A Modest Proposal

What if we just flooded the planet with cheap or even free solar panels?

Chinese students helping install solar panels near Kigali in Rwanda last month

Normally I try to confine this newsletter to the practical—but sometimes I dream a little. This week, perhaps inspired by my despair at the ongoing brutality emerging from the White House, I’ve been trying my best to conjure up how we might actually build the world we need, fast enough to matter for its people and for its climate.

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I was inspired by two news stories. The first was compelling, with Wired’s Zevi Yang detailing how African countries were importing record numbers of solar panels from China

From Algeria on the Mediterranean coast to landlocked Zambia in the south, countries across Africa have been importing significantly more solar panels from China this year than in the past, which analysts say could be the start of a massive effort to help meet the continent’s power demands with renewable energy instead of fossil fuels.

In May 2025, African countries imported a combined 1.57 Gigawatts of solar panels from China, an all time high. (Think of it as adding three-fourths of the capacity of the Hoover Dam in one month.) Dave Jones, chief analyst at the global energy think tank Ember, notes that the spike didn’t come from relatively affluent African countries like South Africa, but rather from nearly two dozen smaller nations.

Jones tracks the value of Chinese solar panels exported to different countries using Chinese customs data. In the first five months of 2025, he found at least 22 African countries imported more solar panels than they did during the same period last year, with most of them doubling the amount. One of the most striking examples is Algeria, which imported 0.76 GW of solar panels in the first half of 2025, a 6,300 percent increase from the year before.

This is beautiful news, but it could go so much faster and farther—there are still hundreds of millions of people across Africa with no power at all, and there are billions of households across the world pouring carbon into the air.

Which brings me to the second story. It’s about how China is trying to shut down some of its solar panel factories, because too much competition is driving the price down.

Under the plan, devised by industry players in the presence of Chinese regulators, big producers will pool 50 billion yuan ($7 billion) to buy out the least efficient facilities and shut them down, then form a cartel to halt relentless price wars.

Ideally, when prices rise, the loss-making producers will turn profitable and reimburse the debt incurred in the process. Reduced output and higher polysilicon costs would force solar panel makers - which can produce roughly twice as much annually as the world buys and have been a source of trade tensions between China and the West - to consolidate.

This is understandable from the standpoint of pure economics. But it is a horrible tragedy to shut in half the production capacity for the most important single item on planet earth. It’s like shutting down half the vaccine factories in a pandemic. (I’m well aware, of course, that the Trump administration is doing just that, just as I’m aware that there’s no way they’d adopt the proposal I’m about to lay out, but we’re citizens of the globe too, and maybe someday we’ll get our democracy back so let’s make some plans in the meantime).

So imagine a world whose nations—mostly its rich nations—just decided to keep those Chinese factories (and the ones in India, and Vietnam, and in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district in Georgia, which is the largest in the western hemisphere) busy. Keep them open,all of them, around the clock, churning out ever-cheaper solar panels and then either selling them at the deepest possible discount or maybe just piling them up on every wharf and railway siding in the world for people to come and take away.

I’m at this point pretty jaundiced about the global climate negotiation process, having been to many of the UN’s COPs. The Paris agreement was a huge step; much of the rest, especially in recent years, has been a kind of charade. It never feels very…practical. But endless huge honking piles of solar panels—that seems practical. The example of Pakistan—where people installed the equivalent of half the national electric grid in solar panels last year—makes it clear that even without sophisticated infrastructure people can put these to good use. (By all accounts, the key ingredient for Pakistan’s incredible solar urge was a cascade of TikTok videos with Hindustani music in the background, all of DIY pioneers showing how to hook the gear together).

When I imagine this, I imagine the world growing quieter, as hundreds of millions of diesel pumps now required to irrigate fields give way to solar-driven equivalents. I imagine it growing less murky, as the smoke from those generators gives way to the…absolutely nothing that rises up from a solar field. I imagine the fleet of e-bikes connecting villages, and smoky cookstoves starting to give way to induction cooktops. I imagine our world growing warmer much less quickly. I imagine countries that no longer need to pay a staggering bill for imported oil using that money to run schools and clinics instead. I imagine the people who own oil fields growing sad. And I imagine bewildered demogogues everywhere trying to figure out how they can fight a war over sunshine.

