystalline panels are the most efficient, but also the most expensive. Polycrystalline panels offer a balance of cost and efficiency, while thin-film panels are the least expensive but also the least efficient.

Benefits and Challenges

Solar panels provide numerous benefits, including reducing greenhouse gas emissions and decreasing reliance on fossil fuels. They can also offer significant cost savings over time. However, they also present challenges such as initial installation costs, intermittent energy production, and the need for a suitable installation location.

Future of Solar Panels

The future of solar panels is promising, with advancements in technology continually increasing their efficiency and reducing their cost. Furthermore, the integration of solar panels with battery storage systems is expected to overcome the issue of intermittency, making solar power a more reliable energy source.

In conclusion, solar panels represent a significant step towards a sustainable future. Despite the challenges, their potential for clean, renewable energy generation is undeniable.

500 Words Essay on Solar Panel

Introduction.

Solar panels, also known as photovoltaic (PV) panels, are devices that convert sunlight into usable electricity. They have emerged as a vital solution to the energy crisis, offering an environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuels. This essay delves into the mechanism, benefits, and challenges of solar panels, offering a comprehensive understanding of this critical technology.

The Mechanism of Solar Panels

Solar panels operate based on the photovoltaic effect, a process that generates a flow of electricity when materials absorb photons. Each solar panel consists of a collection of solar cells made from semiconductors, typically silicon. When sunlight strikes these cells, it knocks electrons loose from their atoms. As these electrons flow through the cell, they generate electricity. This direct current (DC) is then converted into alternating current (AC) via an inverter for use in homes and businesses.

Solar energy is renewable, abundant, and available in most geographical locations, making it a sustainable solution for energy needs. Solar panels reduce greenhouse gas emissions by minimizing reliance on fossil fuels, thereby mitigating climate change. Economically, solar panels offer a cost-effective energy solution in the long run. They can significantly reduce or even eliminate electricity bills. Moreover, advancements in technology and economies of scale have led to a substantial decrease in the cost of solar panels, making them more accessible.

Challenges and Solutions

Despite their numerous benefits, solar panels also present challenges. Their efficiency can be affected by weather conditions, geographical location, and the angle of installation. However, technological advancements are helping to overcome these limitations. For instance, the advent of solar tracking systems maximizes solar energy capture by adjusting the panel’s angle based on the sun’s position. Additionally, energy storage systems, like advanced batteries, can store excess solar energy for use during cloudy days or at night.

Another challenge is the high initial cost of installation. Governments and private organizations are addressing this through subsidies and financing options, making solar energy more affordable. Furthermore, research is underway to develop more cost-effective materials and designs for solar cells.

Solar panels are a pivotal technology in the transition towards sustainable energy. They offer a viable solution to the global energy crisis and climate change, despite the challenges associated with their efficiency and initial costs. With continued advancements in technology and supportive policies, solar panels can play a significant role in shaping a sustainable and environmentally friendly future.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

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Essay On Solar Energy

500 words essay on  solar energy.

Solar energy refers to the energy which the sunlight contains in the form of photons. It is not possible for life on earth to exist without solar energy .  All kinds of microorganisms and single-celled organisms came into existence with solar energy’s help. Plants have been using this energy ever since the beginning. Thus, through essay on solar energy, we will study about it in detail.

Methods of Using Solar Energy

We can trap solar energy in a lot of ways. One of the most efficient ways to do this is by using solar power plants. The design of these power plants is such that it helps to produce electricity on a larger level.

Other appliances which work on solar energy are solar cookers, solar heaters and solar cells. The solar cookers are said to be the most innovative methods of cooking nowadays. It is a great alternative to conventional fuels like gas, kerosene and wood .

These cookers are eco-friendly and also inexpensive means of cooking. Further, we have solar heaters which help to heat water using solar energy. Thus, it does not require electricity to heat water.

Finally, we have solar cells. They operate by directly converting solar light into electricity. In areas where supply from power grid is less available, solar cells are quite popular.

Similarly, a lot of calculators, wrist watch and other similar systems operate with this technology. The electricity which solar panels produce also stores in rechargeable solar batteries.

Advantages of Solar Energy

A major advantage of solar energy is that it is a renewable source. Thus, it will be available to use as long as the Sun is present. In other words, for another 5 billion years. As a result, everyone can use it abundantly.

Further, using solar energy can assist in reducing our electricity bills. When we use this energy, we will become less dependent on non-renewable sources of energy like petroleum and coal .

Moreover, we can utilize solar energy for a lot of purposes. One can produce electricity as well as heat. We use this energy in regions where we won’t require an electricity grid. Another advantage is that it is a clean fuel.

Using this energy will not result in pollution and thus, it won’t harm the environment. As a result, air pollution will significantly decrease. Both the government and individuals must try to promote and incorporate this energy in our daily lives.

This way, it can become the future of our world. It will make the world a greener and cleaner place as well. So, we must all try to switch to solar energy to make the world a better place.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of Essay On Solar Energy

Solar energy is the future of our upcoming generation. It is safe and a greener and economical alternative. Moreover, it can be replenished so it serves as a renewable source of energy. As a result, it does not cause pollution . Thus, we must try to use solar energy more and more to save our planet earth.

FAQ on Essay On Solar Energy

Question 1: What is the importance of solar energy?

Answer 1: Solar energy is the power from the sun. It is a vast, inexhaustible, and clean resource. We can use this energy directly to heat and light homes and businesses. Similarly, we can also produce electricity, and heat water, solar cooling, and a variety of other commercial and industrial uses.

