Power to the people: How solar energy — cheap, plentiful and available everywhere — is poised to change the world

As you may have heard, solar energy is having a moment. Thanks to several technological breakthroughs, it’s now the cheapest form of energy generation in most places on Earth. This past summer, for the first time ever, it became the EU’s main source of electricity, and many other parts of the world — Pakistan, Nigeria and most famously, China — are likewise in the midst of a solar boom of astonishing speed and scale. In this episode, experts weigh in on the social, political and economic implications of this revolutionary energy shift — and the complicated way that Canada fits into it all.

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Narration: For years, solar technology was considered too expensive and inefficient. But if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that solar at long last is having its moment. It’s now the cheapest form of electricity generation almost everywhere on Earth.

Mike Andrade: It has reached the stage where solar is inexpensive enough, reliable enough, and easy to install and maintain that individuals can do it on their own without a lot of support.

Narration: We’re now at a crucial point in the technology’s development, and that’s giving people hope that solar energy may have passed a positive tipping point. This past summer, for the first time ever, it became the European Union’s main source of electricity. And other parts of the world — Pakistan, Nigeria and, most famously, China — are also in the midst of a solar boom of unbelievable speed and scale.

According to the International Energy Agency, solar and wind power are expected to meet half of the world’s demand for electricity by 2030. Solar could help us avoid the worst of the climate crisis, while also transforming the world socially, politically and economically.

But where does Canada fit into all of this? Well, that’s complicated. For a variety of reasons, we haven’t embraced solar with the same fervor as the rest of the world, and some experts worry we’re at serious risk of falling behind.

I’m Manjula Selvarajah, and this is Solve for X: Innovations to Change the World, a series where we explore the latest ideas in tech and science.

To make sense of this massive energy shift, I reached out to two experts in the solar field. Sara Hastings-Simon is a professor at the University of Calgary, where she studies energy transitions at the intersection of policy, business and technology. She’s also the co-host of the podcast Energy vs Climate.

Mike Andrade is the CEO of Morgan Solar, a Toronto company that specializes in solar energy solutions. As a former executive at IBM and Celestica, he’s seen firsthand the disruptive power of new technologies and has been anticipating solar’s rise for years now. I asked them both how excited they are about this moment.

Manjula Selvarajah: Sarah, I’ll start with you.

Sara Hastings-Simon: Sure. So, I think it’s really exciting in terms of the scale of the impact solar is starting to have. You know, we’re talking about going from, just back in 2012 when basically, at the global scale, solar’s contribution to the electricity generation rounded down to zero, and now in 2024, we’re looking at something like 7 percent of global production.

So, it’s really started to, as you said, kind of reach this point where it’s becoming really impactful. But in some sense, it’s really just a continuation of a trend that has been going on for — it’s fair to say — even decades as the cost of solar comes down and the amount of solar being installed continues to grow exponentially. I think from the outside it can feel like, “Wow, that came out of nowhere, what happened?” But I would argue that it’s simultaneously very, very exciting and also very expected — if you’ve been watching what’s been going on in this space.

Manjula Selvarajah: Mike?

Mike Andrade: I’ve been in the industry since 2005, something like that. And I’m almost kind of exhausted because it’s such an intense industry. They call it the solar coaster. It’s up and down and governments are weighing in and public opinion swings all around. So, all of the things that go in place to really expand a technology are now in place for solar. This is inevitable and what is now news for people is old news for us. So, I think we’re looking forward now. Yeah, sure, it’s exciting, the real change is going to come now.

Manjula Selvarajah: I mean, I’ve heard you talk about how in Pakistan the government there discovered how widespread solar use was by looking at satellite pictures. Is that right?

Mike Andrade: Yeah, the first implementation of any disruptive technology is people just drop it into the existing system. Say, “Oh, I’ll replace a coal plant with a solar plant.” So, governments think that they can control the disruptive technology because hey, we’ll control who applies it and who puts it in the grid and what the pricing for it and all that. What happened in Pakistan is, really, to me, the exciting part of it. It has reached the stage where solar is inexpensive enough, reliable enough, and easy to install and maintain that individuals can do it on their own without a lot of support.

And so, Pakistan was following the path of, well, we’re going to implement some solar and meanwhile we’ll just fit it into the grid. And the grid was unreliable and expensive, and so people just made their own decision to put solar on their roof of their house or their factory. And the only way that they found out — it’s like the dog that didn’t bark, that Sherlock Holmes story — is that you only know this has happened because there was an absence of demand on the grid. Even though Pakistan’s economic growth and electricity consumption should have been increasing, they only found out why that was because they did the satellite views and saw all this solar on the roof they didn’t even know existed.

Manjula Selvarajah: Sara, are we at a point where the energy transition is inevitable?

