The Home-Solar Boom May Have Gone Bust. What’s Next for Solar Power?
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With artificial intelligence, creating an ethical foundation isn't just the right thing to do, is crucial to success. Join IBM of the break to hear why from federal binet eris IBM consult into global leader for trustworthy ai.

If you look up at your neighbor's rooftops, you might see some solar panels soaking up the sun. The sheer amount of electricity that can be produced by residential solar power is across the U. S. Has surged over the last fourteen years from six hundred sixty seven megawatts of installed capacity on rooftops in twenty ten to more than thirty seven thousand megawatts midway through twenty twenty four. According to the solar energy industries association.

a trade group last year, more money went into solar than into all other sources of energy generation combined. If you look at what's called utility solar, which is the biggest solar farms that feed utilities and the grid that's booming as well.

But at the same time, reporter fred dvorak says distributed power generation, like lots of small rooftop solar rays, providing power where it's needed is taking the baxi to more traditional energy models, where large solar power plants transmit energy to utilities, sometimes over long distances. Add in high interest rates and rising costs for financing and labor and homes, solar is now slumping.

IT just makes IT harder to recover your costs on any solar installations. And IT makes IT a lot less attractive for homeowner who are thinking of a putting up solar.

From the wall street journal, this is the future of everything. I'm danny Lewis. Today, we're talking about where rooftops lar power is going next and the startup that betting distributed power will take off in future stick around.

How do you start to lay the foundation for responsible AI in your organization? Here's fator born duris IBM consulting global leader for trust.

The AI IT starts with asking the question, what is the kind of relationship that we ultimately want to have with A I? The purpose of A I is not meant to display human beings. That is meant to all meant human intelligence. Soon, as you have a glimmer in your eye about how you think you might want to use A I then asking the questions like what would be required in order to earn people's trust in such a model.

Fred, we keep hearing about a solar boom as energy companies around the world shift to renewable electricity. According to the solar energy industry y's association, the cost of installing solar panels, whether its commercial or residential, has dropped more than forty percent in the last decade. But at the same time, in the last few years, the home solar boom in the U.

S. Has been turning into a bus. What's going .

on overall in the U. S. And globally, there is a clear boom in solar.

There are a couple of cost things that have been going on, though more recently, eighty percent of solar manufacturing is controlled by china. The U. S.

Is trying very hard to build a domestic industry, but when you're building something new, it's often more expensive. There are a lot of tariff barriers and things like that around solar imports to the U. S.

And that's driving the cost. All of those sort of things to protect the vacant domestic industry is driving the cost of solar panels up a bit in the U. S. And the other thing that that's going on is that other costs are going up a lot, is just more expensive to finance projects. The cost of labor has gone up a lot. And the estimate last year was that two thirds of the cost of putting up solar installation on your roof is what's called soft costs, the stuff that's not hardware, and hardware like the solar panels is only a third of the cost. So when you have those soft costs going up as much as they have, then things get more expensive.

Let's look at california, which has more solar panels on homes than any other state and a lot of incentives for homeowners to install them. IT seems like a great set up for the industry. But again, why have solar sales plumped there? Over the last year.

california was early and aggressive in trying to encourage people to put rooftop solar up, and IT did that by offering some very generous incentives. That said, if he had rooftop solar, then not only you'd be able to offset your own consumption because you're producing electricity on your, but if your solar panels were producing more than you and actually used, you would sell IT back to the grid at a really nice rate.

California decided to change that structure and offer a lot less for anything that you might sell back to the grid. IT just makes IT harder to recover your costs on any solar installations and IT makes IT a lot less attractive for homeowners or thinking of of putting up solar from the point of view of the utilities. And sometimes of the year and sometimes of the day is just too much solar.

But then you know in the evening, IT drops off and at night, there's not. So it's a very variable power source. In some seasons, california is essentially throwing away that energy because there's just too much. And as you have more and more households that are offsetting the consider their energy consumption with power from the rules, they are not paying the utilities right.

The utilities, they're not getting that extra revenue, and they have to do all these investments in the electricity, more transmission lines, Better transmission lines and upgrades and protections against all kinds of things from climate change. These are all expensive. And in california, the utilities were saying the cost burdens are now being shifted to people who don't have solar.

Solar advocates disagree. They say that maybe the costs are rising for utilities because of poor management. And set is right. There are a lot of different arguments, but the the utility is regulator in california did accept. And what the utilities were saying and LED to this big incentive change.

So what's the trajectory for rooftop solar from here?

That's a huge unsettled question. There are people who argue the rooftop solar and let's call IT, distributed generation is the future. And distributed generation is where you put the power source much closer to where people are actually using IT.

And rooftop solar is the ultimate rights on your roof if you can use IT, right? I do need, there are lot of big advantages to that. Let's think of a hurry ane that comes through.