Question 2: Is solar energy renewable energy?

Answer 2: Yes, solar energy is a renewable energy. Thus, we can use it as much as we want and benefit from it in ways more than one.

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Topics we focus on

Solutions to the energy crisis

How to achieve sustainable energy.

Identify the causes and effects of the energy crisis, but also the solutions to bring it to an end and how you can contribute.

01. Solutions

02. Definition

04. Effects

05. Prevention

Over the last two centuries, energy needs have skyrocketed dramatically, especially because of the transportation and industry sectors. However, fossil fuel are polluting and their reserves are limited.

We know today that these resources are close to exhaustion and our societies are facing a major challenge: the energy crisis.

Energy crisis solutions

The Solar Impulse Label is granted to innovative solutions to energy crisis that meet high standards of sustainability and profitability.

Each solution goes through a strict assessment process performed by independent experts.

Dynamic Agrivoltaic System

Real-time decision support for agricultural photovoltaic systems

• Utilities (Water, Energy, Waste)
• Agrifood & Natural Environment

THERMAFY HOME SURVEY

A home efficiency service and app that helps customers manage and save money on their energy consumption from heating

• Buildings & Constructions

Streem Energy Platform

A platform to help the management of data flows around renewable assets in the energy sector

Solar electric boats

An integral design approach for efficient solar electric transportation on the water

Climkit Community

Generating and distributing photovoltaic electricity within apartment buildings

Plug & Play Rollable Solar Panel

Solar blinds to reduce your carbon footprint and cut energy bills

• Industrial Processes & Consumer Goods

Energy Station Plus

A basic solar off grid access to lighting and phone charging

SEU 2/5 TDC

A co-generation photovoltaic station capable of producing both electric and thermal energy

Passive Variable Geometry

An energy conversion solution that allows efficient energy production by low-altitude (urban) blowing winds

Dendronic process

The Dendronic process uses a novel solvent to turn waste wood into inputs for the renewable chemical industry

HelioHealth

A high-tech monitoring system for solar rooftops and distributed generation systems

Anaerobic bio-digester to proceed organic waste

A waste management solution that turns organic waste to energy and fertilizers

What is the energy crisis?

The energy crisis stems from the foreseeable end of the cycle of oil, gas and coal, which, in addition, have been producing a considerable increase in greenhouse gases (GHG). In recent years, many scientists have raised their voice to warn about climate change, caused notably by the burning of oil and coal in order to produce energy.

Energy crisis causes

Global energy consumption is increasing and we will face a shortage of fossil fuels in the coming decades. Therefore, the availability of reserves is an important source of concern.

Overconsumption

Our current consumption model relies almost entirely on the use of non-renewable energy sources such as oil, gas, coal and uranium. At the current rate of consumption, oil will be the first fossil fuel to run out. According to projections, there would be between 40 and 60 years of proven reserves of conventional oil. Natural gas could be exploited for another 70 years. For coal, there would be around two centuries of reserves.

Overpopulation

These data are to be put into perspective because they are based on current consumption, while it is clear that it will increase considerably. Energy demands are and will be amplified by the demographic - the world’s population should reach nearly 10 billion people in 2050 - and economic boom of growing areas. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global energy demand could increase by more than 50% by 2030 in the absence of public policies in this area.

Aging infrastructure

Another reason for energy shortage and scarcity is the poor infrastructure of power generating equipment. Most of energy producing companies keep on using outdated equipments that limits energy production. The need to upgrade the infrastructure and set a high standard of performance is critical.

Energy waste

Mainly coming from the unnecessary use of energy resources, energy waste describes the wastage of energy sources, in particular fuels and electricity. Consequently, the reduction of waste is a colossal source of energy savings, which requires actions both on an individual and collective level.

Energy crisis effects

Environmental

The massive use of traditional energy sources leads - among other things - to the increase of greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide (CO2), resulting in global warming and harming the environment and biodiversity. Therefore, the energy crisis is closely linked to the environmental crisis.

Economic and socio-political

Energy security is one of the major concerns of the main economic centers of the planet. In fact, energy conditions the possibility of growth, which is essential to the market economy and its development model. The energy crisis could thus have a dramatic impact on the global economy. Besides, when energy markets fail, an energy shortage develops. Energy shortages and resulting economic factors may create socio-political issues.

Energy crisis prevention

The good news is that there are ways to reduce the energy crisis :

1. Energy transition to renewable energy sources

Unlike fossil fuels, some energy sources are totally renewable, and do not emit greenhouse gases. These clean and sustainable alternative energy solutions include solar energy , hydropower , wind energy, geothermal energy and biomass energy .

2. Energy efficiency and conservation

In order to prevent an energy crisis, it is also crucial that we consume less energy by improving and modernising energy infrastructure such as smart grid solutions , and smart cities . It is also important that we replace old devices by energy efficient solutions, such as replacing traditional light bulbs by LEDs.

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7 energy and climate good-news stories to give you hope

Recent positive energy trends can allow us to be optimistic heading into the future. Image:  Unsplash/Karsten Würth

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} Johnny Wood

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• 2023 was a tough year for the planet, with nine consecutive months of hottest-ever temperatures.
• However, as the energy transition evolves there are reasons for optimism.
• The World Economic Forum’s Energy Transition Index 2024 shows positive readiness trends for several key energy transition enablers.

Are you concerned about the climate crisis?

If so, you’re not alone. Within the last year we’ve seen a string of 11 consecutive “hottest-ever” months , and temperature “firsts” continue to hit media headlines.

