Science Friday - Pfizer Vaccine Approval, Making Solar Power For Everyone. August 27, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

Pfizer’s Vaccine Is Now Fully Approved. What’s Next For The Pandemic? This week, the COVID-19 vaccine marketed by Pfizer finally received full FDA approval, moving out of the realm of “emergency use” to the status of a regular drug. In the wake of that change, many organizations—from the Pentagon to Ohio State University to the city of Chicago—are moving to require vaccinations against the coronavirus. It remains to be seen just how much the status change will move the needle on vaccination numbers—and more importantly, new cases and hospitalizations—in the U.S. Sarah Zhang, staff writer at The Atlantic, joins Ira to talk about what might be next for the pandemic, discussing the virus becoming endemic and how the Delta variant is changing people’s risk calculations. They also explore how different countries, from the U.K. to Vietnam to New Zealand, are coping. Plus, ways that the virus continues to upend business as normal—from SpaceX launches to water treatment.   How To Make Solar Power Work For Everyone If you follow Ira on social media, you may have noticed a trend in his posts over the last few months: They’ve become very joyful about the cost of his energy bill. Why? This year, he installed solar panels on his roof—and he’s not alone. The cost of solar panels has dropped nearly 70 percent since 2014, so more and more individuals and companies are jumping in. Even during COVID-19, solar installations in the U.S. reached a record high in 2020. For Ira and many others, solar panels turn homes into their own power generators. During some times of the day, the panels produce enough excess power that it’s fed back to the grid. As more and more people jump into solar power, big questions remain about how an energy grid designed for fossil fuels will be impacted. If everyone’s home is a utility, how do you best distribute power to a region? Accessibility is also a big concern. If there’s a need to retool how the country thinks about energy creation and use, how do we make sure it’s accessible to everyone? Joining Ira to talk through these big-picture solar energy quandaries are Joseph Berry, senior research fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, and Sam Evans-Brown, executive director of Clean Energy New Hampshire based in Concord, New Hampshire. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Irafledo. Later in the hour, a look at solar power and why it's the biggest disruptor of fossil fuel energy. But first, it's been a big week for news on the COVID front. With the Pfizer vaccine finally receiving full FDA approval, Moderna is in the process. And in the wake of that, many organizations are moving toward mandatory vaccinations. It remains to be seeing just how much that'll move the needle on vaccination numbers and cases and hospitalization. in the U.S. And big questions remain about the future of the pandemic as well. Joining me now to talk about some of them is Sarah Zang, staff writer for the Atlantic.

Welcome back, Sarah. Hi, thanks for having me. Nice to have you, as always. Maybe the biggest practical COVID news this week is that final approval of the Pfizer vaccine? Yeah, absolutely. I think this is going to be a really important step to getting more people vaccinated. Is it going to convince everyone to get vaccinated? Definitely not.

You know, if we've seen like vaccine hesitancy is like a really heterogeneous thing, people have different reasons. Maybe some people will be convinced. But as you said earlier, I think the really big deal is that this is going to empower a lot more employers, a lot more schools, to mandate vaccines. You know, we're already seeing that the military is now going to be mandating the COVID vaccine. Disney World employees, you know, people who work for New York City, a bunch of universities with the Pfizer vaccine getting improved. They're now making everyone who can get the vaccine, get the vaccine. And increasing vaccination number.

It shifts that already complicated risk equation, right? I mean, on the one hand, you have more people getting vaccinated, but on the other hand, you have this delta variant. Yeah, I feel like it's been really confusing the past several months because, you know, over the previous year, we kind of decided what kind of risks we're okay with in the middle of a pandemic. And then we have these two big things that have changed, right? We have vaccines and we have the delta variant.

We put them together, it's even more confusing thing because what's going on is that we're seeing the vaccines are slightly less effective. Delta. We are seeing more breakthrough infections. We are seeing that people who get breakthrough infections can transmit the virus, but we don't really have a good sense of exactly how much that is happening. The U.S. hasn't really been collecting the data. The CDC decided they weren't going to collect data on mild breakthrough infections. So we're kind of flying a little bit blind here. We're relying a lot on what's going on in other countries, trying to give the sense of how much Delta is affecting vaccine efficacy. I think what's also so confusing about this moment is that we all sort of have different

levels of risk right now, right? Like if you're vaccinated versus you're unvaccinated, your risk of COVID, this is very, very different. And we have lots of mixed vaccination households. If you have kids under 12, you know, a lot of times the parents are vaccinated, but the kids can't be. And this is just such a confusing situation. Yeah. And of course, schools are reopening everywhere and people are wondering, what do I do there? Populations that largely can't be vaccinated little kids. Yeah, exactly. You know, when you kind of put all the pieces together, right, we're having more kids back in school in person this year. We have a more transmissible variant. And we have a lot of places, a lot of states where you're not allowed to wear masks. It seems pretty likely we're going to be