But hey, as I said, I’m sometimes prone to dreaming. So I ran the idea by a couple of people whose expertise and passion I trust. The first was Mark Jacobson, the Stanford professor who knows more about renewable energy than anyone on earth. He is a proud wonk, and so he basically responded with a set of numbers, each with a link to the paper cited:

8.6 TW annual-average end-use demand to power 99.6% of the world (149 countries) upon full electrification of all energy sectors from Table 1 of this paper

https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/149Country/149-Countries.pdf

Divide by a mean world PV capacity factor of 20% from Table S12 of the same paper to get ~43 TW of PV nameplate capacity needed to provide that annual-average end-use power.

Multiply by $0.06 per Watt for a Chinese solar panel today.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Cheap-Price-JINGSUN-Monocrystalline-Solar-Panel_11000015231725.html?spm=a2700.7724857.0.0.48681545Z1oo6w

= $2.58 trillion to power the world (ignoring storage, transmission, labor for installing the PV and inverters for converting DC to AC and connecting the PV to the grid or to devices in a home).

Note, however, that the full system cost is much more than the panel cost. Lazard 2025 estimates the U.S. capital cost of utility solar PV panels (including panel, labor, inverters, grid connection, etc.) as $1.15-$1.6/W from page 34 of

https://www.lazard.com/media/uounhon4/lazards-lcoeplus-june-2025.pdf

Using $1.15/W gives $43 trillion.

The paper at the top assumes a mix of WWS technologies and includes storage and transmission and comes up with an overall capital cost to the world (149 countries) of $58 trillion, but due to the annual cost savings, the energy cost payback time is ~6 years and the social cost (energy plus health plus climate cost) payback time is <1 year.

So let’s start at $2.5 trillion, the number for the panels alone, because, hey, Tik Tok videos. Is that an absurd number to imagine helping to pay? The International Monetary Fund reported recently that the world spends $7 trillion a year subsidizing fossil fuel. And all it gets us is the chance to buy more fossil fuel—the last line of Jacobson’s email makes it clear that even at the full price this would be a huge bargain. You save huge amounts of money because you don’t have to pay for fuel any more. Once the panels are up, sunshine is free. It changes everything.

And then I ran it by that solar power guru Danny Kennedy, who travels the world keeping track of—and helping spur—new projects. He’s kind of a wonk too, but not in academic way. So, some ebullience!

As a matter of politics, I've been saying this for ages to philanthropists and others I advise: we need to start using very low-cost solar and batteries as a sword rather than a shield. We should get on the offence rather than play defence around the energy transition. With these cost structures and realities, we can seed fear, uncertainty, and doubt on any capital expense proposed by any fossil fuel proponent anywhere in the world these days.

This is well illustrated by the Wired story on Africa. As for literally drop shipping them as a strategy? Yes—what if we converted a couple of billion dollars of climate philanthropy documenting doom and CO2 parts per million? I'm not saying abandon science, of course, but if we shifted some of that to doing what you're suggesting, we could create significant change with real interventions. Imagine getting in front of an LNG terminal with $100 million worth of PV. That investment would create the same terawatt hours of electricity as X amount of gas imports through said LNG terminal per annum for 25 years, whereas the LNG terminal needs to be refilled annually.

Does it do something like the Fed dropping money from the sky during a recession? I think it's better than that, Bill. It's less of a one-time injection and more like a generational injection of support. It’s like universal basic income that keeps on giving. UBI is a model that some proponents believe in as if it is well invested, then it can grow wealth over time. A PV donation is something that reduces running costs for communities once, twice, and then 20 years running—a gift that keeps on giving.

I’m not quite sure how to get this idea where it needs to go. I’ll send it to the international climate diplomats I know, just to get the conversation going—occasionally ideas really do just take off, like our Heat Pumps for Peace and Freedom campaign which ended up producing a $250 million program from the Biden administration. But this is bigger, more amorphous. I’d love iterations, corrections. And if there are some billionaires out there looking for some good karma—well, take it and run.

In other energy and climate news:

+We’re used to thinking about fossil fuel pollution as a problem mostly in other countries, but a new study shows that 90,000 Americans die each year from breathing the combustion byproducts of oil, gas, and coal. Not surprisingly the damage is concentrated among poor and vulnerable communities. As Dharna Noor writes

More than 10,000 annual pre-term births are attributable to fine particulate matter from oil and gas, the authors found, also linking 216,000 annual childhood-onset asthma cases to the sector’s nitrogen dioxide emissions and 1,610 annual lifetime cancer cases to its hazardous air pollutants.

The highest number of impacts are seen in California, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, while the per-capita incidences are highest in New Jersey, Washington DC, New York, California and Maryland.

