The customer is resistant, but Max tries angle after angle. “You have to think big here. When I talked to your chief, he said, ‘Don’t think small.’ If your kid could see the news on TV, he might say, ‘I, too, could be president.’”
“This is great,” the man says. “I know you’re trying to help us. I just don’t have the money. Life is hard, things are expensive, sometimes we’re hungry.”
Max nods, helpful. “What if I gave you a way to pay for it, so the dollar wouldn’t even come from your pocket. If you get a system, people will pay you to charge their phones. Or, if you had a TV, you could charge people to come watch the football games.”
“I couldn’t charge a person for coming in to watch a game,” the man says. “We’re all one big family. If someone is wealthy enough to have a TV, everyone is welcome to it.”
This hour also ends without a sale, but Max is not too worried. “It takes two or three approaches on average,” he says. “You always have to leave the person in a good place, where he loves you stopping by. This guy wants to finish building his house right now; his house is heavy on him, but it won’t be long.” Indeed, even as we’re talking, the first prospect wanders up to us again, asking for a leaflet and the phone number. His wife, he says, is very interested.
Part of me is happy that these two men have said no, at least for the moment. For an hour, for one of the first times in their lives, they’ve been in the position most Westerners occupy most of the time: that of a potential customer being wooed. It’s a very different posture from being a supplicant to a government, and it comes with a certain undeniable power and dignity. And more often than not, the sale gets made, eventually.
Back in the regional capital of Soubré, I watch for a few moments as Off-Grid’s champion Ivorian salesman winds up his third contract of the morning, on the way to nine for the day. He’s tall and handsome in designer jeans and a dashiki-style shirt he had made in the company’s colors. His name is Jean Anoh, but he’s decided that that name is “too old, too soft.” “Call me Stevens Ironman Never-Tired Killer,” he says—in between pitches, he’s checking his phone for the constantly updated standings in Off-Grid’s continent-wide sales championship and sending trash-talking WhatsApp messages to his Tanzanian competitors.
The overnight arrival of something as profound as electricity can’t help but change communities, from how long people sleep to what they eat to the texture of village life. Some of the new electrical current gets used in ways everyone would approve of: I met five-year-old girls practicing their alphabet in exercise books by the bright new glare of an LED lamp. And when farmers have their phones charged up, they can get daily weather reports from Farmerline, a Ghanaian information service that uses GPS to customize the forecasts. “If a farmer puts fertilizer on the field and then it rains, he loses the fertilizer; it washes away,” says Alloysius Attah, the young entrepreneur who founded the service. “The farmers say they can’t tell the rain by themselves anymore. My auntie could read the clouds, the birds flying by, but the usual rainfall pattern has shifted.”
But think about the percentage of your home’s electric power that you use on things of utter virtue. It’s no different in Africa. I met teenagers lying on the floor watching explosion-filled movies, and their younger brothers and sisters enjoying endless cartoons. I asked one young Tanzanian mother what her four-year-old watched, and the answer, through several layers of translation, was “N’klodin”—which is to say, Nickelodeon. “Our killer app is definitely the television,” said Schreiber. “If the twenty-four-inch is out of stock, lots of people won’t buy.” One mother in a Ghanaian village explained that the TV “keeps the children at home at night, instead of roaming around.”
“You must turn it off so they will study,” a toothless old man told her, shaking his finger. But when I asked what was the most popular program, he and everyone immediately began laughing and nodding as one. “Kumkum,” people shouted. Kumkum Bhagya, an Indian soap opera, airs every night from 7:30 to 8:30, at which point life grinds to a standstill. Loosely based on Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, it’s set in a Punjabi marriage hall. “All the chiefs have advocated for everyone to watch, because it’s about how relationships are built,” said the chief of Kofihuikrom. “Too many marriages are on the downside.”
At any event, this is what deep, rippling change looks like. The developed world has had two hundred years to absorb, more or less, what is now coming to rural Africa, belatedly but almost overnight.
* * *
The rapid spread of renewable energy across the developing world annoyed fossil fuel executives to no end. As they struggled to preserve their brands in the face of growing environmental clamor, the talking point they hit on was “energy poverty.” The coal industry in particular cast itself as the solution to the lack of power in Africa. Peabody, for instance, the biggest of the coal producers, issued a “Plan to Eliminate Energy Poverty and Inequality,” billing its product as “the only sustainable fuel with the scale to meet the primary energy needs of the world’s rising populations.” As one commentator explained, “Instead of a dirty symbol for pollution, the coal giant would refashion itself as a liberator of the world’s poor, a way out of the darkness.”3 The talk about “energy poverty” was soon echoed by the Koch brothers, and by Exxon’s Rex Tillerson, before he departed for his brief career in the Trump administration: pressed by environmental activists at an annual shareholder’s meeting, he pushed back, launching into a brief sermon on energy inequality, concluding, “What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?”4
But, of course, humanity wasn’t suffering from solar panels. Just the reverse—in communities that had been unlit, uncooled, and uninformed by fossil fuel for two hundred years, solar panels were turning on the energy overnight. By the middle of this decade, renewables were providing far more “new electricity access” than fossil fuels, and experts were calculating that meeting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals would require about 90 percent of new connections to come from the sun.5
You could perform the same solar trick in the developed world, of course, but here the complications are different. For one, people use far more power. It takes a roof full of panels to run my house, and even then, in the dark of winter, I rely on the larger grid—a good reminder that conservation and energy efficiency are as important as new supply. Meanwhile, the very existence of that grid lessens the impulse to put those panels up: almost all of us have access to highly reliable power all the time. And as we have seen, the utilities that provide that power don’t want us to change—they’ve been willing to use their money and clout to dramatically slow down the trend toward renewable energy.