Sara Hastings-Simon: I think — I want to say yes. I’m pausing because in some sense we are simultaneously doing the things that we need to do to transform our energy system and to address climate in a way that we never have before, and we’re still not doing them quite fast enough.

The fundamentals, the way that costs are coming down, as Mike said, the way that it is so inherently a distributed form of energy…Which is not to say there won’t be utility-scale solar also. But it’s a kind of system that is very hard to block centrally. You can certainly slow it down, as we’ve seen, for example, in Alberta where I’m sitting.

But in the last two years we installed as much solar globally as we installed in the first 68 years of installing solar, right? So that’s just another way of saying it’s growing exponentially. I think as humans, we’re not very good at wrapping our head around just how big exponential growth is. This year, in 2025, we’re on track to beat the record that was set last year in 2024. So, the solar growth is really just moving ahead.

Manjula Selvarajah: So very quickly, for some of our audience that may not understand the reference to Alberta, can you quickly explain what that is?

Sara Hastings-Simon: Sure. So, in Alberta, we had a couple years back now, some new rules put in place. Well, really, first a pause on new utility-scale solar installations. And then a set of rules put in place that limit where solar can be installed. I should say, this is not totally unique to Alberta. You’re seeing some of this kind of pushback in various places across North America, for example. But basically, laws that are making it harder to build utility-scale solar plants.

Manjula Selvarajah: So, what we have now — I mean, we’ve mentioned it a couple of times in the conversation already — is that solar is now the cheapest form of energy on the planet. And in some sense, I think the prices have fallen faster than even experts expected. What changed, Sara? How did it get so cheap so fast?

Sara Hastings-Simon: From a very fundamental level, I would say the reason that solar has been getting so cheap, while, for example, you haven’t seen other fossil fuels continuing down a similar curve is that with a non-renewable resource, once you extract that oil or that natural gas, you have to find oil and gas that’s much, much harder to extract. Whereas in solar, you know, we’re lucky that the sun comes up the next day. Hopefully. Otherwise, we have bigger problems. And so more of your cost reductions are able to go to your bottom line because you’re not fighting this declining resource. Now, if we look at solar directly, its cost declines have been not totally dissimilar from some of the consumer electronics that we may be familiar with, right? So, depending on your age, you know, I remember our first family computer didn’t have a hard drive. You had to put a disk into it to boot it up.

Manjula Selvarajah: And we’ve seen those prices, yeah, those prices fall, too.

Sara Hastings-Simon: Exactly. So, you have basically a combination of economies of scale, you have learning by doing. So, companies have gotten better at building things. And then also added in there is improving efficiency of the solar panels themselves, which means that the costs come down. And so all those things have come together to drop the cost dramatically. More than 99 percent since the 1970s, for example.

Manjula Selvarajah: Mike, you know, I think about that journey that Sarah’s just talked about, the personal computer and the price dropping. And now the price of solar dropping so much. Why didn’t we see this coming?

Mike Andrade: Well, some of us did. My journey to solar came from technology. And it was formed at IBM when I was working there, and the PC was disrupting the mainframe. And then we saw the same thing happen when digital packet switching was disrupting like twisted-pair copper for communication.

And then we saw it in storage devices as we moved away from platters of rotating discs into solid state arrays. Somewhere around there we said, this is not just isolated to computers or to communications. The meta-level change is that if you can move away from mechanical to electronic things that are modular, you unlock a couple of things. One was the Wright’s Law thing Sara talked about. But when you can turbocharge that by also having some sort of efficiency per widget — which is, you know, most famously Moore’s Law — but when you can combine those two things, they remorselessly move forward and just outcompete everything.

Manjula Selvarajah: It’s almost this case of where, as a tech veteran, you saw this happen again and again.

Mike Andrade: Yes.

Manjula Selvarajah: And you said, well, here’s a space that’s ripe for it.

Mike Andrade: Correct.

Manjula Selvarajah: So, Mike, what do you think, when you look at sort of cheap solar energy, what do you think that could unlock for the planet?

Mike Andrade: I think the lesson from history, tech history, is we first consider the new tech as some new shiny version of the old tech, right? So, right now we just think, OK, it’s unlocking cheaper electricity to be used the way we’re using it now. However, just like we’ve seen with — I’m going to say the internet — I mean, we thought we knew what was going to happen during dot-com and it’s turned out to be very different. Some of that good, some of that bad. Same thing when we got into mobile computing. You know it, some of what we thought was, oh, cheaper phone calls, but not completely different business models.