While there is still time to limit global emissions to within 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels , the window of opportunity is closing fast, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

But as the transition to a low- or no-carbon future gains momentum, several bright spots are appearing on the horizon.

As part of the World Economic Forum’s Fostering Effective Energy Transition 2023 report, the energy transition index (ETI) shows a positive energy transition readiness trend for key enablers, such as regulation, infrastructure and financial investment. These enablers help provide the framework for a successful transition to clean energy.

Here are 7 other reasons to feel optimistic about the future of energy and the environment.

1. 'Spectacular' global renewables growth in 2023

Global renewable energy capacity hit 50% growth in 2023 , its fastest growth rate for twenty years. Renewable capacity is on course to increase by 2.5 times by the end of the decade, keeping a key COP28 climate target of tripling renewable capacity within reach.

Rapid growth in China’s solar industry was the main driver, while Europe, the US and Brazil also achieved impressive renewable energy growth.

Have you read?

4 technologies that are accelerating the green hydrogen revolution, this is how the mena region can accelerate its renewable energy production, the trilemma facing the energy industry and how it's dealing with it , 2. eu parliament: new directive criminalizes eco-destruction.

The European Union has voted to criminalize the most serious cases of ecosystem destruction , becoming the first international body to do so.

Crimes “comparable to ecocide” including habitat loss and illegal logging, can be hit with tough penalties and prison sentences under the EU Parliament's updated environmental crime directive. The bloc’s member states have a two-year period to adopt the directive into national law.

3. Seven countries now powered by 100% renewables

As global wind generation capacity increases, seven countries are now fully reliant on clean renewable energy for their power needs .

Albania, Bhutan, Ethiopia, Iceland, Nepal, Paraguay and the Democratic Republic of Congo generate more than 99.7% of their electricity needs from geothermal, hydro-electricity, solar or wind power.

4. Two-fold increase in government policies tackling deforestation and nature

The number of nature-based policy announcements from governments around the world has doubled in the past year, a study by the Inevitable Policy Response forecasting group says .

However, more than 90% of nature policies introduced in 2023 were in-line with the 2℃ warming target, rather than the 1.5℃ climate goal.

5. World’s largest offshore wind farm at full capacity

With 165 turbines harvesting wind power in an area of the North Sea equal in size to 64,000 soccer pitches, the world’s largest offshore wind farm, Hornsea 2, is operating at full capacity .

Located almost 90 kilometres from the UK’s Yorkshire coastline, the wind farm’s total generating capacity of 1,300MW can supply enough clean energy to power 1.4 million homes in the UK each year.

6. European Court finds climate change inaction violates human rights

A landmark ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) finds in favour of an association of 2,500 Swiss women that the Swiss government’s inaction to address climate change violated their fundamental human rights .

The ruling could open the door to more challenges of governmental inaction over climate change. However, a similar case brought against every EU member state by six Portuguese young people was rejected by the ECHR on jurisdiction grounds.

The Global Risks Report 2023 ranked failure to mitigate climate change as one of the most severe threats in the next two years, while climate- and nature- related risks lead the rankings by severity over the long term.

The World Economic Forum’s Centre for Nature and Climate is a multistakeholder platform that seeks to safeguard our global commons and drive systems transformation. It is accelerating action on climate change towards a net-zero, nature-positive future.

Learn more about our impact:

• Scaling up green technologies: Through a partnership with the US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, John Kerry, and over 65 global businesses, the First Movers Coalition has committed $12 billion in purchase commitments for green technologies to decarbonize the cement and concrete industry.
• 1 trillion trees: Over 90 global companies have committed to conserve, restore and grow more than 8 billion trees in 65 countries through the 1t.org initiative – which aims to achieve 1 trillion trees by 2030.
• Sustainable food production: Our Food Action Alliance is engaging 40 partners who are working on 29 flagship initiatives to provide healthy, nutritious, and safe foods in ways that safeguard our planet. In Vietnam, it supported the upskilling of 2.2 million farmers and aims to provide 20 million farmers with the skills to learn and adapt to new agricultural standards.
• Eliminating plastic pollution: Our Global Plastic Action Partnership is bringing together governments, businesses and civil society to shape a more sustainable world through the eradication of plastic pollution. In Ghana, more than 2,000 waste pickers are making an impact cleaning up beaches, drains and other sites.
• Protecting the ocean: Our 2030 Water Resources Group has facilitated almost $1 billion to finance water-related programmes , growing into a network of more than 1,000 partners and operating in 14 countries/states.
• Circular economy: Our SCALE 360 initiative is reducing the environmental impacts of value chains within the fashion, food, plastics and electronics industries, positively impacting over 100,000 people in 60 circular economy interventions globally.

Want to know more about our centre’s impact or get involved? Contact us .

7. Renewables’ growth could overtake coal by 2025

Clean renewable energy looks set to become the world’s biggest source of power by 2025, overcoming coal, according to the IEA.

Renewables are set to account for more than 90% of global electricity expansion over the coming years. Global renewable power capacity is predicted to increase by 2,400 gigawatts between 2022 and 2027.

While there is still some way to go on the journey to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, it seems we are heading in the right direction. Extending the metaphor, the question is… are we travelling fast enough?

What's the World Economic Forum doing about the transition to clean energy?

Moving to clean energy is key to combating climate change, yet in the past five years, the energy transition has stagnated.

