Will the sun save the polar bears?

Up to now the plan to fight climate change has involved a series of grimly difficult and ruinously expensive lifestyle choices and technological innovations. Vast arrays of windfarms carpeting every hill and cliff in Christendom and beyond. Unlikely Star Trek breakthroughs in nuclear fusion, tidal power, carbon capture and arrays of mirrors in space. Hydrogen fuel cells, eye-watering green taxes and the abandonment of long-haul flying and the worldwide adoption of hair shirts. What these strategies all have in common is that they are unpopular, they are expensive and they will not work.

But could a quiet, almost unnoticed technological revolution be about to tame climate change without anyone noticing it?

A fascinating report in New Scientist this week points to the price crash in electricity-generating solar panels. At the moment photovoltaic panels are frightfully dear and they do not really make much economic sense outside the tropics and subtropics. But that is changing.

Because of the economies of scale being driven by increasing demand, zero-carbon solar panel electricity in India is now cheaper than electricity from diesel generators. This is a huge deal. India has the world’s second-largest population and perhaps the world’s greatest potential for increased carbon emissions as it becomes wealthier. It now costs 8.8 rupees for one kilowatt-hour of solar electricity compared to 17 rupees for diesel – and this is without a subsidy or green tax in sight.

It is not that solar panels have got that much better, but they HAVE got a lot cheaper, costing (worldwide) about a quarter what they did in 2008. According to Jenny Chase, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, solar power is now cheaper than diesel 'anywhere as sunny as Spain'.

By 2015 solar electricity will be as cheap as grid electricity in half of the countries in the world. This is extraordinarily good news, a win-win on all counts. Solar energy is most effective in warm sunny places – exactly the places which are experiencing the highest population and economic growth. And as these places turn to the Sun more and more the panels they buy will continue to get cheaper and cheaper.

It may, astoundingly, be the case that Solar, a fairly mature and unglamorous technology, will come out of the left field and save us just when the doom-mongers say all is lost. Of course we still have the problem of transport emissions, and emissions in high-latitude nations where solar is not viable, but this little noticed economic revolution in a still pretty-obscure technology has the potential to take the sting, at least, out of the worst environmental crisis of the modern era.