So, the first thing I’m going to say is we should not pretend that we would understand what a new disruptive technology is going to enable. Because what we do is we walk into history looking backwards, right? And so we say, oh, well it’s going to just be a cheaper form of X. Or maybe, if we’re imaginative, we say, well, the fact that we can put it on the roof gives power and control — basically, literally — power to the people. My belief though, is because it’s ubiquitous and inexpensive, it essentially democratizes energy, which is a fundamental building block for human evolution and allows us to figure out in a very granular way — I only need one panel, two panel, three panel — and that will just turn into things that we have no idea because there’s billions of people who are going to figure out how do they use their energy because they use it every single day.

Manjula Selvarajah: You know, what you’re talking about is — because this is not just about, oh, I get cheaper energy — but unlocking creative ideas in the brains of people who are going to go forth and do all sorts of things with it. And that could even mean changing relationships between countries and the world. It could change how a city looks like. But it could be as big as changing how countries work with each other and what we depend on each other for.

Mike Andrade: And because energy is more universal than any of those other technologies, I expect that the impact is going to be broader and more universal and all-encompassing. And because it’s going to be from a bottoms-up, yeah, it’s far less predictable. And you could even argue that energy has been the purview of countries and the way that governments get power, and regions assert power and why wars are started; it has macro geopolitical implications that occur faster and less predictably than other energy or any other technologies as well.

Manjula Selvarajah: Sara, I’m going to take us from that global picture to this country. Where does Canada stand in all of this?

Sara Hastings-Simon: So, I definitely agree with Mike. I think the geopolitical piece really can’t be understated. A very large part of our geopolitics is shaped around where energy comes from and how it moves around.

And so, Canada as a, you know, major exporter of energy is going to be very impacted. You know, I think sometimes when people think about transition or want to talk about these reshaping, they sort of argue that — oh, it doesn’t — you know, it’s not until we’re using 100 percent solar power. Which you know is not going to happen, right? Solar is going to be dominant, but it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be the only source of energy. And then they use that to try to say so, like things will just be the same as they always were. But there’s actually so many dynamics that come up even when you just start to change from, you know, a world that has been for a century and more, using increasing amounts of oil and gas to one that is no longer increasing. Even before you get to the decline, even when you just get to stagnation, you’re already really introducing big shocks into this kind of global economic system that will reverberate backwards into Canada.

So let me pick an example to make this a little bit more real and less kind of pie-in-the-sky. You know, one of the countries that is — or really, I should say the country that is moving the fastest on solar and on electrification of their economy, is China. It’s not an overstatement to say that a big part of China’s interest here — you know, some of it is in climate, and of course, one of the things that I hope that solar will do is allow us to limit the really devastating impacts of climate change that we’re already starting to see, to limit us to a 1.5 or two degree Celsius world, ideally — and that’s part of China’s motivation. But another really big part of China’s motivation for installing solar and electrifying their economy is to produce their energy at home and to stop being a major energy importer.

Manjula Selvarajah: It’s independence.

Sara Hastings-Simon: Exactly, it’s independence. You know, the same thing — I spoke recently, actually for our podcast, with an expert from India, and you know, the same thing there; there’s a real desire to not get locked into the cycle of continuing to purchase energy elsewhere.

And so, bringing that back home to Canada, I think it is unavoidable that it’s going to have some serious impacts on the quantity and price of the energy exports. And here again with my Alberta hat on, I’m thinking of things like oil and gas, it’s going to have a serious impact on the demand for those products, you know. And, and you’re already starting to see the two- and three-wheeler electrification that’s happening in China and starting to happen more in India, you’re already starting to see that take a meaningful bite out of the global demand for oil.

Manjula Selvarajah: Where do you think things stand now? Is Canada a front runner here? Are we a laggard?

Sara Hastings-Simon: In terms of installing solar?

Manjula Selvarajah: In terms of solar adoption.

Sara Hastings-Simon: I mean, we’re definitely on the slower side, I would say. If you compare us to the U.S. and to various places in Europe. That said, we did see just very recently, in less than five years, really dramatic growth of solar in Alberta, in my home province. Actually, you know, vastly exceeding the long-term forecast that the system operator had. So, we are starting to see that growth happening here. In terms of the percentage of energy that’s coming from solar in a given country, I think we’re going to end up at a lower level in Canada than elsewhere. And that’s a combination of a couple of things. You know, we are a northern country, and we also, of course, have a very significant hydro capacity as well, too. So, when you’re looking at kind of where we started with our electricity mix, it is different than other places.

Again, I don’t want to, you know — I want to make sure that I’m clear and this is where these energy things, I think, are often talked about in this black-and-white way. Like, oh, we’re in the north so solar doesn’t work, or it doesn’t make sense, or you know, it’s useless, which is completely not the case. And I think we are going to see more solar being built here. I’m really just saying that we’re very unlikely, as a country, to see as much of our energy coming from solar as say closer to the equator, even down into the southern United States —

Manjula Selvarajah: Where we will see the adoption happen a lot faster, perhaps.