having a lot of transmission in schools. Now, you know, experts I've talked to have said that if your school is doing all the things that should be doing, you know, good ventilation, masking for kids, even regular testing if that's available, vaccinating all the teachers, if all these things are happening, like, we don't really have to worry that much about your kid going to school. The problem is that a lot of places are not doing those things, and especially not doing masks, not doing testing. It's a really tough time for parents. We're already seeing that lots of schools are sending thousands of kids to quarantine and isolation. Some schools have even started to go back to remote learning because there's just so many cases going on. I mean, I think the bottom line is

even though the risk of COVID to most kids is pretty low, the risk of Delta disrupting the school year is still really, really high. If you get exposed, if you get sick, you're still going to end up missing a lot of classes might have to go back to remote learning. So it's going to be a bumpy school year. And what I hear you saying and what I look at it myself, it appears like COVID in one form or another is going to be with us for a very long time. It's not going away anytime soon. Yeah, I think we have to be prepared to live with this virus for the rest of our lives. Now, that doesn't mean we'll be living within a pandemic for the rest of our lives. But, you know, this virus looks like it's going to be what scientists call endemic, which means it's just going to be

another circulating virus. Good comparison is the flu or even common cold. Coronavirus is actually a family and there are actually four coronaviruses that cause a common cold. We've probably had all of those before. We probably had them for us as kids and the cases are pretty mild. And we've actually probably had those four coronaviruses more than once. Immunity wanes really quickly. But we do see that the second time you get infected, the infection is milder, maybe even symptomatic. And we're kind of seeing a similar pattern with this coronavirus. You know, the big problem right now is that there's so many people with no immunity at all, right? There's a new virus meeting, like naive immune systems. Once we get everyone vaccinated or worse, once

everyone is infected and everyone who's recovered has some immunity, once there's enough immunity in the population, this pandemic will be over, though the virus itself will keep circulating. It'll just be less serious and less dramatic and less disruptive. That means we have to accept the idea that there will always be cases of it. We're probably never going to zero COVID. We're going to be living with this virus for a long time. And does that mean if it's around all this time and stays around, it's going to keep changing and mutating well beyond the Delta variant that we have? It is. The good news is most scientists I've talked to think that the kind of rate of adaptation of this virus is probably going to slow down. So the virus is going to change, like the flu virus

changes every year. You know, what happens is that once enough people have some immunity to it, the virus is going to want to try to keep infecting more people, right? So any variant that is slightly better in fighting more people would just become the one that's dominant. That's just the way evolution works. We're kind of in this arms race. The difference is that when a lot of people are vaccinated or while people have immunity, there will just be less virus circulating, right? Like there's so many cases right now. The virus is replicating so many times. Each time it replicates is kind of like a lottery ticket where it might be able to find just the right mutations to get better at spreading. So once a lot of people are vaccinated, there just should be less virus around. So that rate of new

variants emerging should probably slow down. It'll probably still happen, but it won't be like we're racing so hard to catch up the way we are right now. Speaking of the virus being all around, you touched on this briefly. Let's talk about it just a little bit more going worldwide. You've written about the UK, other countries. Tell us what's happening there. The UK is an interesting comparison because they kind of got hit with the alpha wave first and also got hit with the Delta wave first. And they also have very high vaccination rates. and they've done an especially good job of vaccinating their elderly. So earlier this summer, the UK, was seeing really high delta case rates,

but their hospitalizations were a lot lower. And then sort of counterintuitively, just as they were opening up, and they were getting a lot of criticism for opening up during this delta wave, cases started falling. There are some really interesting reasons might that happen, one is that schools are out. People still aren't going to work. It's not exactly, like, totally back normal in the UK.

But it does suggest that Delta is not going to, keep spreading uncontrolled if you have a lot of vaccination in your community. One thing we are seeing different in the UK and the U.S., though, is that we are seeing kind of comparably looking like a lot more hospitalizations. And that's probably because in the U.S., we haven't done as good as a job vaccinating the elderly and the vulnerable. And we know those are people, if they're unvaccinated to get this virus, they're going to be hospitalized.

So in the U.S., we still have a lot of hospitalizations, you know. In Florida, it's like the highest number over the entire pandemic. other countries, especially a lot of countries that did really well early on the pandemic, like Australia and Vietnam, with kind of really restrictive like zero COVID policies trying to keep the virus completely out. They're finding it really hard to sustain that, you know, Vietnam and Australia are getting really high case rates right now. And I think we're kind of at this inflection point where we're thinking about how do we

transition from trying to keep this virus out to accepting it's going to be here. Australia has said if, you know, 80% of the population's vaccine. needed. We're going to lift restrictions. But that's interesting, you know, it's a hard psychological transition to go from, this is a virus. We must keep out to, okay, we're going to live with this virus. So these countries, such as New Zealand, that moved very aggressively to control cases, but it's everywhere. How long can they keep that up? That's a great question. You know, the New Zealand is kind of in the middle of another pretty strict lockdown. A lot stricter than, you know, we in the U.S. have experienced. This is like, you know,