Energy consumption and production contribute to two-thirds of global emissions, and 81% of the global energy system is still based on fossil fuels, the same percentage as 30 years ago. Plus, improvements in the energy intensity of the global economy (the amount of energy used per unit of economic activity) are slowing. In 2018 energy intensity improved by 1.2%, the slowest rate since 2010.

Effective policies, private-sector action and public-private cooperation are needed to create a more inclusive, sustainable, affordable and secure global energy system.

Benchmarking progress is essential to a successful transition. The World Economic Forum’s Energy Transition Index , which ranks 115 economies on how well they balance energy security and access with environmental sustainability and affordability, shows that the biggest challenge facing energy transition is the lack of readiness among the world’s largest emitters, including US, China, India and Russia. The 10 countries that score the highest in terms of readiness account for only 2.6% of global annual emissions.

To future-proof the global energy system, the Forum’s Centre for Energy & Materials is working on initiatives including Clean Power and Electrification , Energy and Industry Transition Intelligence, Industrial Ecosystems Transformation , and Transition Enablers to encourage and enable innovative energy investments, technologies and solutions.

Additionally, the Mission Possible Partnership (MPP) is working to assemble public and private partners to further the industry transition to set heavy industry and mobility sectors on the pathway towards net-zero emissions. MPP is an initiative created by the World Economic Forum and the Energy Transitions Commission.

Is your organisation interested in working with the World Economic Forum? Find out more here .

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License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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Oil and Gas Companies Are Trying to Rig the Marketplace

By Andrew Dessler

Dr. Dessler is a professor of atmospheric sciences and the director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies at Texas A&M University.

Many of us focused on the problem of climate change have been waiting for the day when renewable energy would become cheaper than fossil fuels.

Well, we’re there: Solar and wind power are less expensive than oil, gas and coal in many places and are saving our economy billions of dollars . These and other renewable energy sources produced 30 percent of the world’s electricity in 2023, which may also have been the year that greenhouse gas emissions in the power sector peaked. In the United States alone, the amount of solar and wind energy capacity waiting to be built and connected to the grid is 18 times the amount of natural gas power capacity in the queue.

So you might reasonably conclude that the market is pivoting, and the end for fossil fuels is near.

But it’s not. Instead, fossil fuel interests — including think tanks, trade associations and dark money groups — are often preventing the market from shifting to the lowest cost energy.

Similar to other industries from tobacco to banking to pharmaceuticals, oil and gas interests use tactics like lobbying and manufacturing “grass-roots” support to maximize profits. They also spread misinformation: It’s well documented that fossil fuel interests tried to convince the public that their products didn’t cause climate change, in the same way that Big Tobacco tried to convince the public that its products didn’t harm people’s health.

But as renewables have become a more formidable competitor, we are now seeing something different: a large-scale effort to deceive the public into thinking that the alternative products are harmful, unreliable and worse for consumers. And as renewables continue to drop in cost, it will become even more critical for policymakers and others to challenge these attempts to slow the adoption of cheaper and healthier forms of energy.

One technique the industry and its allies have used is to spread falsehoods — for example, that offshore wind turbines kill whales or that renewable energy is prohibitively expensive — to stop projects from getting built. What appear to be ordinary concerned citizens or groups making good-faith arguments about renewable energy are actually a well-funded effort to disseminate a lie. Researchers at Brown University have revealed a complex web of fossil fuel interests, climate-denial think tanks and community groups that are behind opposition to wind farms off New Jersey, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Fossil fuel interests also donate piles of money to sympathetic politicians who then make false claims about renewable energy and push oil and gas on their constituents even when renewable energy is cheaper. After the Texas blackout in 2021, which was caused in part by the failure of the natural gas system , politicians blamed renewable energy, and have since argued that more natural gas is needed to strengthen the state electrical grid .

The Texas grid could certainly be made more robust. But building backup natural gas plants that should ultimately sit idle 90 percent of the time is probably the most expensive way to address the problem, compared with approaches like paying consumers to cut their energy use when the electrical grid nears its limits.

One of the most pervasive pieces of misinformation being spread by fossil fuel interests is that we cannot run our society on renewable energy . It is true that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. However, we could deal with this by expanding our existing electrical grid to allow us to move clean energy from regions with excess to those with shortfalls. When that’s not sufficient, power sources that can be quickly turned on and off, like batteries or hydroelectricity, can match supply and demand. In the current U.S. grid, natural gas provides the primary balance for intermittent wind and solar, and we can keep using it that way — in very limited quantities — when we need it. One study published in 2020 showed that we could operate a grid that is 90 percent clean energy and 10 percent natural gas by 2035, which would produce energy for a cost similar to that of a grid with a continuation of current policies.

Alarmingly, fossil fuel interests are also looking to dictate how schoolchildren learn about the environment. Children are some of the most powerful messengers when it comes to climate awareness, so fossil fuel promoters are keen to shape their understanding from the start. They have succeeded in getting the Texas State Board of Education to reject textbooks that accurately depict the effects of climate change and extreme weather.

Fossil fuels do deserve credit for getting us to where America is today — rich beyond the dreams of anyone living before the Industrial Revolution. But oil and gas are not the fuels of the future; they are changing the climate and generating air pollution that kills millions of people each year . They also bolster autocratic petrostates, fuel conflicts over energy resources and contribute to geopolitical instability . Simply put, the industry’s lies can cost consumers their health, their money and their security.

With existing technologies, the United States can largely phase out oil, gas and coal. The last 5 percent to 10 percent of that process may be expensive, but credible estimates place the cost of getting to net-zero emissions within the historical range of energy costs. This means that a sustainable future hinges on politics, not technology or science.