Sara Hastings-Simon: Yeah. And it’s just easier to integrate these very, very high levels of solar on an annual basis.

Manjula Selvarajah: You know, Mike, I feel like you’re itching to get a word in here.

Mike Andrade: We’re not even in the conversation when it comes to solar. I can’t stress enough how far behind we are. Places like the Netherlands, which have six times the amount of solar installed, factually, today. They installed more solar in a year than we’ve installed ever. Now, last time I checked, they’re a very small country that’s pretty windy, pretty cloudy, pretty rainy, not much space. So, it’s more important to me to hear the reasons why people think that solar wouldn’t work. And it usually comes down to, well, we’re pretty far north, or we don’t have a lot of sun. Or, I’ve heard, ridiculously, we don’t have enough space around Toronto. But then you look at something like the Netherlands and you see what they’ve done. And then you say, OK, well those can’t be true because the Netherlands have done that. OK, well, let’s move on to maybe Germany. They have like 25 times — 20 times the amount of solar that we have and less insulation than most of where Canadians live (insulation is the amount of solar to energy.

I guess I just think we are having a non-factual, emotional response based on the fact that we have an incumbency model around our hydroelectric and oil and gas that has captured the thinking about what energy is and how it could work and all that. And it doesn’t even compute for me.

Manjula Selvarajah: I wonder — is this about identity? Does solar challenge our identity as an energy producer?

Mike Andrade: The more successful the incumbent is, and the longer they’ve been successful, the more resistance and inertia exists. And Canada has tremendous inertia on hydroelectricity, our electricity grid, nuclear power, oil and gas. There’s massive incumbency and massive inertia and historical success. You know, there’s the old saying, science advances one funeral at a time. I actually do not think that people will change their mind. I just think they have to be replaced because they’re outcompeted, and that’s what I saw always. It started off with IBM where they went through a near death experience. They were the best company for decades and almost died because they got the PC transfer —

Manjula Selvarajah: They missed the, yeah —

Mike Andrade: Even though they were the major proponent of PCs. And we know all the story about Kodak, right, they invented the digital camera and got blown away. So, my point being is that same success, inertia and experience blinds you to the new, blinds you to what is possible. Almost by definition. The stronger and more successful you have been, and the longer you have been in that, you know, form, the more likely you’re going to get the transition wrong.

Manjula Selvarajah: The slower you will be to climb onto the revolution.

Mike Andrade: And you’re seeing that in Canada.

Narration: Moving from an old technology to a new one can be extremely challenging, and this is even more true with a major energy transition, where you need to build all new infrastructure, retire old assets and keep the whole thing running at the same time. Sara and others even have a name for this. They call it the messy middle. Take Canada, for example, from an electricity point of view, Canada is like 14 different countries each with their own regulatory regime. So, I asked Sara what challenges we’ll need to clear to get through this mid transition.

Sara Hastings-Simon: Often technology doesn’t get adopted in a place because people just aren’t really even aware of it. And I mean, I know that sounds kind of crazy to say, like, oh, well people aren’t aware that solar exists. But they may lack the information about exactly the cost of it and so forth. And I think you see the result of that if you look at what’s happened in Alberta. You basically had, you know, no solar and you had a government procurement. And on the back end of that, at the end of 2024, we had 1.8 megawatts of solar capacity installed in the province. So, to give you something to compare that to — our total electricity generation capacity in Alberta is around 20 megawatts.

Manjula Selvarajah: It’s substantial.

Sara Hastings-Simon: Which is, you know, again, capacity factors are different and, you know, we could quibble about how you calculate that exactly. But I think it’s fair to say that that’s a substantial amount of solar that essentially came out of nowhere. One of the drivers for that was really this government procurement that helped make private companies aware that this could be done.

So, how do you replicate that elsewhere? It’s hard to do the private company piece because the structure of the utility market, the way this is run, is very different across. But you do need, I think, top-down guidance and pressure on the utilities from the elected officials who can understand this would be beneficial for the people of Canada to build out our solar production capacity. You know, we can get more cheap power relatively easily. As Mike said, people are arguing about whether there’s space for solar in European countries and they’re somehow, you know, finding it there. And yet people are arguing about whether there’s space for solar in one of the largest countries in the world, right? I mean, what do we have in Canada, if not space?

Manjula Selvarajah: Mm-hmm.

Sara Hastings-Simon: Which is not to say we don’t need to be thoughtful about where we put it and all these things, you know. Again, it is a very solvable problem. It would be very beneficial for the people of Canada and for companies in Canada to be producing more low-cost power from the solar resource that we have available.

