The Solarmaxxing of Abundance and Its Critics

More solar, yes, but in service of the public interest

By Seaver Wang

Conflict between supporters and opponents of the Abundance movement has generated such energy that engineers might dream of harnessing it for society’s benefit. But in an intriguing coincidence, both proponents and critics of abundance may largely agree on the issue of energy itself, at least when it comes to solar power.

Sparring commentators of all stripes share a conviction that solar energy will flourish nationwide in their desired future. The text of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson hints at vast, cheap solar energy from coast to coast if government permitting barriers holding back commercial solar development can be alleviated. In response, critiques by Isabella Weber and Sandeep Vaheesan disagree with the means but not the ends, condemning “tax credits and other enticements” to “uncoordinated private companies” but endorsing the goal of solar power growth albeit with a focus on “public and nonprofit solar deployment.” Yet, ironically, both sides’ shared belief that “solarmaxxing” is the key to achieving their societal aspirations is at best incomplete and at worst overlooks the possibility of counterproductive effects.

A significant risk thus exists in pronouncements like environmental writer Bill McKibben’s latest shorthand: “we're... used to thinking about [renewable energy] as the Whole Foods of energy. It's nice, but pricey. Actually, it's the Costco of energy. It's cheap, it's available in bulk, it's on the shelf ready to go.” Such messaging often leaves electricity sector practitioners shifting uncomfortably, well aware that delivering cheaper electricity for working-class Americans is not actually as simple as adding mass solar. In many possible futures, clumsy policy interventions on solar’s behalf could well make electricity more expensive for consumers.

This is neither a validation of anti-renewable smears nor a claim that solar poses an inherent threat to either abundance or its progressive alternative visions. Solar is assuredly a strategically vital sector for America—one that pursues self interest no more than any other slice of the energy world and can drive rapid progress if harnessed well. Solar’s modularity is genuinely revolutionary, delivering scale at both the Jeffersonian level of the rural homeowner and the Hamiltonian level of the gigawatt-scale “solar farm.”

But, make no mistake, political thinkers debating America’s future should avoid too narrowly conflating solar success with good energy policy. The political and technical messiness of the grid and the ways such factors may rebound onto national politics will pose complex challenges to their theories of change and power. Assuming that vastly more of one’s favorite flavors of solar will easily solve these problems is to take a risky shortcut in thinking.

Reconciling solar and energy abundance

Among market-oriented proponents of abundance who are also interested in making progress on climate change, solar power seems to offer an all-in-one solution. Remove the regulatory and permitting obstacles standing in solar’s way, and a solar revolution will deliver cheap energy, economic growth, and political power via an approving electorate. In the very first paragraph of Abundance, Klein and Thompson promise “a cocoon of energy so clean it barely leaves a carbon trace and so cheap you can scarcely find it on your monthly bill.” As for how to get there, prominent solar prophet Jesse Peltan offers the prescription: “Cut the red tape, improve price signals, and you’ll see solar + storage EVERYWHERE.”

Many abundance thinkers will clarify that their energy vision isn’t purely deregulatory, but absolutely also includes stronger state capacity to deploy new renewables nationwide. The abundance movement at large is much more open to nuclear power, geothermal, carbon capture, hydroelectricity, and even gas-fired generation than are solar enthusiasts on the environmental left. But many in Camp Abundance gravitate towards solar, wind, and batteries based on a justifiable stance that these modular resources can deploy the fastest to meet growing energy needs over the next several years.

Meanwhile, progressive and socialist critics of abundance correctly note that government interventions and regulatory streamlining to renewables’ benefit orient government processes and capabilities in service of for-profit companies. This is hardly as nefarious in principle as puritanical Green New Deal advocates implied by disparaging tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act and other abundance-coded policy ideas as handouts for corporations. But numerous voices have called upon Klein and Thompson to acknowledge that many private interests will not neatly align with political goals of clean, abundant energy for all.

A robust energy abundance plan must control the profit-seeking impulses of energy corporations insofar as they seek to rig market regulations and energy system operation in their favor. The ecosystem of relevant actors is large—private independent power producers and asset managers, energy project developers, electricity market traders, retail power companies, utilities, rooftop solar companies, grid service providers, large tech companies, and more. Some focus specifically on renewables, others on fossil thermal power, and some transact in all types of energy. All will play some role along the path to energy abundance, but each will also pursue narrow self-interests.

An asset manager owning forty solar farms prioritizes revenue from electricity sold with little incentive to prevent power grid failures unless public policy dictates otherwise. A solar developer prioritizes building projects fast and at low cost, and may oppose grid connection fees to pay for transmission upgrades even if that means higher electric bills for households. A real-time energy trader may welcome volatility and spikes in wholesale power prices and will pursue all opportunities for arbitrage that market rules allow.