Policymakers must now call out the fact that an industry facing obsolescence is distorting the market to try to shut out a superior competitor, clean energy. Make no mistake: Failure to do so may mean a planet no longer able to sustain human life in the style to which we have become accustomed.

Andrew Dessler is a professor of atmospheric sciences and the director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies at Texas A&M University. He is a writer of the newsletter The Climate Brink .

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• Published: 10 September 2020

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Towards a solution to the energy crisis

• Henrik Melin 1  

Nature Astronomy volume  4 ,  pages 837–838 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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Essay on “Energy Crisis in Pakistan” for CSS, PMS, Judiciary Examinations

• August 30, 2021
• Essay for CSS PMS and Judiciary Exam

This is an essay on “Energy Crisis in Pakistan” for CSS, PMS, and Judiciary Examinations. The energy crisis is the largest single drain on Pakistan’s economy. This crisis stems from a fuel mix transformation initiated two decades ago when power generation came to rely more on imported furnace oil than hydropower. The current energy crisis began to manifest itself in earnest by late 2007. So here is a complete Essay on “Energy Crisis in Pakistan” for CSS, PMS.

Introduction

• Energy, demand for all fields
• Cheap ways of producing Energy

Causes of Energy Crisis

• Lack of dams
• Inability to explore coal: 6th largest coal reserves in the world
• Lack of renewable energy sources
• The problem of circular debt
• Losses in transmission and distribution
• Wastage of energy
• Domestic and household consumption
• Aging of the equipment
• High cost of fuel
• Economic loss
• Agricultural loss
• Closure of industries
• Unemployment
• Social issues

Energy Policy (2013-2018)

Suggestions

Alternative sources of Energy

Nuclear power

• Building of darns
• Long term dams
• Medium-term dams
• Short term dams

Exploit the coal reserves

Regional gas and oil pipelines

IPI project

TAPI project

Updating the system of transmission and distribution

Essay on “Energy Crisis in Pakistan” for CSS, PMS, Judiciary Examinations

Energy is the lifeline of a nation. The economic engine and the wheels of industry, agriculture, and business need the energy to move forward. Pakistan faces a major energy crisis in natural gas, power, and oil. Power outages usually last 10-12 hours a day in the cities and more in the rural areas. This has left the industries of Pakistan (mainly agricultural, secondary and tertiary sectors) stunned and so they are unable to fully operate.

This has a very negative impact on the economy of the country. The demand for energy in Pakistan is huge, and cannot be fulfilled by electricity production based on oil. It can only meet 20% of our requirement through native production and the remaining oil is imported from the Gulf States and other countries. No major oil, the field has been discovered in the last three decades. It is clear that other alternative production methods must be considered to meet the demand. Most likely one that is cheap, considering the initial setup cost, and costs attached.

The second method of production we use is thermal (i-e using coal to produce electricity). Pakistan has been blessed with wealthy mineral resources, but the sad part is that we are too ign0rant to explore them. We are sitting on gold mines and yet we do nothing about it. Balochistan, for instance, is rich in all sorts of minerals and could be exploited heavily. If we could solve the feudal problems of the provinces, and let the national and international companies explore the area, we might solve our fuel problems too. But this is a precious non-renewable resource, so we need better options.

Another major option is hydroelectric power generation. This is the cheapest and most feasible way of producing electricity for our country. Two major energy dams in Pakistan are Tarbela and Mangla. If only the proposed Kalabagh darn would be constructed, 80% of our energy needs would be fulfilled. The best option is to construct this dam and take advantage of the natural hydrography of Pakistan to the maximum possible extent.

Wind power and solar power generation are good alternatives as well. Their initial costs are low when compared to other methods, and are definitely in the best interests of our country.

Following are the Causes of the Energy Crisis in Pakistan.

In Pakistan, no major dam was constructed after the completion of Mangle and Terbela Dams early I980s. Though the demand for electricity was increasing many governments came and completed their terms but neither government built darns which is the cheapest source of the energy. Pakistan needs to make Kalabagh darn and Basha dams but due to politicization and lack of dedicated politicians, Pakistan is confronting with the problem of the energy crisis. Electricity from hydel cost us Rs. 2-4 rupees per unit.

Pakistan is blessed with a large amount of coal. No serious work is done to explore coal for power generation. This complains that the coal quality is inferior. However, ·ready-made solutions are available to burn any type of coal. The government is looking for the private sector to play its role. In our opinion, the government itself should come forward and install the power plants on the site of coal mines only.

The government is not producing electricity from renewable sources of energy such as wind, solar, tidal, biogas, etc. Though Pakistan has maximum summers suiting for solar energy there are huge taxes which are paid while purchasing this technology. Through solar, Pakistan can produce up to 1,00,000 MW of electricity. Besides, wind energy has the potential of producing 50,000 MW of electricity but Pakistan is not producing from this cheapest source.

If serious work is done then the total shortage can be met from the Hydro and wind power sectors. It is also suggested that small loans should be provided to consumers to install small hydro and solar cells for one family usage of electricity.

One of the main reasons for the serious shortfall in the generation of thermal electricity 1s the problem of the “circular debt” which the present government inherited from the previous regime. In 2007, the government did not compensate the power companies for the subsidy that was being provided to consumers. The power companies in turn could not pay the oil and gas companies, reducing their liquidity to import the furnace oil that was needed to generate electricity.

