I was interviewed by Robert Linton on the Green Numbers Radio Show. Here are some excerpts and links to the interview.
Radio interview, Part 1
Excerpts:
Robert Linton – This is Robert Linton, your host for Green Numbers Radio Ask the Experts Show. Tony, for you new book Solar Trillions, what is the premise?
Tony Seba: Well, Robert, thanks for having me on the show today. The premise is simple: the clean energy economy will provide the largest wealth-building opportunities in history. The world will spend $382 trillions in energy over the next 40 years and every aspect of this industry is up for grabs: from generation to transportation to energy storage to use. And Solar Trillions shows seven of those business opportunities that are worth trillions as the title says.
RL: Outstanding. I know you spent a lot of time researching for this book. Could you highlight some of the major findings in this book as far as solar?
Tony Seba: Sure. In researching the book I looked at energy starting from the year 2050, so forty years from now and then I backtracked.
RL: How did you pick the year 2050?
Tony Seba: 2050 because a power plant is a forty year investment, so every investment that we make today is going to last forty years. I looked at the science of energy (where do sources come from?), I looked at the technology aspects of energy (How are we going to store it, generate it and use it?). And the findings are fascinating, actually:
1) No other primary source of energy can scale like solar can. Nothing comes even close. Just to give you an indication, just one hour of sunshine can power the whole planet for a whole year. Therefore the 21st century will be powered mainly by solar.
2) The architecture of energy will change radically. By this we mean the way we transform, generate, transmit, and use energy in 30 years will be totally different from the way we do it today. This is what some call “Electricity 2.0”.
Then, when I put together these two findings, I realized how gigantic these opportunities are going to be and it’s going to be mostly solar.
RL: Wow, that’s amazing. You know there are a lot of myths right now regarding solar power. Could you dispel some of those myths based on what you found in your research and actual facts?
Tony Seba: Certainly. The first big myth is that solar power is too expensive. The truth is that for more than two, maybe three billion people around the world, solar is already cheap. They mostly get their energy from kerosene or diesel and pay up to $2 per kWh. By comparison, in America pay about 10 cents. There are a couple billion people paying $2, so by comparison, solar is about 20 cents today. So it turns out that solar is already cheaper by 50 to 90% for a couple of billion people.
RL: Especially if you take away the incentives that they give to the fossil fuel industry.
Tony Seba: Exactly, that doesn’t take into account all the subsidies and so on. Another myth is that solar has an energy storage problem, meaning that it doesn’t really work when the sun goes down. And the fact is that there is a solar plant in Spain that has 7 hours of storage. This technology is called molten salts, it’s cheap and environmentally safe and it means that they general solar power for 7 hours after sundown, which is pretty cool, huh? And Spain is building a solar power plant that is going to be open 24/7 which basically demystifies all these things have been said about solar.
And another one that I want to tell you about is the myth that solar power = equal = solar panels on a rooftop, which is what we see. In fact, most of the solar power that’s ever been generated comes from a technology called Concentrating Solar Power (CSP), which uses mirrors, not PV, out in the desert. And just to give you an indication, the Economist (the magazine) recently said that this is a single solar CSP plant being built in the Mojave Desert that is going to generate more than all the solar panels that were purchased in the US last year.
RL: In your book, Tony, you compare the clean energy economy to the information economy. They sound so different, but how are they related, though, because there are some parallels between them.
Tony Seba: Yes, and the way I see it today, 2010, equals the computer industry in 1980, thirty years ago. And I’ll tell you what I mean by that. Thirty years ago, the computer model was a big mainframe out there, and users (who were “dumb”) were here. Data was scarce and was controlled and expensive. Then, the PC (personal computer), the Internet and the cell phone came around, and totally transformed the architecture of computing and created new trillion-dollar industries or many. And now pretty much anybody can use, transform and store data, which thirty years ago was unthinkable.
Similarly, in energy today the model is that you have the big mainframes, the big power plants out there, and the “dumb” users in here. So the technologies that are being built right now are similar to what the PC and the Internet and the cell phone are for information, so that in thirty years, energy will be cheap, energy will be social, pretty much anybody will be able to generate, transform, use and store energy just the way that we can with data.
RL: In your book, you wrote about the creation of a clean energy economy. What do you mean?
Tony Seba: That’s a great question since there seems to be no clear definition; it means different things to different people. In principle the clean energy economy encompasses all economic activities from sourcing energy to generation, distribution, storage, and use of energy. Since basically all aspects of our economy consume energy, you can define the clean energy economy any way you want. In the book, I focus on 7 aspects of clean energy, and that includes the whole value chain of these opportunities, including solar, large-scale solar, island scale, clean water, the smart grid, and so on.
RL: So they have to scale to the trillion dollar market before you consider them in your book, is that correct?
Tony Seba: Yes, what I did in the book is I asked myself three questions:
1) Is this source of energy clean?
2) Will it scale… scale to massive proportions, trillions of watts per year? And
3) Is it now or will it soon be financially viable?
And those were the questions that I asked myself. Wind and solar by the way get high grades. Most other sources fail at one or all three.
RL: Water is one of my pet-peeves as far as how we misuse it. And most of the time, we actually only look at water when it comes from the spigot, but given the fact that we are facing a water crisis, it’s unusual to hear about clean water, in the same conversation as energy and especially solar, can you tell us about that?
Tony Seba: Certainly, water is a huge issue. And in my opinion, while a lot of people talk about peak oil, I think that peak water will be here before peak oil, from Australia, to the Middle East to Africa, even America, water is going to hit massive crisis proportions.
RL: Hold that thought, we need to take a commercial break…..
Comments on this entry are closed.