Joe Weisenthal’s review of Abundance even points out the curious case of an oil and gas magnate calling for $1 trillion of public-private spending on wind turbines in 2008, potentially motivated by a recognition that natural gas power plants would benefit from a balancing role alongside wind power. Meanwhile Brett Christophers’s book on why cheap renewables have driven limited decarbonization progress discusses how such balancing by gas plants often leaves electricity prices exposed to high fuel price volatility despite growing wind and solar generation.

With grid costs necessarily socialized between generators, taxpayers, utilities, and customers, many outcomes are possible where working-class ratepayers wind up disappointed with political leaders’ promises that the solar revolution will lower their electric bills. Leaders like California governor Gavin Newsom, now prominently flirting with abundance, are playing with fire by trumpeting simplistic solar public benefits narratives while his voters’ electric bills rise.

First, “more supply means cheaper prices” is only true to a point for solar energy that saves fuel costs and generates during daytime with a midday peak. Electricity is not perfectly fungible across space and time, and battery storage is not omnipotent in its ability to solve solar oversaturation during peak sunlight that discourages further solar investment while leaving unresolved the need to rely on more expensive generation like gas during mornings, night, or cloudy weeks.

A resilient and cost-efficient power system will thus leverage a diversity of resources alongside solar. If abundance is to also pursue decarbonization long-term, this will require ambitious efforts now to elevate complementary energy technologies like nuclear, geothermal, and long-duration storage. Some of these technologies may pose competition to solar that solar interests may well even resist.

A solarmaxxing agenda must also choose between maximizing solar manufacturing versus solar deployment. Deployment maximalism remains predicated on mass solar and battery imports from China that carry trade dependence and human rights risks. This poses uncomfortable political questions around ethical sourcing and why solar can’t be manufactured domestically if it is so clearly the technology of the future. Alternatively, a manufactured-in-America solar deployment agenda demands ambitious efforts to protect and expand U.S. and allied solar manufacturing, imposing higher equipment costs on solar developers in the near term.

Then consider the important yet more technical realm of wires, which typically make up an increasingly large share of a user’s electricity bill. An energy system more reliant on large, far-flung solar farms requires a sizable network of additional wires with its own cost implications. And while a large ecosystem of distributed energy, vehicle-to-grid, and virtual power plant companies and enthusiasts vocally asserts that their solutions can obviate the need for new centralized generation or transmission and their associated costs, these claims remain untested in operational practice.

Progress will demand hard questions of both megasolar and roof solar proponents. Are today’s residential distribution networks equipped to export rooftop solar electricity back to the grid, and what would such upgrades really cost relative to large power plants? Would the behavior of a large pool of rooftop solar, home battery, and electric vehicle assets be predictable enough for a grid operator to rely upon them as a virtual power plant? If Las Vegas is to depend on a network of large solar farms, can the system avoid an outage if a landslide severs a transmission line carrying a gigawatt of solar into the city? These are mandatory questions to consider when contemplating the future of an electric grid that sustains the livelihoods and well-being of Americans every millisecond of the year.

Here, the budding abundance community would do well to embrace its expressed love of deep wonkery a little more. Abundance ideas have drawn growing attention from generalist policy pundits, and energy abundance seems deceptively accessible to many at first. But in practice, the complexities of electricity markets and systems make the puzzle of cheap power for the people unexpectedly difficult.

Solar is not a shortcut for a left clean energy agenda

More left-leaning progressive and environmentalist critics of abundance must also reckon with the shortcomings of their own overoptimistic solar worldview and the limits of solar measures for providing cheap clean energy to all.

First, much of the mainstream environmental movement still operates under a longstanding mistaken conviction that variable renewables and energy storage can solve all problems at low cost. Misled by a feedback loop of biased and performative research and oversimplified activist narratives from ten to fifteen years ago, many have parroted the omnipotence of 100% wind, solar, and storage systems into a pseudoscientific axiom. Ecosocialists and environmentalists can thus reject uncomfortable technologies like nuclear power, carbon capture, large hydroelectric dams, and especially any continued reliance on the grid balancing services of gas power plants as wholly unnecessary.

Such convenient, ideologically-pure nonsense never possessed any rational basis. In fact, persistent reinforcement of 100% renewable myths has done more harm than good to the cause of affordable clean power for all by justifying opposition to energy and transmission projects of every stripe and counterproductive early shutdowns of many nuclear power plants. The final defeat of such technologically absolutist 100% renewable distractions in debates over energy policy cannot come a moment too soon.