The interim government , before the elections, in fact, forced the commercial banks to lend Rs34bn to the oil companies whose credit limits were already exhausted. This problem of “circular debt” became more serious in the summer of 2008, as petroleum prices jumped from $100 to $147 a barrel. It is really surprising that this problem has become the main cause of increasing load-shedding but has not so far been addressed on a priority basis. In 2015 the circular debt reached Rs.600 billion.

Very heavy line losses in transmission and distribution because of old and poorly maintained transmission systems, estimated at over 20 percent compared to eight to ten percent in other countries. Large-scale theft of electricity is clearly revealed by the growing difference between units generated or purchased and those paid for.

Wastage of energy by the industry consumes 30 percent of total electricity due to less efficient systems and other practices. For example, the Chinese consume 30 percent less electricity in textile mills because they use water partially heated by solar panels in their boilers. Overuse of energy by the transport sector (consuming 28 percent of total energy) due to old and poorly tuned engines.

Domestic and household consumption which uses 45 percent of total electricity also depicts wasteful and unnecessary uses of lights, air-conditioners, and large-scale illuminations on different occasions. The problems outlined above reveal many structural flaws in our energy system. These include over-dependence on imported energy, inadequate political will, limited financial support and very weak implementation capacity.

One very important reason attributed to this energy shortage is the aging of the generating equipment which could not develop the electricity as per the design requirement. This is the responsibility to continuously updating the equipment and keeping a high standard of maintenance. we sincerely think serious thought should be given for general overhaul and maintenance of existing equipment to keep them in good working order.

So far energy conservation is concerned, newspapers pay lip service in seminars. No serious thought is being given to utilize the energy at the optimum level. A new culture needs to develop to conserve energy. Sometimes on government level illiteracy is blamed for the failure of the energy conservation program. this is not true. Maximum energy is consumed by the elite class which controls all the resources of knowledge and communication. But for their own luxury, they themselves ignore the problem. Government should seriously embark on an energy conservation program.

Following are the effects of the energy crisis in Pakistan.

Energy is pivotal for running all other resources and the crisis of energy directly influences all other sectors of the economy. The economic progress is hampered by a decline in agricultural productivity as well as by halting operations of industries. One important factor of lower GDP and inflation of commodity prices in recent years is attributed to shortfalls in energy supply. Pakistan is facing a high cost of production due to several factors like the energy crisis, the hike in electricity tariff, the increase in interest rate, devaluation of Pakistani rupee, increasing cost of inputs, political instability , removal of subsidy & internal dispute.

Above all factors increase the cost of production which decreases the exports. Exports receipts decrease from$ 10.2B to$ 9.6B. The global recession also hit badly the textile industry. Double-digit inflation also caused a decrease in production in the textile sector.

The agricultural productivity of Pakistan is decreasing due to the provision of energy for running tube wells, agricultural machinery, and the production of fertilizers and pesticides. Thus higher energy means higher agricultural productivity.

Nearly all Industrial units are run with energy and breakage in energy supply is having dire consequences on industrial growth. As a result of the decline in energy supply, industrial units are not only being opened but also the existing industrial units are gradually closing.

By the closure of industrial units and less agricultural productivity, new employment opportunities ceased to exist, and already employed manpower is shredded by the employers to increase their profit ratios. Thus energy crisis contributes to unemployment.

Pakistan’s textile industry is going through one of the toughest periods in decades. The global recession which has hit the global textile really hard is not the only cause for concern. Serious internal issues including the energy crisis affected Pakistan·s textile industry very badly. The high cost of production resulting from an instant rise in energy costs has been the primary cause of concern for the industry.

The depreciation of the Pakistani rupee during last year has significantly raised the cost of imported inputs. Furthermore, double-digit inflation and the high cost of financing have seriously affected the growth in the textile industry. Pakistan’s textile exports in turn have gone down during the last three years as exporters cannot effectively market their products since buyers are not visiting Pakistan due to adverse travel conditions and it is getting more and more difficult for the exporters to travel abroad. Pakistan’s textile industry is lacking in research &development.

The production capability is very low due to obsolete machinery and technology. This factor is primarily related to the domestic usage of energy (cooking, heating, and water provision). Load shedding causes unrest and frustration amongst the people and results in agitation against the government.

The government has finally formulated the much-awaited National Energy Policy 2013-18. Under the policy, power sector subsidy will be phased out by 2018, and load-shedding will be ended by 2017. It aims at generating surplus electricity in 2018, privatizing government-owned power plants and a few power distributing companies (Discos), bringing the double-digit cost of power generation to a single digit, and restructuring the water and power ministry.

National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (Nepra), Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority (OGRA), adjustment of outstanding dues owed by public and private organizations through federal adjusters, and formation of regional transmission and power trading system. The policy comprises seven points envisions a profitable, bankable, and investment-friendly power sector which meets the nation·s needs and boosts its economy in a sustainable and affordable manner while adhering to the most efficient generation, transmission, and distribution standards.

To achieve the long-term vision of the power sector and overcome its challenges, the government has set the following goals: Build a power generation capacity that can meet the country’s energy needs in a sustainable manner; create a culture of energy conservation and responsibility; ensure generation of inexpensive and affordable electricity for domestic, commercial and industrial use; minimize pilferage and adulteration in fuel supply; promote world-class efficiency in power generation; create a c.utting edge transmission network; minimize .financial losses across the systen1, and align the ministries involved in the energy sector and improve governance .

There are Various Methods to Solve the Energy Crisis in Pakistan.