can't really leave your house except for certain approved activities. In Australia, where something similar is happening, you've seen really big protests, even get kind of violent against these restrictions because I think people are fed up, right? They want to go back to normal life. I think it's a good idea to kind of give people a sense of when this is going to end and probably a certain vaccination threshold, say 80%. I don't know the exact number that is right, and it may change the very end, but giving people some sense of when this will be over in terms of how many people,

with vaccinate, I think that's a good psychological motivator. You know, we've always heard the phrase, beware of unintended consequences. And it appears that there are unintended consequences here, things that we would not have thought about. For example, we've been focused a lot on the stresses, the diseases putting on the health care system, but there are other surprising following effects related to oxygen.

Tell us how oxygen fits in this whole scene. So oxygen is obviously really crucial for COVID. patients who are in hospitals and need supplemental oxygen. But oxygen is also used for other things, such as rocket launches. This week, SpaceX's president said that their rocket launch schedule is getting kind of crunched because they're having trouble getting enough liquid oxygen. Liquid oxygen is propellant that's used with rocket fuel, and they're having a hard time getting enough of that. Another thing that's happening is that in Florida, where there's this huge, huge surge in hospitalizations, oxygen is also used to purify drinking water. Oxygen is used to make ozone,

is basically three oxygen molecules. And that's used to kind of get some of that nasty stuff out of water to make it taste a little better. In Florida, they've asked people to conserve water because so much of the oxygen is being diverged to hospitals instead. In other cases, they've gone from using ozone to purify water to going back to bleach. So the consequences of COVID are kind of rippling through the supply chain. Oh, with all this heavy news this week, Sarah, have you gotten any G-Wiz stories we could sort of end with? Okay, well, here's one. So paper wasps, their nest turned out to be really brightly fluorescent.

So the reason we know this is that a scientist is walking through the woods in Vietnam at night with a black light, as you, I guess you do if you're a biologist. Oh, sure. You just walk through the woods with a black light. Yeah, exactly. That's what you do. And he happened to stumble upon this, like, brightly glowing green paper wasp nest. So my colleague, Catherine Woodard about this this week,

Paper wastes, they make these nests that kind of chew up like wood fiber, and their nests kind of look like paper mesher honeycombs. It's not the paper itself that's fluorescent. It turns out to be that there's the silk that the pupa make is fluorescent. And it glows really brightly green when you have a black light. Well, that is cool. I mean, in nature, glowing things, right? Sometimes can be a signal or a marker of something. Do scientists have any idea why these nests glow? Yeah, that's right. Sometimes they are a marker. So one hypothesis. is maybe these nests glow to help the was to navigate. Another hypothesis is maybe even more interesting is that the silk is able to kind of absorb some of the UV rays.

So maybe it's actually kind of a side effect of the protectiveness of the silk, kind of like a natural sunscreen. Wow, that is pretty cool. And that is a good end for us, Sarah. Thank you very much for bringing that one up. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. Sarah Zang, staff writer for the Atlantic. We have to take a break.

And when we come back, we're talking about solar energy, how to make it more efficient and accessible. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm I Refleto. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed me joyfully posting about my electric bill, $9.62. Why so happy? Well, because last year, the bill was over $300. Want to know my secret?

I'm happy to share it with you. This year, I installed solar panels and a battery. For me, the decision was part economic, part emotional. I had the space, I had the cash, and as listeners of this show probably know, I'm really interested in renewable energy. So it made sense to turn my home into its own power generator, which produces enough storable excess electricity that I'm actually feeding power back to the grid at times during the day, even in peak air conditioning season. That is how the state treats my home as an electric utility.

My power company siphons off power from my panels and my battery during peak demand time to power someone else's home. And it pays me back, I hope, at the end of the year. But don't get me wrong. This is not a get-rich scheme. I probably won't even break even for what? Six to eight years. But that's not why I'm doing it.

doing it because it feels like it's the right thing to do. Obviously, I'm not the only one who's been thinking this way. Do a quick search about solar power and read the headlines. Solar energy is booming all across the country. Solar is disrupting the fossil fuel industry. So joining me today to talk about where we are with solar energy, how it fits into the national grid, what new solar technologies are in development, are my guests, Dr. Joseph Berry, senior research fellow, and at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. Sam Evans Brown, Executive Director of Clean Energy, New Hampshire in Concord, New Hampshire. Welcome both of you to Science Friday.

Thanks so much for having us. Pleasure to be here. That's nice to have both of you. And I want to start by reading a few headlines. Solar power booms in Georgia. World's largest solar power energy storage nearest completion. Solar costs drop more than 70% over the last decade. It seems to me there's great news about solar every week.