But we could. The sun shines everywhere, and when it doesn’t, the wind is usually blowing. The latest studies, from labs such as Mark Jacobson’s at Stanford, make clear that every major nation on earth could be supplying 80 percent of its power from renewables by 2030, at prices far cheaper than paying the damage for climate change. Jacobson’s numbers are remarkably detailed: in Alabama, for example, residential rooftops offer a total of 59.7 square kilometers that are unshaded by trees and pointed in the right direction for solar panels. Want to know how much wind blows across the Mongolian steppe? They can tell you. As late as a decade ago, skeptics insisted that renewable energy would always be an outlier; it was just too expensive. But the engineers did what engineers do: they got better at everything, from predicting how hard the wind would blow to letting individual panels and turbines communicate directly with the grid. “After dropping 65 percent between 2009 and today,” energy expert Dave Roberts wrote in 2017, “wind power costs could drop another 50 percent by 2020. That’s pretty amazing.” You don’t need some magic technological breakthrough. Al you need is for “wind and solar to keep doing what they’re doing—keep scaling up, keep improving, keep getting cheaper—at roughly the same rate they have been.”6 It’s not that renewable energy is our only task. We also need to eat lower on the
food chain, build public transit networks, densify cities, and start farming in ways that restore carbon to soils. But renewable energy may be the easiest of these tasks, especially since it’s suddenly so cheap. The manufacturing process for solar panels has become so efficient that the panels pay back the energy used to make them in less than four years. Since they last three decades, that means a quarter-century of pollution-free operation.7
The most recent data come from Finnish and German researchers, and show the impact that rapidly falling prices for storage batteries have had on those calculations. These researchers found that by 2050, solar energy could provide 69 percent of our power and wind energy another 18 percent, with the rest coming mostly from hydroelectric dams. In the process, we’d create thirty-six million new jobs and the cost per megawatt hour would drop from the present eighty-two dollars to sixty-one dollars. The study’s lead author, Christian Breyer, put it like this: “Energy transition is no longer a question of technical feasibility or economic viability, but of political will.”8 Other economists insist it would be cheaper and faster if there were some nuclear power in the mix, but the bottom line is fairly clear. If human beings wanted to, they could figure out how to extricate us from the climate mess by producing most of our energy from the wind and the sun. There’s probably no single step that would do more to prolong the human game another generation, to pass the (solar) torch on to our kids and grandkids.
Yes, you’d have to build a hell of a lot of factories to turn out thousands of acres of solar panels, and wind turbines the length of football fields, and millions and millions of electric cars and buses. But here, again, experts have already begun to crunch the numbers. Tom Solomon, a retired engineer who oversaw the construction of one of the largest factories built in recent years, Intel’s mammoth Rio Rancho semiconductor plant in New Mexico, took the Stanford data and calculated how much clean energy America would need to produce by 2050 to completely replace fossil fuels. The answer: 6,448 gigawatts. “In 2015, we installed sixteen gigawatts of clean power,” Solomon says. “At that pace, it would take four hundred and five years, which is kind of too long.”9
So, Solomon did the math to figure out how many factories it would take to produce 6,448 gigawatts of clean energy in the next thirty-five years. He started by looking at Tesla’s big new solar panel factory in Buffalo. “They’re calling it the gigafactory,” Solomon says, “because the panels it builds will produce one gigawatt worth of solar power every year.” Using that plant as a rough yardstick, Solomon calculates that America needs 295 solar factories of a similar size to defeat climate change (roughly six per state), plus a similar effort for wind turbines.
We’ve mobilized at this scale once before, and it was the last time we faced what seemed like an existential enemy. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the world’s largest industrial plant under a single roof went up in six months, near Ypsilanti, Michigan; Charles Lindbergh called it the “Grand Canyon of the mechanized world.” Within months, it was churning out a B-24 Liberator bomber every hour. Bombers! Huge, complicated planes, endlessly more intricate than solar panels or turbine blades—each one 1,225,000 parts, with 313,237 rivets. Nearby, in Warren, Michigan, the U.S. Army built a tank factory faster than it could build the power plant to run it—so it simply towed a steam locomotive into one end of the building to provide steam heat and electricity. That one factory produced more tanks than the Germans built in the entire course of the war.
