Local opinion: The scalability of solar and the intransigence of corporate utilities

As author Bill McKibben recently observed, the cheapest way to produce electricity today is to point a flat pane of glass towards the sky. He’s talking about solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, of course. The other half of this equation is lithium battery storage. Both the panels and batteries are inventions from the latter half of the 20th century: expensive then but far less so today. Due to falling prices, these technologies are now poised to profoundly disrupt legacy utility business models, while also providing unprecedented economic benefits, reliability, and convenience to consumers.

PV panels and batteries produce and store electrical energy without noise, smoke or atmospheric-warming gases. True, there’s the needed extraction of raw materials and some industrial emissions involved in manufacturing. But once the technology is deployed, the fuel to run it is free, abundant and clean. Also worth noting that water requirements for solar and batteries, unlike with fossil fuels, are virtually non-existent.

Because those extracted materials aren’t getting burnt to produce the energy, all those eventually-expired PV panels and batteries can someday be dismantled and reduced back to their refined chemical and metallurgical elements. They’re then available for manufacturing the next generation of renewable energy technology. A circular economy develops, if one hasn’t already begun, where there’s always a reliable supply chain of recycled materials. The continued extraction of new ones, resultingly, becomes increasingly unnecessary.

Above all, solar and batteries are scalable. That means a few PV panels hung onto balcony railings or the roof of a sunlit shed, paired with a small battery box sitting in the nearby shade, can now conveniently charge your laptop, or boil water for your coffee or tea. The panels and batteries can be made incrementally larger and offset even more in the way of your daily electrical needs, such as cooking, refrigeration, HVAC, and even your transportation. Yes, scalability also means solar and batteries can power entire swaths of today’s electrical grid, as it should. But it’s the stop-off points in between that are often the most interesting to culturally observe and participate in, and where solar will end up having its greatest impact.

So, why aren’t Arizona’s electrical utilities all in on solar? It’s especially puzzling to observe this in one of the sunniest places on the planet. The quick answer is a diminishing profit potential over the lifetime of the project. New transmission infrastructure — arguably the largest upfront expense — tied to new lower-maintenance power generation that will be operating on free fuel in perpetuity is a money loser for them. It’s especially true if utilities continue to treat solar exclusively like the rest of their aging portfolio: concentrated in far-off places behind tall fences with lots of new wires and poles needed to move the end product around, just like with the smoke-belching coal plants built over a century ago and still used in places.

In marketing dirty electricity, it’s wise not to let the consumer see how the proverbial sausage is made. Instead, emphasize reliability coming out of the wall receptacle above all else. Obfuscate with tales of renewable energy’s intermittency, while simultaneously denying the invention of storage. Cast aspersions over any other entity’s ability — especially government’s — to do what only investor-owned corporate paternalism is alleged to provide. Ignore concerns of climate change and water shortages as wokeness gone amok. Make America Gaseous Again.

The utilities know that the closer solar is built to where it’s going to be used — in plain sight, such as in a city center, shading a shopping mall parking lot, or on a neighbor’s roof — the more it will be noticed and its implications understood. When it becomes clearer to many that a municipality can access the technical skills and funding needed to deploy and maintain a community solar microgrid, for instance, the harder it will become for big investor-owned incumbents to retain control over this most adaptable and scalable of energy resources. How long will it be before the traditional fossil-fueled business model starts looking more like an aging rotary dial-up land line operation than a picture of modern-day interconnectivity? For some of us, it already does.