Is it the best time for solar so far, Sam? You know, it's funny that you ask that, and the landscape really varies from state to state. And I would actually argue where I live, you know, you may have slightly missed the best possible time because there was a bit of a window a couple of years back when the solar market was really starting to respond. Costs were declining really strongly, but the incentives hadn't had their wings clipped quite yet. when we installed our panels in 2015, there was still a state rebate that one could take advantage of, which has now gone away. And so we were able to take advantage of cheap equipment, but also a favorable incentive landscape. And, you know, you mentioned that you're going to wait six to ten years for your

panels to pay back. Ours paid back in about three. You know, that's the benefit of being someone who, at the time I was a reporter covering the renewable energy industry, and I sort of knew what the trends were and was able to jump right at the right moment. So, you know, it's one of those things that's like planting a tree. When's the best time to plant a tree? The best time is 20 years ago. The next best time is today. Well, I did get a federal tax credit that I'm waiting for at the end of the year.

I don't think it has been extended or it's supposed to slowly peter out, but I'm getting, I think, like 20, 22 percent back. Yeah, the federal tax credits have stepped down and they are set to continue slowly stepping down. but they do tend to get extended frequently at the last minute, frequently as part of another bill, as part of a deal struck in Congress. So I know a lot of folks in the solar industry who are the folks that we represent are anxious and hoping that that will happen again because even though solar is cheaper than it's ever been, it still helps to have that federal tax credit if you're trying to, you know,

if you're standing on a customer's doorstep and trying to sell a system. Joe, you work on the tech side of solar research. Seeing headlines like these and seeing more solar deployed change how you feel about the work you're doing? I mean, it's always exciting to see solar deployed. But of course, you know, the goal is to make it even more pervasive than it is, right? At the moment, we're really talking about residential. What we'd really like to do is address the utility scale side where power producers are also

installing solar in order to meet their demands from their customers. And that really changes the equation of how we think about what we want to. to technically achieve on the research side, if you will. So we're still looking for that major ramp up in production by companies, usage by energy companies. That's right, because while it's relatively inexpensive, it's not as inexpensive as it could be. And as you pointed out in the intro, Ira, right, you had the bucks to do it. Not everybody does have the bucks to do it, but it's really important if we're going to

make a dent in things like, you know, the total amount of emitted carbon. that we make solar much more pervasive than it is now. And there are challenges with, you know, grid integration and other kind of aspects of the technology that have to be worked on. But, you know, from a performance perspective, I think based upon the work we're doing at the lab, we're kind of just getting started. In other words, you know, in another five years, the same solar panels that you have on your roof in terms of area could be producing easily 30% more electricity per unit area. Well, talk about that. How can you bring up the efficiency of solar panels? Well, if you look at the goals that have been kind of outlined these days by the U.S. Department of Energy, the goal is to make the cost significantly lower.

And one of the strategies that we use to do that is to make what we call tandem devices. So most PV that you get as a residential or commercial user, anybody who's on the planet, basically, is single junction, mainly silicon, although Cadill is a really, large player in the U.S. market. Just so our listeners know, PV means photovoltaic, the system that turns sunlight into electricity in a solar panel. But once you go off planet, i.e. places like Mars, the Mars rover, we use what you call multi-junctions or tandem technology. And that basically cuts the solar spectrum up into different colors, if you will. And that allows us to convert the energy much more efficiently than we could

if we just had to use a single junction device. So by making multi-junctions, we can really push the efficiency higher. The question is, can we do that economically enough to bring in the stuff that we use on satellites back down to Earth, so to speak? So we know how to do it. It's being used on Mars and in satellites. We just have to, what's the word, scale it up? We have to scale it and we have to make it much more manufacturable. That is to say, we need to be able to do it at scale and at low cost. So that's the catch. And if you look at a lot of the technologies that we currently deploy in space, they're very expensive at a basic materials level. We often talk in our group at Enrol about embodied energy. The amount of energy you have to put into something in order to

make it to begin with, because that's something that you have, then you have to pay back once that solar cell is, say, generating electricity. And for typical silicon-based panels that you have on, say, your roof, you know, the energy payback time is somewhere between two and a half, three years to basically generate the electricity you needed to basically put those together. We're looking at materials that are in order of magnitude lowering embodied energy than that. In other words, the energy payback time is something on the order of two or three weeks. Two or three weeks? Yeah, those are the kind of numbers we want to hit. All right, let's talk about some of the basics of solar power. We'll talk more about the efficiency of solar panels later because it really is interesting.

Sam, let's talk about some statistics. Do we know how much the use of solar energy has gone up in recent years, and do we know how much of that growth is from corporations or just from users like I am? Well, what I can tell you is that, you know, we're at about a place where we're installing somewhere on the order of 18 gigawatts DC every year. And to put that in context, that means that when those solar panels at noon on the sunniest day of the year, when they are cranking out their maximum capacity, could power a large chunk of New England. And that amount is being added around each year here in the United States.