It wasn’t just weapons. In another corner of Michigan, a radiator company landed a contract for more than twenty million steel helmets, while the company that used to supply fabric for Ford’s seat cushions went into parachute production. Nothing went to waste: When auto companies stopped making cars for the duration of the fighting, General Motors found it had thousands of 1939 model–year ashtrays piled up in inventory. So, it shipped them out to Seattle, where Boeing put them in long-range bombers headed for the Pacific. Pontiac made antiaircraft guns; Oldsmobile churned out cannons; Studebaker built engines for Flying Fortresses; Nash-Kelvinator produced propellers for British De Havillands; Hudson Motors fabricated wings for Helldivers and P-38 fighters; Buick manufactured tank destroyers; Fisher Body built thousands of M4 Sherman tanks; Cadillac turned out more than ten thousand light tanks. And that was just Detroit. The same sort of industrial mobilization took place all across America.
If (as the proposal for a Green New Deal envisions) we did something like that again, in the name of stopping climate change instead of fascism, we wouldn’t have to kill a soul. In fact, we’d be saving great numbers of lives that would otherwise be lost not just from global warming but from breathing in the smoke of fossil fuel combustion. (The latest global data show that meeting the boldest climate targets set at the Paris talks would save 150 million lives, or roughly twice the number of people who died in World War II.)10 And we wouldn’t have to do it in mortal competition with the rest of the globe; this is a chance for cooperation on a new scale, as we pass technology back and forth. (At this point, China would clearly need to supply a good bit of the manufacturing muscle and expertise.) Instead of each of us being asked to sacrifice, we could each of us live in more comfortable and affordable homes, saving enough on fuel bills to finance the transition.
Does that sound too cheery, the idea of saving money as we move down this path? Rutland, Vermont, is a gritty place—it made the front page of the New York Times as a ground zero of New England’s heroin epidemic—but I saw scenes there just as remarkable and just as moving as anything in Ghana or Tanzania. Sara and Mark Borkowski live in Rutland with their two young daughters, in a century-old, fifteen-hundred-square-foot house. Mark drives a school bus, and Sara works as a special-ed assistant. The cost of heating and cooling their home through the year consumes a large fraction of their combined income. Recently, however, persuaded by Green Mountain Power, the state’s main electric utility, the Borkowskis decided to give their residence an energy makeover. In the course of several days, teams of contractors stuffed the house with new insulation, put in a heat pump for the hot water, and installed two air-source heat pumps to warm the home. They also switched all the lightbulbs to LEDs and put a small solar array on the slate roof of the garage. The Borkowskis paid for the improvements, but the utility financed the charges through their electric bill, which fell the very first month. Before the makeover, from October 2013 to January 2014, the Borkowskis used 3,411 kilowatt hours of electricity and 325 gallons of fuel oil. From October 2014 to January 2015, they used 2,856 kilowatt hours of electricity and no oil at all. They reduced the carbon footprint of their house by 88 percent in a matter of days, and at no net cost. If you multiply these kinds of small changes across many households, it pays off for everyone.
Green Mountain Power, for instance, was the first utility to subsidize its customers’ purchase of Tesla Powerwall batteries. Two thousand Vermonters installed them, and when a savage heat wave hit in the summer of 2018, GMP was able to draw on the current they had stored away—which saved the state’s rate payers half a million dollars in a single week, compared to the cost of buying outside power.11 The same sort of change is possible everywhere, at almost any scale. In southern Australia in 2018, Tesla announced plans to build the world’s largest “virtual power plant,” covering the roofs of fifty thousand homes with solar panels that will be linked together to supply the grid. The panels are going up on public housing first, cutting residents’ power bills by a third.12
Again, we’re not talking about earth shelters in Aspen built of adobe and old tires by former software executives who converted to planetary consciousness at Burning Man. The Borkowskis’ house couldn’t be more ordinary: the girls’ rooms feature Frozen bedspreads and One Direction posters, as well as two rabbits and a parakeet named Oliver. The family had no particular interest in the environment: “If it’s not on the Disney Channel, I don’t hear about it,” Sara told me. The house sits in a less-than-picturesque neighborhood, in a town made famous for its junki
es. Its significance lies in its ordinariness. If you can make a house like this affordably green, you should be able to do it anywhere, and if you can do that, then one of the great threats to the human game is partially defused.
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Solar power is an interesting advance in that it’s less powerful than the fuel it replaces, and in certain ways harder to use. Where coal and oil and gas can be gathered in a few places and shipped around the world, sun and wind must be collected from a million different locations and then shared across the grid; renewable energy is omnipresent but also diffuse, nothing like the concentrated package of chemical energy in a lump of coal or a liter of oil.
But these limitations also come with real and offsetting advantages. While some people will grow rich putting up windmills and solar panels, they won’t make money on an Exxon scale because you can’t charge for the sun. (That’s why Exxon hates solar: you put up a solar panel and the energy comes for free, which to the corporate mind is the stupidest business plan ever.) The cash you spend for energy stays close to home; there’s no way for the Koch brothers to become our richest and most powerful citizens simply by shipping fuel hither and yon.
Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? Page 22