‘Change the planet, change everything’
Invested in renewables
Solar panels will soon be everywhere — on roofs, cars, wrists, floating on lakes and oceans. Here’s how it’s going to happen
[How solar power will save the world]
[Solar power could become the main renewable source that ends our reliance on fossil fuels. Here are the innovations that will make it happen]
‘Change the planet, change everything’
Invested in renewables
Solar panels will soon be everywhere — on roofs, cars, wrists, floating on lakes and oceans. Here’s how it’s going to happen
[How solar power will save the world]
[Solar power could become the main renewable source that ends our reliance on fossil fuels. Here are the innovations that will make it happen]
The year was 2007. Solar power was growing quickly, but it wasn’t profitable. The future of the sector was unclear. This is when a 30-year-old Spanish industrial engineer named Dario Lopez took a big leap.
“I was studying for an MBA in Madrid and working in the car industry,” Lopez says. “Another student in my class had a vision about the solar industry and wanted me to join him. So I said, ‘Let’s do it.’”
Lopez joined that fellow student at his family’s relatively new company, Solaria. Now, 17 years later, Lopez is Solaria’s general manager, overseeing 250 employees and one of the biggest solar power producers in Europe. “I have no regrets about leaving the car industry,” Lopez adds. “I wanted to do something that could change my country, change the planet, change everything.”
Solar power could, indeed, change everything. The planet, climate change, human history. By ending our reliance on fossil fuels. And if it seems to you that solar power is already fairly common, prepare for a dramatic expansion of its place in your life. In 20 to 30 years, there will be solar panels everywhere — on the roofs of homes, schools and buildings, on cars, floating on lakes, in big solar farms on the oceans. Solar panels will be much more efficient, and solar cells will be integrated into the surfaces of phones, laptops, watches, tablets, headphones and other devices. We will charge these devices by setting them on a table during the day. Buildings will be covered in transparent solar cells that provide energy for entire neighbourhoods.
“The beauty of solar is that it’s so versatile,” says Walburga Hemetsberger, the head of SolarPower Europe, a policy group in Brussels. “Solar elements can be integrated into any number of building materials. There are so many applications for it.”
Elon Musk, the head of Tesla and owner of a company that makes solar roof tiles, thinks the United States could get all the electricity it needs by covering a small portion of Texas with solar panels. According to another estimate, we can power the world with 51 billion solar panels covering land that would be about half the size of France.
The modern solar panels used on home rooftops and in solar parks are mostly photovoltaic, which means they convert light into electricity. Photovoltaic panels started being developed in large quantities after the oil crises of the 1970s, which led governments and businesses to direct more research towards alternative energy sources. Germany and Spain were staunch supporters of solar power installations in the early 2000s, setting fixed prices for electricity produced from solar power. Spain is a world leader today in solar installations. The country also has more sunshine than many other locations in Europe.
How solar panels make electricity:
Today’s commercial panels are about 18% to 22% efficient, which means they convert up to 22% of the sunlight that hits them into electricity. There are materials that can make panels more efficient, such as gallium, indium, arsenic or antimony, but they are much more expensive to manufacture and are mainly used in special applications such as satellites. Only small increases in the efficiency of silicon-based solar panels are expected in the near future. Solar panels on car roofs will not fully power a normal vehicle anytime soon.
“We’re seeing only gradual increases in efficiency and incremental innovation in solar panels because this is now a mature sector, but production and installation are growing rapidly,” says Marc Dufour, an engineer and senior energy specialist at the European Investment Bank.
Solar panel installations in Europe have picked up pace since Russia invaded Ukraine and threatened to end its gas shipments to Europe. European countries responded by pledging more support to renewable energy and setting new goals for the green transition.
In 2022, solar power capacity in the European Union grew by 25%, to 208.9 gigawatts, according to SolarPower Europe. The group forecasts that growth in Europe was 53.6 gigawatts in 2023 and will reach annual growth of 85 gigawatts by 2026. One gigawatt of power can run about 880,000 households for one year. Globally, solar capacity is growing by more than 25% a year.