Though wind, Pakistan has potentials of wind energy ranging from 10000 MW to 50000 MW, yet power generation through wind is in initial stages in Pakistan and currently 06 MW has been installed in the first phase in Jhampir through a Turkish company and 50 MW will be installed shortly. More wind power plants will be built in Jhampir, Gharo, Keti Bandar, and Bin Qasim Karachi.

Solar power involves using solar cells to convert sunlight into electricity, using sunlight hitting solar thermal panels to convert sunlight to heat water or air. Pakistan has the potential of more than 100,000 MW from solar energy. The building of solar power plants is underway in Kashmir, Punjab, Sindh, and Balochistan. However, private vendors are importing panels / solar water heaters for consumption in the market.

Alternative Energy Development Board (AEDB) is working for 20,000 solar water heaters in Gilgit Baltistan. Mobile companies have been asked by the government to shift the supply of energy to their transmission towers from petroleum to solar energy panels.

Biomass production involves using garbage or other renewable resources such as sugarcane, corn, or other vegetation to generate electricity. When garbage decomposes, methane is produced and captured in pipes and later burned to produce electricity. Vegetation and wood can be burned directly to generate energy, like fossil fuels, or processed· to form alcohols. Brazil has one of the largest renewable energy programs from biomass/biodiesel in the world, followed by the USA. Alternative Energy Development Board (AEDB) of Pakistan has planned to generate 10 MW of electricity from municipal waste in Karachi followed by similar projects in twenty cities of the country.

Tidal power can be extracted from Moon-gravity-powered tides by locating a water turbine in a tidal current. The turbine can turn an electrical generator, or a gas compressor, that can then store energy until needed. Coastal tides are a source of clean, free, renewable, and sustainable energy. Plans are underway in Pakistan to harness tidal energy; however, no implementation has been made so far.

Nuclear power stations use nuclear fission reactions to generate energy by the reaction of uranium inside a nuclear reactor. Pakistan has a small nuclear power program, with 425 MW capacity, but there are plans to increase this capacity substantially. Since Pakistan is outside the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, it is excluded from trade in nuclear plants or materials, which hinders its development of civil nuclear energy. The remaining issues in the development of nuclear energy are an enrichment of uranium from U235 to U238, controlling chain reaction, and dumping of solid waste.

Pakistan has the potential for hydro resources to generate 41000 to 45000 MW, however, only 6555 MW is currently being generated by this important renewable resource. Four large hydropower dams namely Kalabagh 3600 MW, Bhasha 4500 MW, Bunji 5400 MW, and Dasu 3800 MW can be constructed to generate hydroelectricity. Similarly, many small to medium hydro plants can be installed on rivers and canals, etc.

The longer-term solution to the energy crisis will be to restore the hydro-thermal mix to 60:40 or at least 50:50 in the next five years. The Water Accord of 1991 had o~ened the way for constructing many dams to store water and generate electricity. But the continuing controversy over the KalabaghDam became a major obstacle. Surprisingly, even many smaller and non-controversial hydroelectric projects have been delayed without any justification.

The hydel projects in the pipeline include the following: Neelurn Jhelurn (969 MW), Tarbela Fourth Extension (960 MW), SukiKinari (840 MW), Munda Dam (700 MW), Khan Dubar (130 MW), Allai (126 MW), and Jinnah Hydroelectric power project (96 MW).

Pakistan has the world’s sixth-largest reserves of coal, after the recent discoveries in Thar. The total coal reserve in Pakistan is about 175 billion tons. The current coal production is only 3.5 million tons per year, which is mostly used for the brick and cement industry. Coal has typical problems, such as a high sulfur content (it produces sulfur dioxide, the source of acid rain), mineral matter content (leading to ash and pollution problems), carbon dioxide emission (contributing to global warming), and high moisture content.

However, technologies are available to minimize all of these. Conversion technologies are currently under development to convert coal into environmentally-friendly methanol and hydrogen gas to be used as a clean fuel. The US is working on a major initiative called future gen to produce “zero-emission” power plants of the future. Thar coal can be cleaned and the sulfur reduced so that it can be burnt in conventional coal power plants and also convened into gas. Coal gasification is a slightly more expensive process, but the gas from coal is a proven and cleaner technology. The Chinese had prepared a feasibility report in 2005 to produce 3,000 MW at 5.8 cents per unit, but the project could not move forward because they were offered only 5.3 cents.

There are also many possibilities of regional cooperation in building gas and oil pipelines. These include the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline; the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan gas pipeline; an oil, gas, and electricity corridor from Gwadar to Western China, the import of 1,000 MW electricity from Ragun hydro station in Tajikistan for which an agreement was signed in March 1992 at the rate of 3.3 cents per unit.

The worldwide electricity production, as per the World Bank, is as follows; coal: 40 percent; gas 19 percent; nuclear 16 percent; hydro 16 percent; oil seven percent. Pakistan’s power production is gas 48 percent; hydro 33 percent; oil 16 percent; nuclear two percent, and coal 0.2 percent. There has been a global trend to shift away from oil because of its rising price expected to reach $100 a barrel by the end of this year depending on the international geopolitical situation.

Despite the lowest cost of hydroelectric power, there have been environmental, ecological, and geopolitical concerns over the building of large dams. The supply of natural gas in Pakistan has been depleting over the years, and the country is now looking at the option of imponing gas from Qatar and Central Asia. This leaves the possibility of exploring nuclear, coal, and other alternative energy sources.