Just as abundance stans may prove susceptible to solar-coded corporate talking points, progressive groups are similarly vulnerable to plucky community energy special interests who appeal to their small-is-beautiful political aesthetics. Rural electricity cooperatives now often resist cost contributions to interregional transmission plans. Community choice aggregation offers beguiling alternatives to utility electricity promising “energy sovereignty” for communities, while in reality letting localities symbolically procure renewable electricity to claim dubious climate credentials and creating unnecessary conflicts with utilities on how to split the cost of maintaining the steel and aluminum of the grid itself.

Another obvious example of this involves generous feed-in tariff subsidies for residential rooftop solar. A wide array of solar installation companies and NGOs will argue that sizable rooftop solar incentives will help increase U.S. households’ independence from the grid and lower system costs. But in reality, such incentives have rewarded disproportionately wealthy homeowners while raising electricity rates for less affluent utility customers. Small and beautiful and distributed and micro-gridded are often mental shortcuts that skate over many techno-economic difficulties and don’t always correlate with a fairer, more reliable, and affordable electricity system.

Conversely, private and public power utilities make for an easy target for activists and demagoguery. It is easy for commentators to fan the flames of existing public resentment and villainize private investor-owned monopolies like Pacific Gas and Electric, Dominion Energy, or Southern Company. But, at a certain point, automatic activist blame of utilities becomes a shortcut for dodging deeper challenges. Utilities are not entirely responsible for electric bill price hikes that reflect factors like wildfire risk reduction, infrastructure replacement, falling numbers of ratepayers, or boring old fuel costs. Nor is it entirely the fault of utilities that they cannot replace all the fossil generation in their portfolio as fast as activists demand. Should the revolution successfully dismantle all monopoly utilities, many of these challenges will not go away.

Just as it is misleading to automatically label monopoly utilities as enemies, left voices should also resist automatically opposing the idea that the state should seek to supply cheap power to energy-intensive industries. Affordable electricity rates that enable the development and survival of data centers or base metal refineries can unlock considerable benefits that revitalize local economies and create job opportunities for workers. Fair distribution of economic windfalls is never assured, but the grid’s big industrial customers often are—or could become—the linchpin of communities and blue-collar union locals.

Finally, critics like Isabella Weber are also wrong to strongly reject a “top-down model” for energy infrastructure buildout and energy transition. It is time to accept that the more urgent and large one’s project of electricity sector reform and society-wide power sector decarbonization, the more likely the need for heavy top-down planning.

At the end of the day, most agree that each region’s maze of transmission and distribution wires constitute a natural monopoly, impossible to devolve into competing mom-and-pop cooperatives and microgrids. Major changes to generation, wires, and power flows demand that a bunch of power systems electrical engineers analyze and run a battery of models on any future proposed grid, make sure that said grid is not liable to literally explode, and mandate changes based on their findings. Even the most “Jeffersonian” opponent of centralized energy governance should at least consider whether leaning into such inherently top-down structural factors might prove more worthwhile. Rooftop solar and community power may be useful assets, but they are not a manifesto.

Into the thicket of wires

Very few have remarked on the potential contradictions behind solar’s place of honor on opposing sides of the abundance debates. One recent essay by the left abundance-curious Fred Stafford, Matt Huber, and Leigh Phillips does call out both neoliberal underestimation of how vested interests goals’ may diverge from abundance as well as the socialist left’s counterproductive defenses of regulatory bureaucracy and small-is-beautiful energy visions. As the many such complexities of energy markets, the grid, and utility electricity rates make clear, the path to lowering household electric bills is far from easy.

Robust transmission networks will be crucial to solving this challenge, providing public electron highways that solar projects bear some responsibility to help pay for. Cracking the energy abundance problem long-term will also require developing future-proof substitutes—nuclear, geothermal, hydrogen—for the flexible fossil generators serving as solar’s essential complementary resource on the grid today. Policymakers will have to demand compromises from solar stakeholders to accommodate these priorities, even as solar power climbs to unprecedented heights.

It may be politically unwise to promise cheaper electricity to voters at all. Certainly the nuclear sector has received an earful of skepticism for decades now thanks to old 1950s boasts that abundant nuclear power would make electricity “too cheap to meter.” Given that much of America’s grid infrastructure is aging, combined with the vast construction challenge of meeting growing energy demands and shifting to cleaner forms of energy, a dangerously honest political message might be that voters should expect electricity to get more expensive before it gets cheaper in the future.

In any case, handwaving about solar using aspirational generalities will only go so far. Anyone who seriously believes that their political worldview offers energy abundance must be prepared to defend and reexamine those beliefs throughout a gauntlet of electricity grid, power market, and energy technology tests of faith. The long-term coherency of their politics will hinge upon it.