There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask, “Why?” I dream of things that never were, and ask, “Why not?” - Robert F. Kennedy
Purpose of Petition
This petition urges Apple to save solar from the Trump Administration and to ignite the solar revolution. Years ago, Apple ignited the computer revolution and transformed society. Now, Apple, along with other Silicon Valley companies, should embark on a solar project that will rival the Manhattan Project in its ambition, investment, energy, and urgency to transform the world.
In order to save solar, Apple needs to take three steps in 2017. But before detailing these steps, it is necessary to address the question of why Apple and the Silicon Valley should pursue anything outside of their normal business practices at this time.
Need for Silicon Valley Intervention
1. Why Solar Now?
Today, three paradigm shifts in the solar sector are intersecting: The first shift is that with the new Trump Administration, the federal government no longer acknowledges climate science and decades of support for clean energy will almost certainly be abandoned. The second shift is that solar energy (and wind energy) have in some geographic areas achieved grid parity, and are very close to grid parity in other geographic areas. The third shift is that the almost exponential fall of solar prices over the past ten years has decimated solar companies’ balance sheets, rendering them incapable of building factories and innovating to take advantage of grid parity. (First Solar, a company with 1/100 the market cap of Facebook, is the only US firm that is cash flow positive and its stock price has fallen by more than 50% in this year alone.) These shifts are both a crisis and an opportunity for Apple and other Silicon Valley companies to save solar while pursuing the large scale economic opportunities resulting from this disruptive change.
2. What is the Challenge?
In Valley lore, Steve Jobs asked John Sculley, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest your life or do you want a chance to change the world?” and a revolution was born. Ironically, today many of the technology companies that reaped the fruits of this revolution exist to sell sugar water, albeit with sophisticated Bayesian algorithms. Decades after the Scullian challenge, literally orders of magnitude of effort, intellectual capacity, and capital have been redirected back to John Sculley’s trivial problem of selling sugar water, seemingly forgetting Jobs' question, “What is the challenge to change the world?”
This devolution of technology’s higher purpose to Sculley’s pre-Apple nihilistic capitalism runs counter to the Valley’s ethos: From Donald Tresidder’s stewardship of Yosemite to Apple’s OS names and marketing, to hourly Facebook posts, the Bay Area’s beauty and nature inspires generations. In the future, when El Capitan’s dome will never be capped with snow, it will be difficult for our descendants to imagine that billions were spent to experience it, or an augmented reality of it, and so little was spent to preserve it. The challenge is, “How can the Valley prevent climate change, preserve beauty itself rather than its digital simulacrum?”
Steps to Take in 2017
1. Finance Large Scale Solar Projects In a Non-Trivial Way.
In 2016, Apple announced “our 4 gigawatts of clean energy projects around the world will avoid more than 30 million metric tons of carbon pollution by 2020.”
This commitment is impressive, but these projects fail to qualify Apple as a leader in solar financing: In 2016, DE Shaw Renewable Investments (DESRI), the subsidiary of a much smaller company than Apple, had 1.3 gigawatts of projects, or projects equivalent to 1/3 of Apple’s projects. Because DERI’s parent, DE Shaw, is 1/10th the size of Apple, if Apple were to have DE Shaw’s commitment to wind and solar, Apple commensurate portfolio would have to be 13 gigawatts, or more than four times the size of Apple’s present effort. (DESRI’s investments also include the politically difficult Block Island Wind Project, which has no analogue in Apple’s clean energy portfolio.)
In 2017, and the next few years, Apple can help solar and the climate in a manner that goes beyond covering the carbon footprint of "operations." Being the largest and most respected company in the world, Apple should engage in a thought experiment: What if we were the people at DEShaw Renewable Investments, (who are comparatively kicking our butt in clean energy investments with much more difficult projects) and we had access to the capital, the marketing power, and the influence that we have? What would we do? For example, currently Apple sells bonds to bring capital back to the United States. Is there a way to finance a solar project outside the United States, and then sell the solar project bonds, then bring that capital back to the United States? Or is there a way to finance municipal bonds for projects in the United States?
(In 2016, Apple created a new company, Apple Energy LLC, and “won permission from federal regulators to sell excess electricity.” This move seems to offer the legal opportunity for Apple to go beyond just covering their own carbon footprint.)
There are many possibilities for Apple to act as a solar or wind financing bank on a large scale. But the most important point is that Apple in 2015 did an $850M dollar deal with First Solar, the leading, and most financially stable US solar company. First Solar’s financing costs in 2016 are 36% of a project, because it is financially weak and because most partners aren’t as strong as Apple, which fact is reflected in the high interest rates of the financing terms. For any large scale project to be cost effective, the project need a strong financial backer. Apple has caused a few project to occur because it is using the power itself. However, there are potentially many projects that can occur with Apple’s financial backing without Apple being the end user.
In 2017, Apple should seek to put its full weight into solar financing, using Apple Energy LLC, and finance and develop projects for solar and wind that it are economically viable with its participation but not economically viable without it.
2. Establish a Solar/Wind Advocacy Group of Silicon Valley Companies
With the imminent abdication of responsibility for climate change by the Trump Administration, someone with a larger constituency larger than Trump’s must fill the void. Apple’s brand is more trusted than Trump’s or the government’s. Where it cannot change policy on a federal level, it must change policy and implement solar projects via state and local advocacy.
