Mission Solar

Last week, I attended #solarpowersummit 2024 of SolarPower Europe in Brussels with the theme of a Solar Mission similar to Lunar Mission of 60s with very interesting and inspiring sessions. Obviously, the planet needs less politician talks with election-to-election range of interest and populism. Among many other important players and influencers, conservations with visionaries like Laurent Segalen of 🎙Redefining Energy , Bruce Douglas Global Renewables Alliance (GRA) Jörg Ebel , Vartan Oskanian of RECOM TECHNOLOGIES and Fath Peter of RCT Power were memorable ones.

This time I was even more in active listening and observing mode with less speaking, lijkt me gezellig 😄

Reforging the Solar Photovoltaic Supply Chain

The global solar supply chain is looking for a shift away from Chinese manufacturers who serve as the dominant suppliers of solar PV equipment today. However, this shift can only occur if policymakers and industry actors adopt a firm stance against unethical solar manufacturing in Xinjiang and take an active hand in rapidly expanding alternative, socially and environmentally responsible solar commodity production elsewhere.

What Level of Investment Is Required to Establish New Manufacturing at Scale?

Projecting the magnitude of necessary investment required to diversify the solar supply chain depends on the scale of the target. The following calculations estimate total capital investment required to meet 30%, 50% and 100% of non-Chinese global solar PV demand in 2030 with new manufacturing capacity operating outside of China.

Governments should enact bans on the importation of goods from any companies complicit in forced labor practices, thereby sending a clear and distinct message of zero tolerance for forced labor within the supply chain. Policymakers could also enforce other penalties like investment bans on companies abroad that persist in their exploitation of forced labor, whether directly or by sourcing components.

Policymakers and customers that care about supply chain justice will need to prioritize investments in responsibly-sourced solar products as the new, global standard and thereby contest the market share of Chinese manufacturers as much as possible. Companies will need to devote major effort to trace products and materials throughout their supply chain, with the support of government partners and pooled industry knowledge.

Climbing the Accountability Ladder Up

Rung 4 | Wait and Hope

These are the people who wait and hope for miracles and successes to happen in their lives without putting in the effort to go out and get it done. They are my "favorite" group of victims 🤫 and they are not hesitant to reply with an innocent and faithful "I hope" to an inquiry with a specific deadline. A usual anecdote that people who worked with me witnessed several times:

Me: Can we get 99% supplier qualification by the end of month?

Victim: I hope so.

Me: I see, but we do not work for Stato della Città del Vaticano my friend, what is our plan?

Although waiting and hoping are better than blaming and making excuses, this is still a mindset that places the obligation for results on someone else. In fact, all the behaviors on these lower rungs on the Ladder of Accountability are victim behaviors. People who languish at these levels of performance (or non-performance) seem to believe that things happen to them.

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Entrepreneurs with the mantra “if we build it, they will come,” and executives who don’t communicate their expectations, fall into this category. Employees can’t be accountable if they don’t know what is expected of them. Entrepreneurs won’t be successful if they have a passion, but no plan and no target.

Tragic example of wait-and-hopers are Climate Change inactivists those think that the planet will heal itself or someone else action will suffice. Hey there, you can also do something and do it today and onwards! We already crossed boundaries and point of no return.

The scientific updates and analyses presented in a 2023 study confirm that humanity is today placing unprecedented pressure on Earth system. Perhaps most worrying in terms of maintaining Earth system in a Holocene-like interglacial state is that all the biosphere-related planetary boundary processes providing the resilience (capacity to dampen disturbance) of Earth system are at or close to a high-risk level of transgression

Book Bits

Reading List of March 2024

📚 The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives [2024] is for readers interested in understanding the global battle for critical minerals, the environmental and social impacts of mining, the challenges of recycling and new technologies, and the geopolitics involved in mineral production. It will appeal to those concerned about climate change, energy independence, and the intersection of environmental and economic issues.

📚 Liberalism and the Challenge of Climate Change [2023] Climate change poses a decisive challenge to free market liberalism, while closing off the possibility of imagining a different kind of future for humanity. The author analyses how liberalism has shaped our understanding of climate change and how liberalism is legitimated in the face of a crisis for which liberalism has no answers.

📚 The Edge: How competition for resources is pushing the world, and its climate, to the brink – and what we can do about it [2023] We are at the edge, not the end, of history. The world is reaching its limits and is at war over the critical natural resources that define them. The Edge is about our limits, but also a turning point. Have we reached one now, why, so what, and what should we do about it? The Edge seeks to explain 'why' the world is facing so many of the challenges ahead of it today, to ask 'so what', in terms of the implications for individuals, society and the planet, and what we can do about it. It seeks to establish a framework to explain what is happening in the world today.

📚 Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation [2021] A stylish and engaging book packed with outstanding photographs if perhaps a few too many lists. We “live on a dying planet” and the only way to reverse this is a whole scale campaign of regeneration. There is a lot of interesting material on re-wilding, reforestation and biodiversity. But it is too misty-eyed and too politically-naïve. The debate about climate change has moved on

📚 In the Camps: China's High-Tech Penal Colony [2021] Author’s conclusion is a reminder that China’s internment programme, which he calls the largest internment of a religious minority since the second world war, has global implications for surveillance and modern policing that should be considered in their own right. It’s facial recognition, checkpoints but also just data collection. That’s something that is relevant across the PRC. It’s happening in Hong Kong as well, this effort to get people’s cellphones and their contacts and to maximize the personal data the government has at its command. Though, of course, that again is not just a China story but a global one.