Manjula Selvarajah: I’m curious, since we’ve spoken about ways that Canada’s not sort of jumping on this revolution. But I’m sure there are bright spots. Where are you already seeing signs of change? I know that Sara, you’ve mentioned this one change in Alberta. Mike, are there places that you see, you know, the sunbelt or places that you see change happening when it comes to the adoption of solar?

Mike Andrade: Not really in Canada. No, I don’t see. In fact, I would argue that it’s certainly gone backwards in Alberta, which was a bright spot. We established a very large solar facility there with some innovative new technology, and then that’s all stopped. And in Ontario, I mean, it’s better than it was five years ago, but that’s damned by faint praise. I mean, they shut down solar and EVs and batteries. And so, I actually don’t see a lot of bright spots in Canada and I view whatever progress is occurring needs to be viewed against the pace of what’s happening elsewhere in the world. We’re falling farther and farther behind, if anything.

Sara Hastings-Simon: Yeah, I mean you know, it’s sort of a glass half full glass, half empty compared with pre-2020 when we had no utility-scale solar essentially in Canada. It’s certainly looking a lot brighter. Like Mike said, you know, we’ve taken some serious steps backwards. But I think that the challenges that Canada is facing with the U.S. has to some extent — I’m optimistic at least — opened up a little bit more of a willingness to how we might better integrate our provinces around interprovincial transmission lines and things like that. Otherwise, I would say the brightest spot to me is the fact that, while we may be falling behind in Canada, at least the rest of the world is continuing to install solar and continuing to bring the cost of solar down so that, you know, when we’re ready to jump on this opportunity, we will benefit from that.

And so the policies that we’re talking about being needed are not massive subsidies, right? It’s really about removing the barriers that are in place that are keeping solar from being constructed. And so if I, again, if I’m trying to be my optimistic self, the challenge continues to get easier as the cost of solar comes down.

Manjula Selvarajah: You’re talking about this pressure from sort of other countries jumping on the bandwagon, right? I think that some people will make the energy transition here because of necessity. I mean, I think of Old Crow, Yukon. We spoke to the chief of that community, Chief Tizya-Tramm on this podcast, and his community had made the transition because they weren’t connected to the grid. You know, I wonder what does it mean that you have some communities that are going all in on solar? Meanwhile, what you’re also seeing is politicians, policy-makers, stall on integrating renewables. Mike?

Mike Andrade: Pakistan, that’s the same story there. It’s Texas. Texas is passing ridiculously draconian, anti-solar, wind and battery law. And look what’s happening there. They’re installing more solar and batteries than anywhere else. So I think all it says is that it’s power to the people. People can make decisions that make sense to them, and you can try and block it centrally as much as you possibly can, but that people make the call. And it’s just like, you know, Africa, which didn’t have the phone infrastructure we had, or computing infrastructure. I mean, they just leapfrogged and they went right to mobile phones. They never had wireline telephony. And they are growing extremely fast in solar. So basically the people in the north who unfortunately don’t have grid access, their choices are diesel gen sets or not a lot of power. And so they’re making the call that’s right for them, and that’s what solar and batteries allow you to do.

And I feel the government in Canada, I think you could argue, is captured by our oil and gas sector and probably our utilities and thinks of energy policy as industrial policy. They just announced today that, oh, we’re going to spend $3 billion or something on small modular reactors. And the rationale is, well, that’s going to create X, Y, Z jobs. Yeah, maybe. But you know, what jobs is it going to kill because it’s going to give us power in 10 years, maybe at more expensive rates. And so unfortunately, every portion of Canada has their pet energy technology that they view as the industrial policy to power themselves.

Alberta has its, and Ontario’s is nuclear and natural gas. And so that’s the difference to me is that people are making decisions that are energy decisions that match what they need to do because of their circumstances.

Manjula Selvarajah: Now you’ve mentioned Texas, so I’m going to talk about the U.S. here for just a minute. Do you think we could stand to benefit from investment flowing north, following some of the things Trump is doing south of the border?

Sara Hastings-Simon: You know, whenever there is uncertainty introduced into a region like is happening in the U.S. now that makes making investments harder. You know, in theory, I think there is some opportunities, but we are a little bit cutting off our own nose, at least in the case of Alberta where you had new regulation introduced that created a lot of uncertainty. So at a time when you might have seen more projects coming in because of people looking for places to make those investments, the regulations that were not just not supportive, but also trying to actively block projects from moving forward, made that more challenging.

I think you see similarly, you don’t have other governments — I mean, I talked a lot about Alberta because that’s where I sit — of course there’s Saskatchewan as well, which also has a really excellent solar resource and really just hasn’t prioritized building that out.

And, and I think, we haven’t talked about it a lot, but I think that climate has a big role in this as well, too, right? You know, solar is increasingly competitive and it’s not that you have to necessarily spend more to build solar. But many of the European countries that Mike mentioned have built solar and are building out their renewable energy to achieve climate goals. And that creates that top-down pressure from politicians. And we don’t have that today in Canada.