Maybe IT destroys a plant, a generator, or maybe IT topples some transmission lines. Well, if you had a smaller network with generation right by you, then maybe wouldn't have an outage right? IT could be cheaper because you don't have to transmit the power as far.

What if you combine batteries with these systems? What if you use your electric vehicle battery and throw that on the grid too, right on the local grade, and you could have this really very mix. There are other arguments to make for not going that way. But I ve spoken to people who have worked in utilities and say, really, it's much cheaper to do IT this way and we really need a lot of renewables so this is the way to go. Um and the other thing is when you think about how do you control and manage a bunch of smaller distributed generation systems, IT gets really complicated, let's say your distribute to generation system is just your home with your rooftop array.

What happens then if a hurricane comes again, knocks off all your solar panels? Whose responsible then for restoring power? How do you track IT? How do you fix IT? How do you pay for IT? But if you don't have that kind of hubby spoke model and you've got a lot of other distributed generation in network town, does that work? Those questions aren't answered yet, but it'll be really interesting to see how the great of the future developed. And and for sure, rooftop solar is didn't part of .

that reporter, fred deora.

thanks for joining us.

Thank you. What if rooftop home solar is just the beginning of what's possible with small distributed power sources? Just ahead, i'll hear from one start up that's banking on the future of flexible solar energy. Literally, that's after the break.

When you think of rooftop solar panels, you're probably picturing big, rigid installations mounted to the shingles or maybe in array attached to a middle frame to get a Better angle from the sun. But what if those same solar panels powering a home could be woven into something lighter, more flexible and easier to set up?

This is actually fabric from A A nyon jaco, integrated with solar cells. And you can see, even inside the wires and all connect .

call in to he is the CEO of pavilion a started from brooklin, new york, that weave flexible solar panels directly into fabric.

This amount of solar wishes, about the size of eight and half five, eleven piece of paper, is enough to charge your phone.

He showed me a stack of prototype solar panel ways, all made from fabric, all light weight falda, even rollable like silicon baking sheet that can generate electricity from the sun.

There's different texture and there's different colors. And this is looking at smaller solar cells that you might fold up like into the size of a deck of cards. It's a little bit different.

a little bit thinner. Pavilion has collaborated with companies like Tommy hilfiger ure to make limited bags and jackets with built in solar panels, but their bread and butters are shelters that can supply solar power as soon as they're set up. Everything from umbrella like solar sales that can be set up in a backyard to a large solar powered tents designed military and disaster relief for places and situations that would traditionally require huge generators and barrels of fuel where solar power might be able to provide the same electricity dust, cheaper and lighter.

Something that's about ten feet by ten feet is thirteen hundred to fourteen hundred watts. That's enough to power twenty computers or air conditioner. Um so it's a lot of power.

They're all geared towards the future where small solar power generators become common. Which two, he says, could come next, thanks to where rooftop home's lar has brought the industry.

When you look at a state like california are starting to see saturation, which decreases incentives, and that's a good thing. That's the whole point. These incentives are to cultivate an industry and incubate and industry until IT is affordable in comparison to the fossil fuels. And that starting to happen in certain jurisdictions.

And because solar panels are getting cheaper while companies are finding new innovative methods to build, that opens up new, smaller ways to integrate solar power into everyday life.

Frankly, I think home solar or a traditional rooftop residential solar is going to be less of the leading product that you buy and more of a piece of a bigger puzzle.

But while rooftop solar may have helped popularize the technology too, he says rethinking solar panels as a more mobile power source could reshape our relationship with electricity.

But we're going going to see is a big growth in the integration of solar into portable products. You're talking about leaf blowers, you're talking about generators. You're talking about construction equipment, farming equipment, maritime applications.

You're not going to have an idling diesel tracor trailer outside your apartment. You're not going to have the ice cream truck idling the giant generators for the film shoot going on in your igher hood is gonna be silent and a battery. There is a real energy independence to having access to portable solar and portable power products that I don't think people really appreciate until you have IT in your hands.

The future of everything is a production of the wall street journal. The episode was produced by me, danny Lewis, mixing and sound designed by Michael evo. Like the show, tell your friends and believe us, a five star review on your favorite.

Thanks for listening.

Earlier, we discuss what responsible A I looks like in practice. Here's fator binaural from IBM consulting again on why that begins with data.

My favorite definition of the word date up. It's an architect of big man experience. A I is like a mirror that reflects our biases back towards us, but we have to be brave enough and introspective enough to look into the mirror.

Does this reflection actually line to my organization values? If IT allies betrays parents about, why did you pick the data that you did? If IT doesn't a line that when you know you need to change your entire approach.

learn more about IBM artificial intelligence consulting services and IBM dot com splash consulting.