And so it's nothing to sniff at. But you have to remember, you know, that's just when they're going at that peak moment. So it's a technology that's being deployed rapidly. In the sunniest parts of the world, it is genuinely the cheapest kind of electricity generation you can build at the moment. and it's reached the point where it's starting to substantially drive out other types of generation out of the market. So if you look at the types of generation that are being proposed in the United States right now,

in 2019, 32% of new generation that was coming online was natural gas. In 2020, that had dropped to 18%. And then so far in 2021, we're at 0% natural gas that's been added to the grid this year, whereas solar continues to rise. It's now up to 58% of new capacity that's been brought online. So the market is speaking. The market is saying that this is the stuff that's cheap enough to bring to market, but there are a lot of challenges to come. We're at such low levels of penetration that solar is still able to simply operate by taking up load that needs consuming. And we haven't hit a point where there's so much solar on the grid in most places where the grid is really having to

dynamically respond and figure out what to do when that solar starts to go away, you know, as the sun goes down at the end of the day. Well, let me get to that point then. I mean, what if everybody says, hey, I want to do what Ira did and put solar panels on my roof? And is there enough supply to meet demand? Are there enough solar panels that people could buy? Well, so actually, I think long before we get to the point where there aren't enough solar panels to buy, will hit a point where companies start to struggle to make money installing the solar panels. And in particular, I think on the utility scale side, that's going to become pretty acute because a utility scale solar array sells into the market, right? And the markets for

electricity, you know, designs vary across the country, but many of them are setting a market price every five minutes the market price changes. And when there's a lot of solar in the middle of the day, those prices crater. And there are parts of the country where, because of, you know, various subsidies and other mechanisms that power producers have to continue to make money even when prices hit zero. Electricity prices can often go negative in the parts of the day when the most variable, renewable technology is online. And so that is going to threaten the business model of all the solar providers. And that's when we're going to have to start talking about market innovation that will encourage bringing other types of resources to balance that online.

Yeah, because we have seen stories. I have seen stories, especially coming out of California, where they make so much solar energy now. They don't know what to do with it sometime during the day. There were stories about having to pay Arizona to take it off their hands. No, and that's exactly right. I think California is really the one that points the way to the challenges that the rest of the country is going to have to face. And similarly, California is probably the state that's going to start to figure out many of the solutions first, because they are so big, they have so much capacity to study these problems, and they have the ability to bring solutions to bear. In fact, the California ISO, the independent system operator,

which is kind of like the air traffic controller for the grid, is actively working on reforming their markets to try to figure out how it is that many of the balancing resources could be brought online. I do think that at the end of the day, you really do have to think both about the technologies and what the marketplace looks like for how you implement. those technologies to offer an opportunity for people to win economically, so to speak. So there's a balancing act between all these things. We value electricity differently depending upon how we're using it, right? We value the battery in our phones differently than we value the electricity that comes out of the wall because of the grid. And so the grid is kind of an interesting challenge to some of the

market penetration of new renewables. And then the other aspect of it is, you know, again, if we want these kind of impacts to be equally beneficial to everybody in the U.S., we have to find really effective market ways to really take advantage of the lower costs that these technologies really can provide. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you just joined us, we're talking about solar energy and the future of electrification with my guest, Dr. Joseph Berry, Senior Research Fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. Sam Evans Brown, Executive Director of Clean Energy, New Hampshire in Concord, New Hampshire. And will we be faced again and have a solution this time around

for communities that can't afford high costs of electricity, you know, and be available for underserved communities this time, as we think about distribution of electricity? Well, I think there's an opportunity to, I mean, these are challenges that, you know, I'm a material scientist slash device physicist person. And so I'll have to defer to some of my more clever colleagues who really do look at some of the economics of these things. But certainly if you talk to people who are working on these technologies day in and day out, we don't really feel like we'll have succeeded if we leave people out. It doesn't do us any good to have, you know, regions where we've got, you know, nice, clean parks and electrified.

cars if there are other places where, say, for example, we were generating all of that electricity with coal. Now, clearly, given solar prices, we have an opportunity to get rid of that. But we do need to think about kind of the implications of putting utility scale power plants in different places and what happens when those power plants reach the end of their lives. That's, again, something that we're working pretty actively on to try to develop what we call circular economic concepts when we're designing these systems from the beginning. So this is an active, very of research for us at NREL. Well, and Ira, I think your question really gets to the right way to be thinking about this, which is that we shouldn't just be looking at what is the cost of solar

and what is the cost of natural gas and comparing those two things and trying to decide which is the right resource to go with. What we should be looking at is total system cost. And increasingly, as variable renewables are starting to drop in cost, and as some of the technologies that we discussed, you know, the information and communication technologies that would allow the grid to talk to our homes and use our homes as sort of distributed batteries in all the various ways that they could do that. As those costs have started to drop, it started to become clear that there might be a system that is radically different than the grid that we use today that is still cheaper than the grid we use today. And I would point to an analysis by a gentleman named Chris Clack, who works for