Manjula Selvarajah: It’s interesting that you’ve mentioned that because you’re right, throughout this conversation, we’re talking about price being the driver, but there is climate and climate goals that Canada has established. Mike, I know that I’m pushing you on potential, right, on the potential here in Canada, but do you think there’s some potential there?

Mike Andrade: I got into solar back in the day because I did think that climate change is probably — well, not probably — is the challenge for our time. And you know, my dad was a World War II Spitfire pilot. That generation stepped up to the challenge of their time. And so, to me, as a manufacturing person in technology, my mission that I was going to step up to was using technology and the forces that I knew there and manufacturing skills that I had. Because I’m not a politician, I’m not Greta Thunberg or any of them. And so, yeah, I stepped into it because of the need initially for climate change. And then I was, not surprised, but I had younger kids, they’re in their twenties and thirties now, and it was important to them and. And the people who came out of the woodwork to work on the group, you know, they said, look, I’m an engineer, but if I can do something that will help with climate change, that’s important to me, that — that really motivated me. So, let’s first of all, say yes. My experience has been that only gets you so far and you’ve got to have a better product that’s less expensive and easier to use. And that’s where I’ve spent all my time. So, am I hopeful? I mean, I’ve been in the industry for 20 years. I guess (laughs) —

Manjula Selvarajah: And you’re still in it.

Mike Andrade: Yeah. I’m foolishly hopeful. But my hope all comes from outside of Canada, I guess, because — and unfortunately that’s where our sales go. You know, we created in Ontario, and we created in Alberta, some real capability in solar. I set up, it was the largest solar manufacturing and inverter manufacturing plant in Canada back in 2010 or so. And it was world class. And then we got rid of the environment that was supportive of that and we lost it.

So, I feel that the moment is coming again because I think there is this realization around the world. It’s not a realization, it’s execution around the world that solar is the dominant thing. More money’s being spent on it than anything else, it’s generating more power, so it’s just factual.

And I feel that that is raising awareness. We’re having this conversation partially because of that. But I’m certainly not taking a victory lap around the excitement that’s happening elsewhere, right? I’m saying in my backyard, I got into this, in Canada, and worked at Morgan Solar, as an example, and invested in Morgan Solar because frankly, it was the only game in town. Like Morgan Solar, sadly, has more patents than all the other Canadian-owned solar companies combined. And that’s not saying a lot, unfortunately. So, my experience from working at the, you know, branch plants of multinationals and this sort of thing, is that unless you control the intellectual property, unless you have the board seats, unless you own most of the shares, the value of creating anything goes outside of the country. So, I’m making my stand here with these small companies and stuff like that, out of hope, but not because of the environment here.

Manjula Selvarajah: Yeah, you want to see other players enter the field, too.

Mike Andrade: Yes. Yes.

Manjula Selvarajah: So, I want to, you know, shift us from this discussion to kind of envisioning the future. I want us to take a moment, Sara, sort of looking ahead, what do you see?

Sara Hastings-Simon: Continued accelerating growth of solar worldwide. I think that is, you know, inevitable and unstoppable. Underneath that hood I see, you know, variations of that from country to country and even from sub-national, you know, province to province, depending on the willingness of policy-makers to step up and say, yes, this makes sense, and we’re going to remove the barriers that are preventing solar from growing. To be optimistic, I really hope to see a future where solar is, and I think it has a real potential, is playing a big role in bringing electricity to the many people around the world that don’t have access to electricity today.

I think that solar and kind of microgrid systems for that are much more promising than other options. And I hopefully see, you know, a return to more growth of solar in my home province here in Alberta where we are lucky to have some of the sunniest parts of Canada. And painting a really positive picture, I see strong collaboration between provinces, strong interconnections between B.C. and Alberta, where we’re exporting lots of solar power to them when the sun is shining and they’re sending back hydro over that transmission line to us when it’s not. And at every scale, basically, the utility grid working in a smart way to use that power when it’s available from the sun. You know, people charging their EVs in the middle of the day. Batteries that are able to kind of carry us over, as we’re seeing working very well in Texas and California, carry you over through the evening hours. And all of that against a backdrop of electricity and broader energy system that has decarbonized so that we are not seeing accelerations of the climate disasters that we’re really, sadly, already starting to see.

Manjula Selvarajah: And that we’re really feeling in some parts of the country, you know, especially Alberta, right, with wildfires and —

Sara Hastings-Simon: Yeah, exactly.

Manjula Selvarajah: And things of that nature. Mike, what is one lesson here? One lesson that we can take away as we innovate to solve other problems with technology.

