The Economist reported recently that “Cheap solar power is sending electrical grids into a death spiral”. Solar power is now so cheap that it is breaking the model used to regulate the supply of energy in many nations. Pakistan, the Economist reports, “has sky-high energy prices, a legacy of expensive contracts to pay for capacity from often Chinese-built coal plants.” But in 2024, Pakistan became the third-biggest importer of Chinese solar panels. The expansion of local solar power generation, combined with the adoption of cheap battery technology, has undermined the economics of Pakistan’s national grid. Although not necessarily a good thing in itself, this remarkable development provides powerful evidence of the potential of cheap renewable electricity to democratise access to energy. South Africa has also seen a solar boom, while in Lebanon, solar capacity has expanded “from 100 to 1,300 megawatts from 2020 to 2023”. Meanwhile, Texas, the oil state, has been one of the world’s biggest investors in wind power and now has fast-growing solar energy capacity (for example see this massive development that will provide power for 50,000 homes). And China now leads the world in renewables; the International Energy Agency reports that by the end of 2030, China is expected to have “at least half of the world’s cumulative renewable electricity capacity”.

The Right tries to cast those arguing for a transition to renewable energy as idealistic extremists fighting to preserve the ideological obsessions of a privileged elite; Ed Miliband is caricatured by the right-wing press as a “zealot” – somebody who is fundamentally unhinged. However, as the examples above illustrate, it is straightforwardeconomic considerations that are driving rapid adoption of reneable energy in parts of the world where there is no ideological imperative to “go green”. Renewable energy is much cheaper than fossil fuel energy. The unhinged zealots are those who cling to the belief that North Sea gas and oil can provide the nation with a prosperous future: pursuing a policy to abandon renewable energy in favour of dependence on shale gas (a finite resource that is expensive to exploit – see previous post) and “extracting every last drop” from the North Sea is the very opposite of patriotism because it will greatly increase energy costs for ordinary British people.

Far from being the preserve of elites, renewables promise to democratise energy in a way that is anathema to the real elites – the oil cartels in the Middle East and Trump’s financial backers in the fossil fuel industry – who are fighting to preserve their own wealth and power. The patriotic path, the socially equitable path and the way to make the nation wealthier and more secure – never mind any of the much bigger considerations about avoiding global extinction for humanity – is to accelerate the transition to green technologies.