Hotter and Hotter | the New Yorker

Globally, so far, we haven’t quite hit the peak of fossil-fuel combustion—the latest data from early November predict that the world will burn a little less than one per cent more than last year. But California isn’t the only place demonstrating that another world is possible. Early this year, analysts started noticing something unusual in Pakistan: demand for electricity from the national grid was dropping sharply. Some sleuthing—including looking down from the sky via Google Earth—revealed the cause. Local businesspeople and farmers, annoyed by an expensive and unreliable electricity supply and lured by cheap Chinese solar panels, were covering the roofs of homes, factories, and stores with photovoltaic arrays. By the middle of the year, as the energy analysts Azeem Azhar and Nathan Warren wrote, this silent solar revolution had seen Pakistanis erect the equivalent of thirty per cent of the national grid in six months. Farmers who depend on tube wells, which pull water from aquifers for irrigation and are often diesel-powered, were putting up panels, too; diesel sales in the country dropped thirty per cent. And something of the same magnitude, again driven by the incredibly inexpensive Chinese panels, seemed to be happening across much of southern Africa. In sunny Germany, meanwhile, where solar panels are now cheaper than wood fencing, at least half a million apartment dwellers hung them from their balconies.