firm called Vibrant Clean Energy, who built, you know, a very granular computer model of the electricity grid that integrated the weather and, uh, and made all sorts of assumptions about what technology costs would be down the line. And he estimated that having a high degree of distributed renewable generation out in the community on the edge of the grid, as they say, uh, you know, if we think of the grid as a wheel with a hub in the center that's a power plant and spokes that go out grid edge refers to our homes. And Chris Clack's model spat out a solution that said that having a lot of grid edge technology would be the most cost-effective solution, saving something on the order of a half a trillion dollars. And so I think that as technology changes, the assumptions of

what is going to be the most cost-effective grid is also going to change. And we really need to be thinking hard about what that means for policymaking, you know, every step of the way. So would the grid be more localized, which is the better way to make it so that everybody has their own source of power like their solar panels on their roof or to make it more centralized? Sam, what do you think? What's your opinion about that? I think that the answer to that is sort of yes and. My read of the studies that have been coming out is essentially that putting more renewables at the edge of the grid and making it so that your local circuit, you know, the local feeder that the big transmission line connects to from some

far away power plant, making it so that that local circuit is optimized on its own and is, you know, much of the time generating the electricity that it needs. What that does is it frees up that big transmission line to do other things. We have to take a break. And when we come back, continuing our dive into solar energy and how it's disrupting the fossil fuel giants. Stay with This is Science Friday. I am I Refleto. In case you're just joining us, we're continuing our conversation about solar energy, its potential, and its limitations, and its future. With my guest, Dr. Joseph Berry, senior research fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. Sam Evans-Brown, executive director of Clean Energy, New Hampshire, that's in Concord, New Hampshire.

I live in New England. I see that you live in New England. We may be hooked up. up to the same grid because I know when we had the hurricane that came through and we were on a storm alert in my home and I noticed that the grid was drawing off some of my battery at times and drawing some of my solar panels at time. I imagine it was to make sure that somebody else on that grid had enough electricity. Yeah, well, you must live in Massachusetts, Ira. Is that correct? I live in Connecticut. Okay. So generally speaking, southern new, New England is a little bit more progressive with its policies. I do not yet have the ability, even if I were to install a battery in my basement, my utility has not gotten wise to the fact that

it could use my home in that way. So it speaks to really the patchwork of energy policy that is part of the challenge here, right? There is no federal authority to come in and say exactly how energy should be regulated at the local level. States have a great deal of authority, And so this sort of necessarily based on our system has to be done in a patchwork way. And it's funny you mentioned that you were noticing that your battery was getting pulled off to power your neighbors. I was just noticing as I was sitting here in the interview, I have the ISO New England app set up on my phone. And I just got a notification that power prices are spiking right now because it's hot. Air conditioners are running.

The grid is slightly stressed. You know, the coal plant that's down the road from my office here, which is the last one in New England, is starting to spin up. So this is, I really just bring it up just to stress how interconnected we all are. And I personally think that leaning into that interconnectedness is the way through, that thinking of our homes as an island and trying to be entirely self-reliant 100% of the time and have like an off-grid homestead is really not a good solution. Because think of the hospitals and the factories and the schools and all of these other places that cannot generate enough electricity on their own.

If we're all thinking about cutting the cord and going off to live on our own little solar homesteads, those places are going to have increasingly higher prices for their power, and we're going to deepen our equity problems in the country. So I personally think we should be leaning into our interconnectedness and thinking of the resources in our basement as something that can help our neighbors when the grid is stressed, but also can help drive down prices.

Do you think also with people putting batteries in their homes, not only batteries in their basements, but batteries in their garages. I mean, as more people get electric cars, could they also not be seen when they're plugged into the home seen as sources to store electricity? Absolutely. And I just have to say, I really completely agree that, you know, this notion of everything being interconnected is a critical component. And as we do massive electrification, like with the vehicles, most people, if they're at work, I guess, you know, we've all been living through the pandemic, so a lot of times work is at home. But typically when you drive in in

the morning and when you drive home in the evening, those are the times when often, you know, the utility costs are the highest, right, at the beginning and the end of the day. And in the middle when we've got sunlight, if those vehicles are all plugged in, we can charge them at low cost. And that, you know, will again just make an electric vehicle even more appealing. You know, it's already great that you don't have to basically stop and go to the gas station all the time. But now if you're actually incentivized to have it plugged in and get it charged up when the prices are the lowest, that's, that's another great way to increase market penetration. And, you know, it also makes it cheaper for everybody to drive. Of course, there is still the barrier to entry, right? At the moment,

while electric vehicle prices are really dropping, they're still pretty expensive. So, you know, that's, that's again one of those challenges. But I think as we look forward, that's something that really is a problem that we can address. Well, I want to address something you started talking about earlier, Joe, and I want to get back to that, and that is new materials for solar cells. Let's talk about perovskite research. What makes it so different from what we use now, and why are people so excited about it? Yeah, so the first hybrid metal halide perovskite material, I believe, was reported in science

by David Mitzie in the 19, I think it was in 1999. And so these materials were of interest for transistors like any semiconductors are, and all solar cells are kind of made out as semiconductors. But the difference with these materials is that, you know, they do all the things that we want a semiconductor that we want to use for a photovoltaic device to do. It interacts strongly with light. It allows charges to move around so we can collect them and harvest them. But one of the things that we often have to do with semiconductors is make sure all the atoms are just in the right place. and these materials don't seem to require that, at least when we're trying to make an initial device, if you will.