The analysis by researchers at University College London and the Stockholm Environment Institute is the first to examine the health impacts – and unequal health burdens – caused by every stage of the oil and gas supply chain, from exploration to end use.

+The EU’s wildfires are the worst on record. Meanwhile Canada’s forest continues to blaze, and Aaron Regunberg has a smart essay in the Boston Globe detailing how this is just one more way climate change is, to use his phrase, “enshittenfying” our lives: . Here’s the non-paywalled version

Two years ago, when the smoke from the Canadian wildfires was similarly intense, it was a huge story. And I don’t just mean in the media, where the image of New York City’s hazy orange skyline became ubiquitous. Where I live, in Providence, it felt like the madness of the wildfires came up in practically every conversation. And no wonder! Our world was filled with carcinogenic smoke from fires so mind-meltingly massive they were affecting us from thousands of miles away. It was eerie, it was unsettling, and it was not something any of us could accept as normal.

But it turns out we can, in fact, accept these smoke-filled skies as normal. This year, in my circles, people barely mentioned the air quality around us. Yes, it’s been unpleasant — in fact, the experience for my family has been harder this summer. We have a 3-month-old now, and it was an extra challenge to be cooped up with him inside all day, unable to take him on a stroller walk to help him fall asleep. But it was unpleasant in a way that already is becoming just “the way things are.”

It’s not just annoying, however—new research finds we’ve underestimated the death toll from breathing this stuff by, oh, 93 percent. Double plus ungood.

+Fascinating account from Audrey Gray about how LGBGTQ Americans are organizing their community to deal with climate disaster, given the fact that the federal government won’t be of any help at all

Before DOGE offed the project in 2025 citing “evolving priorities,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) kept a detailed data set of U.S. weather disasters leaving more than a billion dollars’ damage. Last year, we had 27, Francine and Helene included. While there’s a general sense that first responders do the best they can, Americans have seen enough wreckage now to understand two things: the government is not swooping in to save you or your stuff, and if you are vulnerable in some way before the storm hits, you’re going to have a rougher time recovering. Neighborly goodwill may be the only safety net in the days, weeks and even months post-disaster…just ask Western North Carolina.

But relying on local networks of family, neighbors and volunteers presents real problems for anyone isolated—or shunned—from community life. Case in point: if you are one of approximately 16 million Americans who identify as LGBTQ+ (a number rising fast), you are nearly twice as likely to be displaced after a storm as someone who’s straight.

+When we think of batteries, we usually imagine the lithium-ion devices storing electricity for cellphones or EVs. But industry needs energy storage too, usually in the form of heat, and happily there are proving to be all kinds of ways to make that heat with renewables and then store it in lots of different (and cheap and plentiful) materials:

Some entrepreneurs are looking beyond chemical batteries to store thermal energy directly—a new field called thermal energy storage.

TES systems have substantial advantages over chemical batteries: The raw materials used to store energy—dirt, concrete, salt—are cheap and plentiful. Thermal batteries tend to have very long lifespans—measured in decades rather than years. Also, converting power to heat, or simply storing heat to be used later, is very efficient—in the 95% range.

+Old friend and veteran climate warrior Gina McCarthy has a spirited essay in the Guardian advising us not to despair just yet in the renewables fight

States, cities and local communities have authority to act boldly and work with industries to advance market innovation and install clean energy that creates jobs and lowers the cost of living for families. They still have clean vehicle fleets for cities to purchase and EV charging projects to pursue. They still have tax credits for solar, wind and batteries. There’s more than a decade of geothermal and battery storage tax credits available for cities, schools and health clinics, as well as many more clean energy opportunities we can and must grab.

California, the fourth largest economy in the world, ran on clean energy for 219 days last year. Florida built more large-scale solar infrastructure than California last year. Even in oil country, Texas is setting records for solar, wind and battery capacity.

More than 40 states have green banks and clean energy financing institutions. Twenty-four states are committed to the goals of the Paris climate agreement. They’re developing bilateral climate partnerships with countries that understand the threat of the climate crisis and the opportunity that clean energy provides.

I needed her tonic and confident tone, because it’s one of those truly insane stretches of time in the Trump era. On Friday his administration sent a “stop work” order to the Revolution Wind farm off Rhode Island in order to "address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States." I leave it to you to figure out what the threat to our national security from some wind turbines might be. Meanwhile in Rhode Island, a law firm opposed to offshore wind said it would complain to the federal government to try and get veteran academic Timmons Robert to back off his investigation of wind opponents. As Lisa Friedman explained,

The demands come at a precarious time for the nation’s universities, which have become targets of a pressure campaign conducted by the Trump administration. Last month, Brown struck a deal with the government to restore lost federal research funding and end investigations into alleged discrimination.

