Customer Reviews

Solar Revolution: The Economic Transformation of the Global Energy Industry

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4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a clearly written short book with good news about photovoltaics by someone familiar with economics and business. Although its title is Solar Revolution, there are many aspects of solar energy in which he shows little interest and this makes the prospects for his revolution depressing. Here are the basics of the solar revolution as he sees it.

The revolution's goal is to overthrow the use of fossil fuels and nuclear power, but all without returning to any of the traditional uses of solar energy that supported mankind through history. We abandoned Mother Nature's solar teat to suckle on giant bottles of fossil fuels. Now the bottles are going dry and we want to return to solar, but it's got to come in bottles, be electric, be synthetic. Bradford's concern is the preservation and continued growth of our use of electricity. When you stop to consider that electricity is a means to an end and not an end in itself - as, for example, water or food - this is a puzzle.

Our appetites expressed through the market place are too slack for Bradford, the revolutionary. Although he claims to wish an end to subsidies, it is hard to believe him. He greatly admires Japan and Germany for their fanatical government-directed drive for photovoltaics. On September 1, 2006 Sharp electronics, a company singled out for special praise by Bradford, ran full page color picture ads in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. They boasted that their Kameyama plant "features the world's largest solar energy system".

A glance at their building shows they use no skylights. They cover every inch of roof with PV panels. The walls have few if any windows. The building looks like a giant sealed-off, above ground termite nest.

The Japanese and Bradford are confused. Skylights and windows are much better at providing light than PV panels wired to light bulbs indoors. Bradford drives on saying (page 175) that "R&D funding by industrialized countries' governments for renewable energy is crucial for market growth because it helps resolve a commonly observed market failure in economics - that is, that businesses collectively underinvest in R&D and basic science compared to what a socially optimal level would be." How does he know? Who is to decide what is socially optimal?

If you look at the fate of daylight, foot travel, bicycles, clotheslines and other traditional solar powered ways, you see that we are giving up genuine, tested effective uses of the sun at the same time as we are urged to adopt synthetic hi-tech solar energy.

Bradford gives only lip service to passive solar, about 1 page out of 200. . On page 187 he writes the ominous sentence, "solar power will be increasingly big business because it will be increasingly good business". Yet traditional and passive uses of solar energy are the most cost effective

As this reader has come to expect from the MIT Press, there are a number of typos and confused mistakes such as on page 200, "1 kWh equals 3.4 Btu" and on page 187, "in 2003 some 10% of new electric generation capacity installed worldwide was non-hydro renewable".

I found the sun, but no clouds in Bradford's book. PV panels can supply megawatts of power one minute and when clouds arrive, almost nothing a few minutes later. How do utilities fill in? He glosses over this.

Bradford's study is part of a spell we have fallen under where we confuse consumption of electricity with success.

Steve Baer
Zomeworks Corporation
Albuquerque, New Mexico USA

This should have been a magazine article in the Economist, not a book. As other reviewers have explained, this is about photovoltaics and only photovoltaics (PV) and even at that it's limited. True, other energy sources are mentioned, such as hydrogen fuel cells, but they get about half a page.

It would be better titled "The Estimated Economics of Photovoltaics." But even at that it's weak. Photovoltaics come in many forms from rigid structures to concentrators to flexible fabrics. Only round numbers are used, such as, "In the case of photovoltaic modules, the cost to produce them in the late 1970s was around $25 per watt but has since dropped to less than $3.50 per kW,..." (p, 109) But there's no mention of the applicable configuration.

Some things are footnoted, like "Various forms of solar energy have been used since prehistoric times." But others, like Figure 7.2 where today's PV costs are shown at $6 per watt are not. And the $6 per watt in Figure 7.2 hardly correlates with the $3.50 quoted above for production costs. Yes, I know one is production cost, the other presumably installed cost, but even that isn't clear and an installed cost that's 1700 times production cost deserves some explanation.

I couldn't find one reference to actual PV conversion efficiency, yet there are statements such as "Even at today's efficiency of PV cells, the land required would be 10 million acres, or 0.4 percent of the total land area of the United States." Perhaps the efficiency assumption is buried in the primary documents but it should be shown here since it's pivotal. I didn't notice any reference to the fact that today's PV's degrade over time. PV efficiency and life is fundamental to PV economics.

There are few diagrams, all economics and order of magnitude.

It is clear that a lot of work went into preparing and documenting the book, but in the end you can't do much with what's here. If you wanted, for example, to crudely estimate say the cost of a megawatt of photovoltaic power so you could compare it to say Nevada Solar One, the solar concentrator facility outside Boulder, NV, you only have the $6 per watt from the chart quoted earlier and that gets you to $6 million/megawatt. But you don't know what PV efficiency that's based on. (Solar One's cost is about $4 million/megawatt)

From this book you'd think PV's were the future. But the Europeans are moving ahead with solar thermal at the bulk stage. Do PV's make sense for example on say roof tops and solar thermal makes more sense at the utility level? From this book, you can't even begin to answer that question, or know if a breakthrough in PV efficiency would make a difference.