Mike Andrade: In this particular case, when it comes to sun, I don’t see how it doesn’t work for us, because the sun shines on everyone in the world, everyone has access to it. And so giving the people the tools to use the sun the way they want to use the sun to better their lives is perhaps, in my opinion, outside of maybe using fire or something like that, is maybe one of the most fundamental technological adaptation we could pursue that’s beneficial to everyone. It’s democratization of power as opposed to having these centralized, often malignant, actors controlling our access to one of our most fundamental, uh, needs as a, as humanity. That’s, that’s to me, the lesson here for us, is that we have a chance to shape a fundamental human right with a technology that should be good for everyone.

Narration: This is a huge conversation and we wanted to bring in a few more voices. My producer, Ellen, reached out to some other experts in Canada to see what questions they had for our guests.

Ellen Payne Smith: All right, so here I go, I’m going to play this. Let me know if everyone hears it properly.

Manjula Selvarajah: This one comes from Chris Caners. He’s the general manager of Solar Share. It’s a cooperative-run solar company based in Toronto.

Chris Caners: One of my favourite things about solar energy is that it allows people to produce their own electricity where it’s needed. Unfortunately, policy often stands in the way. I’d like to ask Sara and Mike, if you had full control over energy policy, kind of like a magic wand, how would you accelerate the uptake of distributed solar in homes and businesses across Canada?

Manjula Selvarajah: Magic wand question. I love these. Sara, do you want to take a stab at it first?

Sara Hastings-Simon: Sure. I’m wondering when I get my magic wand. I keep getting questions like this and I’m hoping for the day I actually get it, but —

Manjula Selvarajah: It’s in the mail.

Sara Hastings-Simon: Excellent. So, if I had a magic wand to do with distributed solar, I would really push hard on the community solar options, right? So distributed solar is great, but it is limited in who’s able to invest in it and be a part of it. And so, you know, right now if you want to and you own a home and it’s facing in a reasonable-ish direction, you can put solar on your rooftop. I think we need more policies that enable people that don’t own homes or whose homes don’t have the right kind of orientation to be able to invest in things like community solar gardens. I believe Denver, I think, places in the state of Colorado, have done a really great job of this, kinds of policies that encourage this kind of solar garden that even require low-income ownership. So, making sure that opportunity is being made available for a large range of society and that really we’re allowing as many people as possible to engage with energy in this way. I think that would be a great role for policy-makers.

Mike Andrade: My first kind of flip answer, having just gone through the installation of a battery on my house, is just stop making it hard. Because my opinion and my experience is that the systems are set up to stop you from doing it. And if they just made it a neutral playing field, it would happen. Now if you want it to happen faster, the next thing is: let the price signals go through the market. Our utility sector does a terrible job of really giving people information by which how they could consume electricity and things like that, how much it’s actually costing them, etcetera, etcetera.

So that would be my second thing: really let the market work. They don’t want to do that because the cost will be really high right now. The third piece is aligned with what Sara says. I think it’s an anachronism to think of solar as some sort of isolated thing. I do think that it’s distributed energy storage, and also use, and so virtual power plants, distributed energy resources, community solar, you can call it what you will, but the combination of self-generation, self-storage, use-reduction. That’s very, very powerful.

Manjula Selvarajah: Next up we have Deb Chachra. She’s an engineering professor at Olin College outside of Boston, and she’s the author of the book How Infrastructure Works. I actually spoke with her, we had a fascinating conversation on this podcast. Here’s her question.

Deb Chachra: Right now I’m on leave from my college, so I’m calling in from Vancouver, B.C. on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. So I have really smart, thoughtful readers and audiences, and when I talk about the transition to renewables and what it enables, I’m often asked about batteries and the need for lithium. Part of my answer is always that there are many ways to store energy. It’s not just lithium batteries. What do you see happening in this space and how can we avoid recapitulating the geopolitics and the environmental cost of fossil fuels only with lithium and other minerals?

Manjula Selvarajah: Sara, batteries are key to the journey that we’re talking about here. Your thoughts?

Sara Hastings-Simon: What I would say to people is, if you’re worried about how much stuff we’re taking out of the ground for our energy system, then you should be pushing as hard as you can to electrify. Because it takes a lot less raw materials to run a system off of electricity with renewable energy than it does to run a system off of hydrocarbons that we’re digging out of the ground and burning.

That said, we do need to improve the way we extract resources around the world. And you know, we have, I think it’s fair to say, failed over and over again at respecting land rights, at dealing with liabilities. This is a very important topic and it does need more work to be done. But it’s not a matter of it’s going to get somehow worse if we’re doing this with electricity. In fact, it’s going to get better in terms of the total quantities. We also need to think about how we use less energy overall as part of moving forwards. But it’s far from a reason not to move to, you know, a solar and renewables-based system.