Solar power’s share of global electricity generation will rise to 13% by 2030 and to 25% by 2050, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency. And prices will keep falling for the energy they produce. Two decades ago, solar panels cost about $4 per watt. Today, it is about 20 cents per watt. The International Energy Agency says solar power is the cheapest energy to produce—cheaper than wind, oil, gas and coal.
The European Investment Bank has made big changes in its support for solar power.
About 20 years ago, the Bank was mainly supporting “concentrated solar power.” These types of solar panels use mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto a receiver, heating up a fluid and creating energy. One of the earliest big solar projects the Bank financed is near Ouarzazate in south-central Morocco. This site, which received a package of European Investment Bank loans and EU grants during various phases over the past decade, is one of the largest solar operations in the world, covering more than 3 000 hectares. Part of the plant uses solar panels to collect heat, produce steam and turn turbines, while other parts use photovoltaic panels that convert desert sunlight directly to electricity.
The Bank’s main solar investments today centre on the installation of photovoltaic panels. In 2023, the European Investment Bank invested €4.8 billion in solar photovoltaic projects.
A more recent European Investment Bank deal is the €200 million loan in 2023 to the logistics company CTP to cover its buildings’ rooftops with solar panels.
This firm has 11 million square metres of rooftops in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and the Netherlands. CTP hopes to create as much as 400 MWp of capacity by the end of 2026. MWp stands for “megawatt peak,” a measure of the output of power from sunshine. CTP estimates it could generate up to 10% of its profits from solar panels, if the company sells the electricity created from installations on the roofs of all its factories and fulfilment centres.
“Solar panels on rooftops do not use farmland,” says David González García, a lead engineer at the European Investment Bank. “This project creates a new use on top of something that’s already useful.”
For sheer size, it’s hard to beat the deal the European Investment Bank approved in 2023 with Solaria, the Spanish solar company. It’s €1.7 billion, to build more than 100 solar power plants in Spain, Italy and Portugal. The plants will be built over the next few years and produce an estimated 9.29 terawatt hours a year.
And even though Solaria’s parks won’t sit on rooftops like those of CTP, they won’t eat up all the land that could otherwise be used for farming. Solaria and other installation companies are developing parks that use unobtrusive cabling and mounting systems that sit higher off the ground to let livestock graze safely. This is important for countries like Italy, which has a lot of sun but whose state laws protect arable land.
“We have to evolve our types of solar installations and our locations to keep growing,” says Lopez, the Solaria general manager. “We have been very successful in Spain and Portugal, but we need to find ways to go to new places. We think Europe is the place to be because it has big goals for green power.”
Hemetsberger of SolarPower Europe encourages developers to promote “agri-solar” farming. Using 1% of arable land for solar parks in Europe would generate 900 gigawatts of electricity, while allowing farmers to use the same land, she says. The solar parks also can protect crops by shielding them from the harsh sun, reduce water evaporation, and give farmers an extra income.
Solar projects can bring electricity to communities in regions where most of the power is currently derived from diesel generators. Clean and safe electricity for everyone is an important part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
When remote areas of Africa get electricity, people can charge mobile phones, use online banking and get better jobs. Electricity improves safety at night and empowers women who can earn income from running shops that stay open later in the day. And with lights powered by solar kits in the home, women have more time to complete daily tasks, freeing part of the day for education or employment.
In 2023, the European Investment Bank signed a $20 million deal to build small solar parks, known as mini-grids, in as many as 150 communities across Nigeria that aren’t served by the state electricity grid. In 2022, the Bank also loaned €10 million to WeLight to help build small solar parks in more than 120 rural Madagascar villages.
Other European Investment Bank investments in Africa include a d.light project to install solar kits in homes to run lanterns, televisions and radios in Kenya and many other countries, and an ENGIE Energy Access deal to install pay-as-you-go solar kits in thousands of homes in Benin.