The Valley must also face the gross imbalance of capital devoted to trivial problems, as compared to the capital devoted to climate change. In the past, dirty energy producers have been encouraged to invest in clean energy. But they have not responded; and the development of clean energy technology is more suited to the Valley than dirty energy producers. Without Apple and the Valley focusing on climate change in a major way, it is unlikely any other industry will. It is up the Apple and the Valley to make a difference.
3. Invest in Solar Research and Fund the Solar Future.
Years ago, Harry Atwater, a Caltech professor and luminary in solar research said, in regard to the cost requirements of solar, “We need to think about potato chips, not silicon chips,” suggesting that prices needed to drop to an inconceivably low level.
At the time, Atwater’s requirements for a cheap solar cell seemed at best quixotic, but now we are almost at grid parity. Additionally, in the past months, research on perovskite cells by Berkeley researchers and Stanford researchers promises to drastically reduce the price of solar cells. Both perovskite/silicon tandem cells and tandem cells composed of dual perovskite materials could be the end product and solar solution from the past fifty years of solar research.
And yet, like the last mile of a marathon, the last years for this end product of solar research to reach viability, promise both epic victory and epic defeat. As with a computer neural network or augmented reality, solar grid parity has been promised to take place “in the next five years from now” for the past thirty years, and that promise has always been true, except in recent years, the “now” is in the past.
To highlight one discovery, Stanford’s Michael McGehee has been working on this ‘five year perovskite solar project’ for the past twenty years and on November 2 in this video, he announces that a tandem silicon-perovskite cell has achieved 23% efficiency and will easily achieve 26% or 27% efficiency in a few months. In this earlier video, he announces an all-perovskite solar cell can achieve 25% efficiency in a few months.
These are revolutionary announcements. Granted, NREL authenticated lab results of perovskite solar performance and manufacturing performance may differ, and there are many steps from the lab to the end product. One problem is that the media just doesn't care about solar: there is a combined 1K youtube views of McGehee and no mainstream media stories on the solar perovskite announcements from Stanford, Berkeley, and Oxford. Why is it that millions are aware for Zuckerberg’s failed attempt to develop an AI system for his home but only a few thousand are aware of a huge achievement in McGehee’s twenty year solar research quest?
That rhetorical question aside, as McGehee confesses to his students, in the video, FirstSolar is the only stable company in the US solar industry. Even FirstSolar is cash-strapped to build a new factory for its own purposes. Furthermore, (not stated by McGehee) perovskite cell advances apply to silicon cell manufactures, but because FirstSolar’s Cadium Telluride (CdTe) cells do not benefit from perovskites (the bandgap compatibility and efficiency gains are not the same as for silicon), FirstSolar, the only profitable US solar company would not be interested in perovskites, because even if it believes in the technology, it would have to sacrifice its present CdTe solar company to create a product.
FirstSolar’s inability to build a perovskite factory and the mismatch with its solar technology means that there is no US solar company with the balance sheet to develop silicon-perovskite or tandem-perovskite cells. As stated before, even FirstSolar is about 1/100 the market cap of Facebook.
This calamity of political and fiscal impediments to the last leg of solar advancement presents both a profit and a moral opportunity for Apple.
On the profit side of the equation, if Apple were to enter the solar development market at this time, focused on perovskites, it would be entering at the time of disruption, and taking advantage of decades of government-funded solar research and a political desire to balance overt preferences for turning the clock back on energy production with the realities of energy economics. If Apple researched and developed the manufacture of perovskite solar cells, it also would be applying its manufacturing expertise and ability to innovate in an area where it can create and define solutions with an unrestricted freedom unequaled in other research areas such as autonomous driving. The economic possibilities are also far greater than most technology opportunities being pursued in the Valley.
On the moral side of the equation, Apple cannot lose by supporting solar research or pursuing a Manhattan project of investment in solar technology. Even for Donald Trump himself, the idea of a company devoting itself to solving the energy problem is hard to campaign against. And at least on a worldwide level, Apple’s constituency is much larger than Trump’s or the new era that he is ushering in.
Conclusion
Apple needs to save solar’s fate and the planet’s fate by igniting the solar revolution. By doing so, it reaffirms and follows the ethos of the founders and leaders of Silicon Valley, from Donald Tresidder to every person who has taken a breath in the great panorama of Bay Area beauty and has reflected for a moment on the beautiful and fragile nature of their environment.
You, Tim Cook, and Apple have many other concerns on your plate with the Trump Administration: tax policy, immigration policy, privacy concerns, intellectual property, user-security, human rights, possible federal suits, and a potential boycott of Apple products by a President who has urged a boycott previously.
But at the end of these four, or eight, or sixteen years, what’s the higher order bit? Looking back, you would see that Trump received 62M votes, Clinton 65M votes, but Apple had 90M iPhone users in the United Staes, and much more worldwide. These 90M individuals did hire you to protect their privacy and security, others hired you to protect their stock interests, and at the core of it, something else.
Perhaps that something else today is the same as yesterday, to “think different;” that is, not to just hunker down in these times and accept merely defending corporate prerogatives, but to also push forward the society you want regardless of the political climate. There is no Bell Labs today, but there is the possibility that many companies in the Valley could be the solar Bell Labs of tomorrow. Of those companies that could lead, it falls to Apple to be that company, and to you, Tim Cook, to lead that venture into a better tomorrow, by igniting the solar revolution.
Disclosure: I don’t work for the solar industry and cannot in any way benefit from the implementation of the ideas set forth above, except as a concerned citizen of planet Earth.