I liked one of the reviews on the back cover..."deeply researched and hopeful." Says it all, and says nothing.

Wish I could refer you to a better book, but haven't found one yet. There's material on the net. Scientific American's September 2006 and March 2009 issues cover the technologies briefly, but are weak on the economics. There's an absence of clear economic data on solar energy sources.

Excellent overview on economic potential of Solar. This book is optimistic that Solar's inherent scalability...low maintenance and power will make it the choice to replace much, it not all fossil fuels in a few decades. The devil is in the assumptions, the reader must assess if they agree. The next several years will confirm or disprove the assertions. Note: Figure 5.6 on page 111 is actually 5.5.

A great look at the actual costs of electricity generated and delivered through a wide range of channels. Based on sound economic principles, the book illustrates how solar power will become competitive in price to fossil fuel-generated electricity in the near future (years, not decades).

Is it convincing? Suprisingly, yes. The reasons why the #'s fall in favor of solar in the near future have a lot to do with the distributed nature of solar power (no added transmission infrastruture costs), and the fact that solar power is generated most easily during the time of day when electric loads peak.

Check it out and see if you agree with the author's analysis. If so, our future is going to be a lot greener than many of us would have thought.

The Solar Revolution makes an incredibly compelling argument for the future of solar energy. The author does this in a way that takes the emotions out of the argument and gives us straight talk about how solar makes economic sense. The writing is really superb and I highly recommend it if you want deep understanding about the inevitability of solar energy.

Sam

This is a well-written, well-researched book comprising a wealth of knowledge and statistics on traditional and renewable energy sources. Even if you know nothing about solar energy, you'll find this book fascinating and informative. With energy becoming such a hot topic these days, the book will give you an excellent background on a wide range of energy resources along with a captivating story about a possible future alternative. Highly recommended!

Travis Bradford is the president and founder of a nonprofit organization that promotes the use of renewable energy. He is convinced of the necessity of solar energy and he wants to persuade you, too. He considers the various ways society currently produces power and the new technologies now underway, and makes the most generous assumptions in trends, advances and breakthroughs in favor of solar energy. Bradford's arguments are lucid, if a bit rose-colored. You may find them plausible or you may find them to be more advocacy than science. However, the world clearly needs new power sources and solar will undoubtedly play a significant role. We recommend this book to everyone who is concerned about global resources. You may not agree with its conclusions, but it is still worth reading for its information about the issues involved.

This book provides an excellent economic analysis of the prospects for the solar energy industry. The author considers that fundamental economic drivers make solar power the best bet for the coming decades. The dominance of solar will be driven by falling costs (dropping 5-6% annually), the advantages of a distributed system that will ultimately depend little on the expensive public grid, rising costs of fossil fuels, exploding demand in industrializing economies, and the need for greener energy. His book is short, compelling and well-footnoted. Other than Vaclav Smil, he has no equal in the field of renewable energy, particularly solar energy.

We know that our descendents will eventually have to find some energy source other than oil & natural gas. While I think we should be making much more of our electricity with nuclear power, others disagree. Travis Bradford is a Harvard MBA who also has an MPA (master of public administration), also from Harvard. He is also the founder and president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development and puts all his efforts into promoting business and market based sustainable energy. Obviously, when world governments are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into fossil fuels each year, there has to be a public policy component, as well.

Bradford sees photovoltaic generated electricity (solar cell) as a big part of our future. The price per kilowatt hour has been dropping and he sees the trend continuing so that it will converge and become competitive with fossil fuels, but with many advantages. The author sees PV cells as a solution for big utility companies that need to add peak demand capacity (which is during the day when the Sun is up), as a way to bring electricity to remote locations where it is impractical to bring in electricity or have large power plants. Homeowners who want to lessen their dependency on the grid can also add them to their energy mix rather simply.

However, he never addresses the pollution caused in making PV cells or the cost of disposing of them or the availability of the materials to make them. I guess he believes that if the cost is going down it must be confirmation that PV cells are a good thing. Look, I hope he is right. We do need more electricity available for people around the world to make their lives better. Still, the book does read somewhat boosterish for my taste.

Great book that discusses the future of energy. This in not a save the planet type book, it gives an analysis for how we will get our energy in the future and the outcome of that analysis is solar. Bradford does a great job of using conservative estimates and giving both sides of the argument as much as possible within the scope of the book. I would recommend this book to anyone that wants to know the mechanics of why the shift to solar will happen from a dollars and cents and economics standpoint.