“WIN, WIN, WIN, WIN” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 148

and markets, were again formed. But the arguments coming from both
sides had important l aws.

m m m

In April 2012, I found myself in London. Two years earlier, a group of
energy ministers had joined to create something called the Clean Energy
Ministerial (CEM), a regular summit of governments, companies, advo-
cates, and experts, all of whom aimed to accelerate the progress of clean
energy technologies. London would be holding the third CEM summit,
and I was to moderate a discussion about solar power. 21
h e group gathered at Lancaster House, an imposing neoclassical
mansion built in the early nineteenth century. It was a typically dreary
spring London day, and as the drizzle continued more than one par-
ticipant thought it clever to observe that this was the wrong time to
be discussing power from the sun. Once our discussion commenced,
though, it was clear that there were bigger challenges at hand. Solar,
everyone agreed, had made enormous progress. Additional sessions
came to similar conclusions about wind, energy ei ciency, and other
alternative energy technologies. But agreement among the captains
of government and industry mostly ended there. Two big questions
remained unresolved: How close were these technologies to competing
with traditional fuels? And what role, if any, would governments need
to play if alternatives were to fully l ourish?
A few weeks before the meeting, three analysts at McKinsey and
Company, the strategy consultancy, released a study that caught sum-
mit-goers' at ention. 22 h e analysts had surveyed the landscape and
found that the cost of solar power was rapidly declining. h e holy grail
of solar power has long been a solar module that costs a dollar a wat .
(Sixty wat s is enough to power a typical incandescent light bulb; look
for a “60 W” mark on old bulbs around your home.) According to the
National Renewable Energy Laboratory, costs have followed a steady
downward trend, declining from ten dollars a wat in the mid-1980s
to three dollars by 2009, an average of 7 percent a year. 23 Since then,
prices have fallen of a clif , hit ing $1.50 in mid-2011 and continuing to
decline from there. 24 Along with falling module prices have come bold