America’s Next Eclipse Is a Threat to National Security

If you’re reading this, congratulations! You didn’t go blind staring at one of nature’s great spectacles, the solar eclipse. That phenomenon dazzled millions of Americans and brought small towns across America a windfall of tourist dollars, but in the process it also threw a small but growing industry into sharp relief. Let’s take the opportunity to examine solar power with the same scrutiny we looked to the eclipse.

Back in March, solar power hit a major milestone here in the United States, generating for the first time 2 percent of our overall electricity. Last year, solar provided 0.9 percent of American power, but that share is increasing rapidly. It varies seasonally for obvious reasons—more daylight hours during summer months mean more operating time for solar panels—but even accounting for that, the clean energy source is having a dazzling 2017. According to the EIA, solar production year to date in 2017 is more than 50 percent higher than 2016. That’s real progress, seasonal variation aside.

But variation can’t be left aside for long when you’re discussing solar power. Like its renewable cousin wind power, solar is by its very nature intermittent. Solar panels (or solar thermal facilities) can only supply the grid when the sun is shining. That’s currently not a major problem in the U.S., thanks to the relatively small market share of solar and wind (which together produced just under 7 percent of American power last year). But given the growth we’re seeing in renewables lately—growth driven in large part by falling production costs—that intermittency is looming large as a major problem on the horizon.

In fact, we can already see the issues coming our way, should renewables gain a larger market share. Germany gets roughly one third of its power from wind and solar, and at times has heralded especially windy and sunny days, when it produced 100 percent of its power from renewables, as major triumphs. But this excess of power is as problematic as those cloudy and windless days by dint of the fact that it wreaks havoc on power grids. Germany’s neighbors have had to spend millions on grid upgrades to handle the rise in power supply volatility that has accompanied Berlin’s energiewende, while traders have had to rely more heavily on algorithms to deal with the rapid fluctuations in power prices that have now become the norm in the northern European nation. Electricity needs to be abundant, cheap, but above all reliable in order for society to function, but renewables’ rise is undermining that facet of energy security that so many facets of our modern life have come to depend on.

The eclipse didn’t devastate American solar power production, and even if it did, that wouldn’t by itself be cause to ring the alarm. These are, after all, once-or-twice-in-a-lifetime events, and unlike other varieties of natural threats to energy sources, they can be predicted well in advance. But on April 8, 2024—the next time the U.S. sees a total solar eclipse—this event will be a much larger threat to our energy production, should solar power continue its impressive growth.

So how will we cope in 2024? In part, by relying on fossil fuels. When panels can’t produce power, backups need to be switched on, and that means continuing to invest in options that can be relied on for 24/7 baseload power. Natural gas is an ideal complement to variable renewables not just because it emits roughly half as much CO2 as its chief competitor, coal, but also because the capital costs for constructing a natural gas-fired power plant are significantly lower than a coal-fired one, which lessens the economic need to run the facility all the time in order to recoup that investment. Thanks to shale, we have plenty of cheap gas in the U.S., and it will have a vital role to play in our shift to a less carbon intensive energy mix.

So too will nuclear energy. The American nuclear industry has been losing steam of late, and the recent cancellation of the last active nuclear power construction project in the U.S. drove home the point that we’re not reinvesting in an energy source that must form the foundation of any future sustainable power mix. Nuclear power is, after all, the only source of zero-emissions power that we can consistently count on (other than hydroelectricity). It’s stagnation is one of the biggest energy problems we’re going to need to solve in the coming years.

Energy storage would solve solar’s intermittency issue overnight, but as of now we lack any commercially viable, scalable storage options. On that front, ARPA-E has an important role to play for our future energy security. Continuing to invest in moonshot energy programs—especially ones focused on storage—could be the key to solar’s future flourishing. The Trump Administration wants to axe that agency; Congress needs to stand firm in support of it.

Seven years from now, Americans will once again look upwards towards the sun, agog as it’s briefly eclipsed by the moon. By then, solar power will play a much bigger role in our power mix than it does now, so it’s vital that we take its intermittency weakness as a threat to our energy and national security.

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