The Trump administration is trying to stop the country’s nascent wind industry, a source of energy that President Trump has disparaged since he failed to stop an offshore wind farm from being built within view of one of his Scottish golf courses.

One initiative the Trump administration hasn’t been able to kill is the roll-out of EV chargers across the nation. Unable to figure out a legal rationale to stop the funding Congress had appropriated, the Department of Transportation has released billions of dollars for the program, though it is forcing states to reapply for the money.

+In Europe, military planners are figuring out that bogs are a way to simultaneously slow down Russian tanks and trap greenhouse gases. As Politico reports,

The idea isn’t only to prepare for a potential Russian attack. The European Union’s efforts to fight global warming rely in part on nature’s help, and peat-rich bogs capture planet-warming carbon dioxide just as well as they sink enemy tanks.

Yet half of the EU’s bogs are being sapped of their water to create land suitable for planting crops. The desiccated peatlands in turn release greenhouse gases and allow heavy vehicles to cross with ease.

Some European governments are now wondering if reviving ailing bogs can solve several problems at once. Finland and Poland told POLITICO they were actively exploring bog restoration as a multipurpose measure to defend their borders and fight climate change.

+Intrepid journalist Keith Schneider has a new account of the way lax federal enforcement is leaving Midwesterners dangerously exposed to badly polluted water

What Trump is pursuing now, just like Iowa did starting in the early years of the century, is a perilously different course in how America manages its natural resources. Trump explained the rationale for MAPA in a statement in April that argued environmental safeguards were “a drag on progress.” By allowing industry to evade regulation and increase polluted discharges to air and water, the statement said, “we can stimulate innovation and deliver prosperity to everyday Americans.”

That’s essentially the logic that over time led to Iowa’s wretched water. Some 30 million of Iowa’s 36 million acres is farmland. Until the late 1970s and 1980s Iowa agriculture encompassed nearly 134,000 farms, most of them much less ecologically damaging 300-acre to 400-acre mixed crop operations with manageable herds of hogs and dairy cows raised in pastures.

+Check this out: Scientists have figured out a way to use solar panels at night to track potentially dangerous asteroids. Saving the world in more ways than one!

At night, starlight or other objects in the sky fall onto the heliostats. This light is too weak to be used for heating, but it is strong enough for the entire system to detect it. Photodiodes on the surface of the heliostats generate a flow of energy when they register light. In the case of the night sky, this flow is small but allows for the detection of specific objects.

“It’s like listening to wind chimes instead of the wind itself,” the inventor explained to Space.com. “The heliostats shift subtly relative to the stars, keeping a steady rhythm throughout the night. The stream of light from the stars creates one tone. Light from an asteroid that moves along with that shift generates a slightly different tone because each shift hits the asteroid at a slightly different spot relative to the stars.”

Meanwhile, in Japan, researchers are figuring out how to use osmotic pressure in desalinization plants to produce energy. Ima Caldwell writes:

Osmotic power plants place freshwater and seawater on either side of a special membrane, with the seawater slightly pressurised.

As water flows across to the saltier side, it increases the volume of pressurised solution, which can then be harnessed to produce energy.

In the Fukuoka facility, fresh water – or treated wastewater – and seawater are placed on either side of a membrane. As the side with seawater increases in pressure and decreases in salinity, some of the water is channelled through a turbine that is connected to a generator, producing power.

And one more: in India they’re experimenting with putting solar panels between train tracks. Prabhat Mishra offers the latest from the holy city of Varanasi along the Ganges:

This initiative was launched by Banaras Locomotive Works (BLW). This project not only promotes renewable energy in India but also makes use of unused track space, avoiding the need for land acquisition.

Do I think this will turn into a huge thing? Who knows—it interests me mostly because it shows that out in the rational world countries are still proud of efforts to cut carbon, and looking for every opportunity to make use of ever-cheaper solar. Train tracks! Why not!

And so I can’t resist adding one more—a Tasmanian company has finished building the largest electric ship on the planet, a large ferry that will be used in Uruguay. I rode a retrofitted electric ferry earlier this month in Oslo harbor—it was quiet, and with none of the vibration that usually heralds ferry travel!

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