What does sunlight have to do with the future of snow-capped mountains?
Plenty!
For starters, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few decades, you are no doubt aware that the planet is warming, and glaciers are melting. 200 years of intense industrial development and the associated burning of fossil fuels have caught up to us. The climate crisis is only going to get worse, unless we can manage to switch over from fossil fuels to clean energy.
The good news is that solar energy has defied the skeptics to become the cheapest and fastest growing source of new electricity on the planet. Solar installations are multiplying in practically every nation on earth, and more money is going into solar than all other electricity sources combined. Less than 20 years after global solar first reached one gigawatt, or 1,000,000,000 watts, at least 29 countries installed more than 1 gigawatt in 2023 alone. It turns out that the best solution to our climate crisis was right up in the sky all along, warming our planet and bathing it with light. We just needed to figure out how to convert sunlight into electricity reliably and affordably. And that is exactly what we have done.
Powerful solar farms are penciling out in Finland, Nepal, Somalia the Congo. Remote outposts in deepest Amazon and frozen Antarctica are running on sunlight. Entrepreneurs from India to Norway are perfecting solar roofs, sun-powered vehicle charging stations, flexible photovoltaics that can be glued or taped to any surface, foldable origami panels, solar greenhouses, solar desalination plants, solar robots for cleaning solar panels in the desert. Researchers are zeroing in on futuristic advances such as photovoltaic paint, perovskite solar panels created from materials grown in the lab rather than extracted from the Earth, lasers beaming solar energy from space to earth, quantum dots working their magic on photovoltaics, solar cells using an ever-wider swath of the light spectrum that humans cannot see.
I recently spent a highly enjoyable year circling the globe with my lovely wife, enjoying life and traveling from one solar success story to the next, and I can tell you unequivocally that the clean energy transition is happening, and some fascinating people are making it happen. It isn’t perfect and it isn’t going to be easy. It’s going to require a ton of work: good, rewarding work done with a sense of purpose, by people who love their jobs, who are amazed at how far solar has come and firmly convinced that it has much, much farther to go. Because the price is now on our side—so long as foolish politicians don’t ruin the market with ill-advised tariffs and soft-headed policies.
Solar panel prices have fallen by a factor of 100 over the past 20 years, and manufacturing output has been doubling every three years. It’s kind of like what has happened with computer chips. It took a century or so for scientists to figure out how to build a computer chip; now you’ve got 10 billion or so of them inside your phone. Solar hasn’t scaled that radically but it is an electronic technology and therefore it definitely has scaled—big-time. Because semiconductor solar cells have a lot in common with semiconductor computer chips…
Okay, I’ll check myself here, though trust me—I could go on… Not everyone is as obsessed with photovoltaics as I am. But if you love snow-capped mountains and the possibility of a future that still has snow-capped mountains, you should at least like solar power. Because solar is the best tool we have to keep the climate crisis in check, before the ice caps and the glaciers melt, the seas rise, and… well, let’s try not to find out exactly what comes next, shall we?
Ben Jacklet started skiing at the age of 5 in New Hampshire and writing for publication at the age of 15 in Guilderland, New York. He has served as staff writer for The Stranger in Seattle, the Portland Tribune, and other publications, and as managing editor for Oregon Business Magazine. He launched Shred Hood in 2013. He is also a solar energy consultant, editor of “11,239: A Skiing and Snowboarding Guide from the Summit of Mount Hood” (available through Amazon) and author of the forthcoming “Follow the Sun: Around the World in Search of Solar Solutions—and Hope.”
Last modified: March 12, 2025
