Skip to main content
MIT
Climate
Search

Main navigation

  • Climate 101
    • What We Know
    • What Can Be Done
    • Climate Primer
  • Explore
    • Explainers
    • Ask MIT Climate
    • Podcast
  • MIT Action
    • News
    • Events
    • Resources
  • Search

Main navigation

  • Climate 101
    • What We Know
    • What Can Be Done
    • Climate Primer
  • Explore
    • Explainers
    • Ask MIT Climate
    • Podcast
  • MIT Action
    • News
    • Events
    • Resources
  • Search
PostJune 30, 2021

Cheaper solar PV is key to addressing climate change

Image of exaggerated penny over house with solar panels

In late 2007, less than 10 years into the company’s existence, Google came out swinging on the clean energy front. To a fanfare of plaudits up and down Silicon Valley and well beyond, it declared “RE<C” as its goal: make renewable energy cheaper than coal. The company invested tens of millions of dollars into R&D efforts from concentrated solar power to hydrothermal drilling. Four years later, those efforts had been scrapped.

It would be all too easy to see this as an admission of failure—big tech playing in an arena it knew nothing about, with the hubris that Silicon Valley is known for. But something else was going on. Google’s shift in strategy was a reflection of the growing success of the solar sector. Google realized its energies were better directed toward massively scaling up existing renewable technologies that had plummeted in price, rather than inventing new ones.

While Google nailed the switch from R&D to deployment, it arguably still bet big on scaling up the wrong technology. In the early 2010s, the solar race looked like a tight competition between solar photovoltaic (PV) and utility-scale concentrated solar power (CSP), which uses sun-heated fluids to drive power turbines. Google quickly invested more than $1 billion in a slew of renewables companies and utilities, including big investments in CSP outfits BrightSource Energy and eSolar. A decade later, such choices aren’t looking promising, as CSP, too, has been losing out to PV’s continuing rapid cost declines, writes Gernot Wagner for the MIT Technology Review. 

Read the full article at: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/30/1026507/cheap-solar-pv-google-clean-energy/

Image Credits: Andrea Daquino

Share
facebook linkedin twitter email compact
by MIT Technology Review
Topics
Energy
Renewable Energy
Industry & Manufacturing

Related Posts

PostOctober 26, 2022

News Electricity Retail Rate Design in a Decarbonizing Economy: An Analysis...

MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research
PostOctober 20, 2022

Billions in funding could kick-start the US battery materials industry

MIT Technology Review
PostOctober 19, 2022

2022 C3E Women in Clean Energy Symposium & Awards

MIT Energy Initiative
PostOctober 18, 2022

Rational Rationing: A Price-Control Mechanism for a Persistent Supply Shock...

MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research

MIT Climate News in Your Inbox

 
 

MIT Groups Log In

Log In

Footer

  • About
  • Terms & Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
  • Accessibility
  • Contact
Environmental Solutions Initiative
MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge MA 02139-4307
Communicator Award Winner
Communicator Award Winner