Nuclear energy and coal form the lowest source of power production in Pakistan. On the other hand, the world average for nuclear energy is 16 percent and for coal 40 percent. Let us first consider these two potential sources of electric power production for Pakistan. The US obtains 20 percent of its electric power from; clear. energy with 104 reactors; France 78 percent with 59 reactors, Japan 24 percent with 54 re~tors, the UK 23 percent with 31 reactors, and so on. Even India has signed a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States to develop its nuclear capability for power generation and economic development . It has currently six reactors in operation with a capacity of 3750 MW, and another six with a capacity of 3,340 MW are under construction.

The new agreement will further boost the nuclear power generating capacity of India. Today, nuclear power plants have average capacities of 600-1,000 MW. Pakistan only produces two percent of its power through two reactors (Karachi and Chashrna at 137 MW and 300 MW respectively). Pakistan is a nuclear technologically advanced country with capabilities to produce fuel, yet falls behind most other countries, including India, in terms of nuclear power production. The US introduces 51 percent of its power using coal, Poland 96 percent, South Africa 94 percent, India 68 percent, Australia 77 percent, China 79 percent, Israel 77 percent, UK 35 percent, Japan 28 percent, while Pakistan produces only 0.2 percent of its power through coal.

In Pakistan, smaller windmills are now visible, such as the ones at Gharo, where SZABIST set up an experimental research station many years ago. The Sindh government has recently announced plans to build a 50 MW wind farm in the vicinity of the coastal region at Gharo. Solar power (photovoltaic or thermal) is another alternative energy source option that is generally considered feasible for tropical and equatorial countries. Even though the accepted standard is 1,000 W/m2 of peak power at sea level, an average solar panel (or photovoltaic – PV – panel), delivers an average of only 19- 56W/m2. Solar plants are generally used in cases where smaller amounts of power are required at remote locations. PV is also the most expensive of all options making it less attractive.

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Freight costs edge toward pandemic levels, hitting solar module costs

Freight costs, which represent around 4% of a solar module’s total costs, are increasing on trade lines between the Far East and the US West Coast, Northern Europe, and Mediterranean region.

• Markets & Policy
• Modules & Upstream Manufacturing

Image: William, Unsplash

Freight container shipping spot rates have increased to their highest level since 2022, according to data from Xeneta, a Norwegian ocean and freight rate benchmarking platform.

At the end of May, Xeneta said market average spot rates from the Far East to the US West Coast would reach $5,170 per forty-foot equivalent unit (FEU) on June 1. The figure is 57% higher than in May and the highest that spot rates have been for 640 days, surpassing the peak seen during the Red Sea crisis earlier this year. Spot rates are expected to peak at $6,250/FEU on the Far East to US West Coast line in June, just shy of the Red Sea crisis peak ($6,260).

On the Far East to North Europe trade line, spot rates are set to exceed the Red Sea crisis peak, reaching $5,280/FEU, compared to $4,839/FEU on Jan. 16. This will be the highest rate on this line for 596 days and an increase of 63% since 29 April.

Xeneta noted a similar story on the Far East to Mediterranean trade line, where spot rates are expected to edge past the Red Sea crisis peak of $5,985/FEU to reach $6,175/FEU. This would be an increase of 46% on May and the highest rates on the trade for 610 days.

With freight costs representing around 4% of a solar panel’s total costs, the spot rate increase is likely to have a knock-on effect on PV module prices.

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Xeneta said the market has been hit by the ongoing conflict in the Red Sea , port congestion, and shippers deciding to frontload imports ahead of the third quarter, which is the traditional peak season. Despite the latest spot rate increases, Xeneta’s chief analyst, Peter Sand, said the growth is not as rapid as during May, “which may hint toward a slight easing in the situation.”

“This cannot come soon enough for shippers who are already having their cargo rolled, even for containers being moved on long term contracts signed only a matter of weeks ago,” Sand said. “Carriers will prioritize shippers paying the highest rates. That means cargo belonging to shippers paying lower rates on long term contracts is at risk of being left at the port. It happened during the Covid-19 pandemic and it is happening again now.”

Sand said that freight forwarders are facing additional surcharges and are being pushed to opt for premium services to secure space on ships.

“In such cases they have no other option than to pass these costs on directly to their shipper customers,” he said. “ Carriers will continue to push for higher and higher freight rates so the situation may get worse for shippers before it gets better.”

This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com .

Patrick Jowett

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Energy & Environmental Science

Electric effects reinforce charge carriers behaviour for photocatalysis.

Photocatalysis is a highly efficient way of converting solar energy and has shown excellent promise in alleviating the growing energy crisis and environmental risks. However, achieving the desired solar energy conversion efficiency, which is directly limited by complex photoelectronic processes in the generation, transport, dissociation and recombination of charge carriers, has still been a great challenge. These behaviors of charge carriers are thought to be dominated by electric effects. In this review, recent advances in the utilization of electric effects (e.g., piezoelectric effect, magnetoresistance effect, and excitonic effect) of charge carriers are discussed in relation to applications in photocatalytic processes. The mechanism of exciton dissociation in photocatalytic processes, the role of a built-in piezoelectric field, and negative magnetoresistance in promoting photoinduced charge transfer and separation are emphasized. This review provides insights into the potential challenges associated with leveraging the electric effects of carriers to reinforce photocatalysis.

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A. Shu, C. Qin, M. Li, L. Zhao, Z. Shangguan, Z. Shu, X. Yuan, M. Zhu, Y. Wu and H. Wang, Energy Environ. Sci. , 2024, Accepted Manuscript , DOI: 10.1039/D4EE01379D

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