The other thing that I’ll say is, you know, if people are worried about what happens to these solar panels and batteries after their life cycle’s over, they’re going to be in for a shock when they learn what happens to the oil when you finish using it to drive in your car.

Manjula Selvarajah: Fair enough, fair enough.

Sara Hastings-Simon: Real concerns, but we can address them.

Manjula Selvarajah: And then let’s go from Deb in Vancouver to Tom in Toronto. Tom Timmins is the leader of the energy practice at the law firm, Gowling WLG Canada, in Toronto. Go ahead Ellen.

Tom Timmins: Quick question for both of your panelists. Given that most solar panel manufacturing occurs in Asia these days, where do you see the opportunity for Canadian companies to scale or define either technological or implementation advantage and really to look for competitive advantage that can be exported to global markets?

Mike Andrade: Funny you should ask because that’s exactly what we’re doing. So, our view is you can’t fight the Chinese juggernaut. And so you’ve got to use them intelligently. So, our kind of judo move is the fact that solar panels now have gotten to the point where on a per square meter basis, they’re cheaper than generally plywood and other building materials. And so if you can use clever design, you can create products for buildings that are less expensive than traditional blinds and slats and things like that. And so they have value-add and they have export potential, and they use the existing manufacturing footprint in other parts of the world. But that’s a feature, not a bug, for it.

I think if we are to say that we’re going to base our economy only on doing things that we manufacture in this country, I’m sorry to tell you, we don’t do a lot. Every single thing that we’re talking on here has manufacturing somewhere else, or parts of it somewhere else. I hope we learned that in COVID. So I don’t use it as — I don’t believe that it’s, oh my God, solar panels are the only thing that’s manufactured in China, so therefore we shouldn’t use them. No, you just have to intelligently use the existing manufacturing capacity and what other people do well. And then add what you do well to it to create a product that has attractiveness, and that’s literally what we’re doing.

Ellen Payne Smith: Should we try one more from Deb, just in case? Just as one, just to try it.

Manjula Selvarajah: Why don’t we? Yeah, yeah.

Deb Chachra: So one of the great virtues of solar energy is that it can be distributed. So that unlike, you know, the big hydroelectricity dams or thermal generation, it’s not intrinsically at this large scale. But that means that households that can afford it can build out their own systems. They can benefit from the economics. But that can easily leave households and communities that can’t afford it behind. So, how best can we foster equitable and universal provision with solar energy?

Sara Hastings-Simon: I’m going to sound like a broken record, but I think policy has a key role to play here. And there’s a really great example from Alberta when there was government procurement for renewables. There were two rounds that were run at the same time, and one required a certain level of Indigenous project ownership. And in the end, to make a long story short, the cost for the renewable projects out of these two rounds was essentially identical. And yet there was no Indigenous project ownership in the round that didn’t require it. So, essentially, governments have amazing tools at hand where they can require outcomes and shape outcomes in ways that really make a difference, particularly for inclusion without necessarily having to spend any more money. And so that’s something that I think is often not talked about, or it’s thought that, you know, we should avoid government regulation at all costs because it’s heavy handed and it’s going to be costly. But governments are elected to achieve certain goals, and they should be willing to put requirements in place to achieve those when they’re in the society’s interests. And so the same applies with solar and ownership. You know, we need to make sure that we have structures in place, not necessarily for every single project, you know, you don’t want to overcomplicate things, but making sure that there are structures in place that don’t allow for people to be left out or left behind.

Mike Andrade: I think it’s an opposite problem. I think that the grid and the centralized provision of electricity is expensive and growing ever more so all the time. And the way that the government is dealing with that is papering it over by giving people rebates and. They are not addressing the problem, they’re just financially putting a Band-aid on it. So, I guess my point being, I see the solar system way better than the current system. We’ve got a problem with the current system with affordability. So, what you’ve got to do though is allow and stop the utilities to have their stranglehold on electricity. And so you have things like balcony solar and you can buy a kit in Ikea in Europe, right? And even if you don’t own your property, you can power a fair chunk of your apartment off of solar that you own that’s inexpensive. And so I flip it on its head.

Manjula Selvarajah: That was my conversation with Mike Andrade and Sara Hastings-Simon. It was recorded remotely in late October of this year. Solve for X is brought to you by MaRS. This episode was produced by Ellen Payne Smith, and written by Jason McBride. Lara Tovi, Sana Maqbool and Sarah Liss are the associate producers. Mack Swain composed the theme song and all the music in this episode. Gab Harpelle is our mix engineer. Kathryn Hayward is our executive producer. I’m your host, Manjula Selvarajah. If you liked this episode, please do rate, review and share. It really does help. And stay tuned for new episodes coming soon.

Photo illustration: Kelvin Li