So we can basically make the most efficient solar cells we can make out of these perovskite materials are solution processed. So that's to say, you know, you can literally use things like inkjet printing to deposit them, which means that printing them at scale and making them large area very, very rapidly is in principle tractable. that's obviously something we have to work at. But when you can then think about manufacturing the materials that you're making panels out of very, very rapidly at very, very high performance, then that's the way you drive down costs. And that's why they're different than most of the other semiconductors we have.

One of the other properties we really like about them relates to this tandem concept I talked about before. And it turns out one of the fundamental properties we care about for a semiconductor is, what we call its electronic gap. And if it's tunable, then that means we have different ways of slicing up the spectrum to take advantage of the energy that's in the light that we're harvesting. And perovskites have the ability to be tuned quite well, in contrast to a lot of the other kind of materials that we use for PV like silicon. Silicon is kind of silicon.

It's kind of the way it is, and it doesn't have a whole lot of tunability to it. In contrast, these materials can really change their color by tuning their properties. So those combination of things make it unique and allow us to use it to not only, say, do the job of a photovoltaic material by itself, but we can also add it to existing technologies like silicon to make them more efficient. And that combination is pretty much, it's kind of the holy grail of things you look for if you're a semiconductor physicist thinking about photovoltaic devices. So what you're basically saying is that silicon works in visible light that we all can see, but there are other frequencies of the light. light like infrared, that it doesn't absorb, but you can now tune, let's say, Paravsky to a certain place where it can absorb that invisible part, and then you add that to the silicon, and you just get a much more efficient solar cell.

Yeah, that's... Would that be correct? That's the general idea. I mean, in the case of silicon, the problem is really that the high-energy photons, like blue, light, you harvest it, but at the same time, you're generating a lot of heat. heat. In other words, you're wasting a lot of energy and thermal energy that if you had a solar cell that just harvested that blue light, it would be much more efficient. But you'd forego all those lower energy photons that would be, say, red and other colors like that. So silicon does a really

good job of making a bit of a compromise between, you know, which photons it takes versus which it doesn't. But if I can have something that I can put on top of a silicon solar cell that takes that blue light, harvest it very, very efficiently, then I can combine that with the silicon and make it a system that is even more efficient than either the two would be by it themselves. Does that make sense? Yeah. So I just want to jump in real quick because these new materials are very exciting. They're the next frontier, and I don't want to give the impression that I'm not excited about them. But when we talk about solar innovation, I think that there's sometimes this sort of ignored piece that is largely what's been driving the cost down so far, which is innovation in manufacturing techniques. And in particular,

there's an analyst named Jenny Chase, who I follow her work quite closely. And she points to something called diamond wire saws, which, you know, essentially when you are making a solar panel right now, you get a big chunk of silicon and you cut off slices of it. Those are what you use to put together the modules. And the width of the saw determines how much of that silicon you waste. And so from 2016 to 2018, basically the entire solar manufacturing industry transitioned to using these wire saws and wasting much less silicon, and that's what drove down the price. And similarly, there's now the same standard materials, just silicon solar panels, are now being made in a bifacial arrangement, which is to say that both sides of the panel absorb light

and generate electricity. And so if you put a panel somewhere that there's, you know, high albedo, which is to say like out in the desert where you're on sand, which is pretty reflective, the light that scatters off the sand and hits the back of the panel can generate meaningful amounts of electricity too. And so all of these new materials are really important. And I think for, you know, the 10 years out, 20 years out, in order to continue driving down the price of solar, they're going to be the thing that we, that we, need to continue investing in. But similarly, right now, using the same old materials, there are a lot of sort of more humdrum advancements that have kind of flown under the radar, but have been incredibly important to getting us to where we are today. Well, so your point's well taken, but I guess I would argue that, you know, the thing with silicon, a lot of these technologies like bifaciality,

for example, these are things that are kind of improving things. But for a silicon device, by itself, there's a basic thermodynamic limit that kind of says, okay, you can't do much better than this, even if I play a lot of kind of clever games, so to speak. In addition, certainly the reduction of kerf, which is kind of like the dust that you get when you make these saw cuts, while you can reduce that, there are other kind of approaches that I think are, they're a little bit more radical, but they're kind of of a piece where you can essentially do kerfless technologies. In other words, instead of making silicon in a really large single crystal and then cutting it up, right, can you basically make that as a more of a thin film type deposition? Those are questions

that I think can provide some life to the kind of existing materials, but a lot of those materials are pretty mature, right? We've had experience with silicon that's, you know, older than I am. In contrast with these new materials, I started at NREL in about 16 years ago, and the proscyte materials were not a thing at that point. So in contrast, at the moment, if you combine a proscite solar cell with a silicon solar cell, you can take it to an efficiency that no silicon solar cell will ever get to by itself. And that's kind of a remarkable thing. Give me a number.