As the world races to cut emissions and meet goals such as the European Union’s net-zero carbon plan for 2050, floating solar photovoltaic projects will offer a big contribution, particularly in countries that don’t have a lot of open land or where solar plants compete with agricultural land.
“This floating tech development opens the doors for countries with land constraints to boost their sustainability goals,” says Valentina Puccini, a senior energy specialist at the European Investment Bank who quit a job in oil and gas nearly 20 years ago to work in renewable energy. “There aren’t so many floating solar parks in Europe just yet, but we’re starting to see some nice projects around the continent.”
Floating solar parks rest on large platforms held in place with cables attached to the beds of seas, lakes or reservoirs. The panels are coated to prevent rust.
According to a Nature study, covering 30% of the surface of the world’s 115 000 reservoirs with solar power could generate 9 434 terawatt hours of electricity annually. That’s more than triple the energy production of the European Union.
Floating projects the European Investment Bank is exploring include one on artificial reservoirs in North Macedonia and a large floating solar farm in the Haute-Marne region of northern France. The French project will supply power to about 26 000 people.
Industry experts say the most important brake on solar power will be batteries. Without them, it’s hard to store surplus energy for use at night or when the sun doesn’t shine.
But that isn’t the only obstacle.
We need better permit systems and government regulations that make it easier to install solar panels in new areas. And we must find more land for solar parks. Spain has a lot of land potentially available for solar, but in countries with a higher population density, such as Belgium or Italy, or in places with strict local land-use laws, it can be difficult to build solar parks.
In the future, many solar parks will be built on oceans or lakes, alleviating the need to use farmland. The European Union is considering legislation that would make photovoltaics compulsory on all new buildings.
Finally, manufacturing needs to diversify. Most solar panels and solar parts installed in Europe come from China. The International Energy Agency says China’s global share of solar panel manufacturing exceeds 80%. European manufacturers and installers complain that solar panel production in China has been subsidised with hundreds of billions of dollars from the government. The few European panel makers that remain, in parts of Germany, for example, have requested trade safeguards on the cheaper Chinese panel imports. But broad curbs on this overseas supply could slow down Europe's expansion of clean energy and hurt its climate goals.
“Today there is no significant solar panel industry in Europe, because we have lost that battle,” says Lopez of Solaria. “We should have saved this sector 10 years ago.”
The lack of panel manufacturing is a problem, but it won’t kill solar expansion. “Seeking independence in oil and gas is not the same as independence in solar panels,” says Patricio Peixoto, who works on solar investments at the European Investment Bank. “You buy solar modules, and they work for 20 years. But we need to buy oil and gas every day. If Russia closes its gas tap, that’s a big problem. With solar panels, a loss of supply is not going to be a huge difficulty.”
It would be too costly to close the gap between Chinese and European solar panel makers, says Ignacio Antón, a senior researcher at the Solar Energy Institute in Madrid. Ignacio Antón has another idea.
“I think the only solution now is to attract Chinese manufacturers here, to make the conditions attractive enough for them to make the panels here,” he says. “This also will encourage some new ecosystems, some new technology in Europe, and support the research labs, help us recover the technology. I don't think there is another solution in terms of manufacturing.”
The European Investment Bank is looking for new battery projects or research and development ideas for solar panels and energy storage. In the past few years, the Bank supported a group of companies working on new storage technologies, including an electricity storage method using liquid electrolytes developed by VoltStorage in Munich.
“The sun is very generous with us, but we have many hours of low solar irradiance and darkness,” says Puccini of the European Investment Bank. “We need to find new ways to store this energy during the daytime to meet our green goals.”
Every solar product can be improved with better batteries, including floating platforms, electric cars and the home kits installed in Africa. If companies can make batteries a lot cheaper and more powerful, solar power should dominate the renewable energy industry, experts say.
“The battery problem will be solved very soon,” says Lopez, the manager at Solaria. “The last revolution was the cost of solar panels. I believe the new revolution will be in batteries. Prices will go down and the capacity to store this energy will go up. When we do this, we will see the next big expansion in solar energy.”