Jenny Chase went to work for the London-based startup New Energy Finance in 2005, straight out of university in Cambridge. She founded its solar analysis team and helped establish some of the first reliable indexes of prices in the solar supply chain, as well as some of the first serious industry models and projections.

The solar power industry barely existed then. Now solar is the cheapest source of new power in most markets and the International Energy Agency expects it to dominate global electricity by 2050. Throughout that heady transition, Chase has run and grown the solar analysis team, even after the company was bought by Bloomberg and became Bloomberg NEF in 2009. It has become one of the most respected teams in the business and a widely cited arbiter of industry data.

In 2019, Chase wrote a book summarizing what she learned over her years analyzing the industry. It is called Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon, but the title is somewhat misleading — it covers solar power finance but also solar power history, technology, and policy. It is leavened here and there with droll bits of biography or advice from Chase and contains an incredible amount of information in a highly compact and readable package, just over 200 pages.

A heavily updated second edition was released this month. Also this month came Chase's yearly “opinions about solar” Twitter thread, which is highly anticipated among a certain kind of energy dork [waves].

I figured it would be fun to have Chase on the pod to talk about the current state of the solar industry, whether anything but standard-issue solar PV is ever going to flourish, and what the world needs to help balance out increasing penetrations of solar.

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Checking in on solar power

Volts

Checking in on solar power