29% is currently the record at lab scale. But that's a silicon proscyte tandem. And that is in a place that no silicon solar cell will get to by. itself, at least if it's operating as a conventional photovoltaic device. That's huge. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, talking about solar energy and the future of electrification with my guest, Dr. Joseph Barry and Sam Evans Brown. And Ira, the reason I bring this up and the reason I think Joe responded so quickly

is that there's been sort of a debate in the energy landscape of, to what degree do we need to be investing in innovation, and to what degree should we be investing in deployment of the existing technologies that we have? And I think, you know, most people who look at this closely, again, would say both, right? Both and we need to be investing in innovation and the urgency of the climate problem

suggests that we need to be deploying what we have quite quickly, especially given the price drops that we're talking about right at the outset. And I really only brought up the improvements in manufacturing processes that have driven those cost declines because there are some folks who would hear about the types of technologies that are on the horizon and they would say, well, let's wait. Let's wait for those. And once we get better technology, let's roll that out. But I think what the experience with Silicon Solar really

points to is that much of the cost decline comes after the lab, right? And so these advances that Joe is engaged in and that national laboratories are driving are incredibly important. And I don't mean to say that they aren't the future, but they shouldn't be, they shouldn't give us an excuse not to act now. Yeah, I would argue the future is now, as they say. But, but, you know, I mean, I would agree that we kind of need an all of the above approach. But one of the things that we talk about is kind of the embodied energy. And, you know, I have a, I have a colleague who's a theorist, and he said, if you were designing a material to do the photovoltaic task, you would never choose silicon. So, why do we use silicon and why is it 90% of the market? Well, you can argue silicon is the most

well-understood material that we have, certainly as a semiconductor on the planet. And when you have the perfect hammer, every problem is a nail. And I think one of the things that, you know, we get excited about at NREL, certainly, you know, in our research group, is that we now have a different tool in the toolbox to kind of address these challenges. And it really is complementary. That is to say, we can take an existing technology like silicon to a place it couldn't go otherwise, and we have an opportunity to basically create a technology that's even lower cost because of the potential opportunities to manufacture these types of materials in completely new and unique ways. We do a demo in the lab where we actually paint on a solar cell in real time.

And so these are things that you can't really do with existing silicon-based technologies, for example. Okay, that's a good place to wrap it up, a little bit of, future looking about what might be down the road. I want to thank both of you for taking time to be with us today. Dr. Joseph Berry, senior research fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Gold in Colorado. Sam Evans Brown, Executive Director of Clean Energy, New Hampshire in Concord, New Hampshire. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Thank you, Ira. It was a real pleasure. One last thing. Having been away for a few weeks, I can't let another one. go by without mourning the loss of Neil Conan, former colleague and talk show partner.

I knew Neil and admired his work for more than 40 years. He could do it all, report from Iraq and get arrested there, heard a bunch of self-minded producers and reporters, and create a magical radio program. Get Chuck Yeager to drive him around a secret military airport in his private pickup truck, and have the wisdom to leave the 9-5 world and grow mass. Academia Nuts in Hawaii. Neil was his best at summing up the world around him, and understanding and appreciating the contributions you, our audience, make to comprehending it all.

So I'll let him do that. I leave you with a bit of his farewell message to you, his listeners, after the cancellation of his beloved Talk of the Nation radio show, whose airwaves we shared. This program works best when we find ways to engage your stories about your jobs and your kids, your fears and your successes about what happened in the drought, the hurricane, and the fire on the hospital at the job and at school in Iraq or Vietnam. Over all my time at NPR, I've worked as a reporter, editor, and producer, and as much as I

loved all those jobs, the past 11 and a half years, this job has been the best. Neil Conan, condolences to family, friends, and listeners. And that's about all the time we have for this hour. Charles Berkowitz is our director. Our producers are Christy Taylor, Kathleen Davis, John Dankowski is our news director. B.J. Leatherman composed our theme music. And of course, if you missed any part of the program, or you would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Oh, and one more thing. On the SciFri Voxpop app, we want to hear from our STEM teachers. What topics and projects are you most excited to dive into with your students this school year.

We want to hear about your plans on the SciFri Voxpop app. Tell us wherever you get your apps. Have a great weekend. I'm I Refledo.