Global Energy Crisis? It’s The Sun Wot Won It

For years a war has been waged in the nuttier quarters of the press, with the aid of the nuttier quarters of the scientific community, against solar power.

It isn’t just that the people who hated it didn’t think it would work, it is that, for reasons that may require psychological study, they actively wanted it to fail.

Power from the sun, they would say, a laughable idea! Have these fools not noticed how much it rains in this country?

Dominic Lawson was the leader of the sun haters. As far back as November 2011 he was writing “Good riddance to the great solar scam”.

Subsidising the nascent solar power trade was not only a waste of money, it was unfair on other, powerless, energy companies such as Shell who had no way to influence government policy.

The arguments against solar power were odd, as I say, because they plainly came from an angry dislike of basically any alternative energy source.

Wind? Not enough of it. Sea? Too far away and interferes with those nice oil rigs.

Now, if a new technology were something the sunshine deniers liked – nuclear weapons, foxes that shoot themselves – they would have defended subsidies and early failures as just part of the market sorting itself out, which it does over time and in sometimes contradictory ways.

That’s biz, they would have said.

Unfortunately for this crowd, the sun is winning.

Solar panels are now so cheap that are they being used to build garden fences.

They capture less sunlight as fences than they do on roofs, but they are still cost efficient. So you might as well.

Jenny Chase, lead solar analyst at BloombergNEF, says: “This is the result of solar panels getting so cheap that we’re just putting them everywhere.”

Solar Energy UK, the trade body, is presumably Dancing In the Moonlight at all this.

Lawson, one suspects, remains ambivalent about solar power and isn’t too sure about gravity.

What about the popular press? Well to its credit, The Sun – which the star 93 million miles away is named after – did in April 2022 offer a piece on how installing solar panels might save you hundreds of quid a year.

One has always been tempted to ask those City hacks who insisted that oil was the fuel of the future, which was likely to last longest, the star at the centre of our solar system said to have about 5 billion years of useful life left, or Exxon Mobil?

Some seem so committed to their oil religion one suspects that if it were possible, they would short shares in the sun. 

I guess one lesson here is that if your product is good enough you don’t really need any PR.

Solution to the global energy crisis? It’s the sun wot won it.

 (The Sun, I fear, is beyond even the best PR help.)