It’s getting cold out there, so put on all your clothes and let’s think nice things about solar power. Yr Editrix suggested the other day that I “find something nice” to write about after my lunch break, so I stopped by the “Uplifting News” subreddit, one of my favorite sources for news that doesn’t suck. I strongly recommend it for those days when it’s a “damp, drizzly November in your soul” and you could use a reminder that not quite everything is terrible.
I ended up finding a whole bunch of really neat articles about cool things happening with solar energy. That reminded me that we’ve been looking for an excuse to crank up the old Wonkette Book Club again, because we haven’t clubbed a book since 2023, when we all jumped out of a van and whaled on Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 climate change novel The Ministry for the Future. (All Wonkette affiliate links.) All this neat solar news has me hankering to finally read Bill McKibben’s 2025 bestseller Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, which makes the case that solar energy (along with wind and battery storage) is already remaking how we power the world’s economies, because it’s simply more efficient and cost-effective than fossil fuels.
Just as climate change is here right now, not a looming threat, the technology we need to replace fossil energy at scale is also mature and ready to go. McKibben argues that the economics are plain: Within another 40 years, the world will run on sun and wind (another form of solar energy, really). But he warns that “if it takes us anything like 40 years to get there then it will be a broken planet; our energy sources will hardly matter.”
Paradoxically, market forces are now driving the energy transition. In an ideal economic sandbox with weightless, frictionless, spherical rational actors, the efficiencies of renewable energy would swiftly replace dirty, inefficient fossil fuels. But we live in a world where friction comes from giant corporations that control trillions of dollars worth of the dirty inefficient resources of yesterday. They also keep political leaders (some nearly spherical) in their gravitational fields, inhibiting change.
So despite the economic logic, actually reaching that clean energy future in time to prevent the worst ravages of climate change depends on breaking the political death grip that producers of coal, oil, and gas currently have on the world economy. That’ll be a far greater challenge than building out renewable energy plants or rethinking electric grids to handle the diverse, distributed energy coming from wind, solar, and batteries. McKibben has a lot of ideas about how to do that, too.
As McKibben notes in his introduction, his first book, with the “cheerful title The End of Nature” (1989) has sometimes been called the first book on the climate crisis, and since then, he has written frequently about how its dire early warnings have come true. But now, with the availability of cheap solar power, he says that “for the first time, I can see a path forward. A path lit by the sun.”
But Here Comes the Sun is not a simplistic happy-talk or techno-fix book; McKibben makes clear that there’s no guarantee we’ll actually make the energy transition happen within “the short window physics is giving us to deal with climate change.” There’s finally hope, but we have to do a hell of a lot of work just to limit planetary heating to the already-perilous levels we’ll have reached when we finally end most greenhouse emissions. There’s a lot of disaster locked in already.
Let’s read this thing! I’m still figuring out a schedule for our Here Comes the Sun book club posts, but at 200-some pages it’s a fairly brief read. I think we can read and discuss it over three Wonkette posts, and then to wrap up, how about we have a Wonkette Zoom chat at the end? (This nifty idea courtesy of our nifty girlfriend M, who formerly worked in PR. Little darlin', I fear the icecaps surely melting.)
To give y’all time to get a copy of Here Comes the Sun and start reading, I think we’ll have our first discussion post in two weeks, which would be late in the week of October 26-30. The book has been out long enough that you can easily find a copy at your local library or used bookstore, or use Wonkette’s handy dandy Bookshop.org link, which gives Yr Wonkette a hefty 10 percent cut of each purchase. You can find it there in hardback, paperback, ebook or as an audiobook on CD. (Audible has the monopoly on downloadable audio versions. Depending on availability, you may also be able to borrow an audio copy through your local library.)
I’ll post regular reminders as we run up to our first book club post, and the rule is that you can always participate in the discussion even if you haven’t done the reading. There will not be a quiz.
After the moneybeg below, let’s look at some cool solar energy news!
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Cheap Solar Is Already Changing The World
One of the first stories that caught my eye at “Uplifting News” was this Techspot piece from September about how the ridiculously low cost of solar panels is quietly reshaping energy use around our weary world. Since the turn of this century, the cost of solar panels has plummeted from around $5 or $6 per watt of energy produced in 2000 to roughly 12 cents per watt today, mostly thanks to cheap panels produced in China.
The low cost of solar has actually been a “known known” for a few years, at least among climate and clean energy nerds. That’s the central point of Here Comes the Sun, after all. But the scale of growth can still be surprising.
The fact in the Techspot article that really caught my eye: As of 2025, the world’s installed small-scale solar capacity was almost 1.2 terawatts, which is a hell of a lot. The article acknowledges that solar can’t actually generate that full capacity 24/7, which a lot of fossil fools still pretend means solar isn’t “practical” (a pose made increasingly silly by the rapid growth of battery and other energy storage).
But here’s the cool thing: That total installed “small-scale” solar capacity is roughly three times the energy produced by all the nuclear plants in the world. When you add in grid-scale solar, the total capacity is more like five times that of the nuclear fleet. Also too, when it comes to actual energy production, 2025 was the first year in which solar generated more total electricity than nuclear worldwide. Wow. When McKibben wrote the introduction to Here Comes the Sun, that was still only a projection.
California Passes ‘Balcony Solar’ Law, Woohoo!
At the end of September, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law Senate Bill 868, informally called the “Plug And Play Solar Act.” That makes California the 10th — and now the largest! — state to pass legislation allowing “balcony solar” systems, which have been wildly popular in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Unlike rooftop systems that are meant for homeowners, balcony solar was originally designed to be easily installed by renters, and in Europe, the basic equipment can be bought online or even in supermarkets. Hell yeah, energy solutions for renters!
The simple systems include one or more solar panels and a “microinverter” that converts the panels’ DC output to AC home current. They plug right into the wall, and to prevent strain on the power grid, they’re fairly limited in allowable energy output — enough to power a dorm-sized fridge or charge a laptop. For grid-stability reasons, they can’t run a whole apartment. But they’re portable, and could help cut $40 to $50 off monthly utility bills. California’s law will allow systems as large as 1,200 watts — but off-the-shelf systems aren’t yet being sold.
Americans have wanted in on the plug-in solar fun, and in March 2025, Utah became the first state to legalize plug-in solar, with a bill sponsored by state Rep. Raymond Ward, a Republican who was inspired by a New York Times article about the European plug-in solar craze. Other states piled in, and plug-in solar bills have now passed in 10 states, with dozens more bills on the way.
As Grist explainered when Utah’s law passed, it may take a while for balcony solar to become common in the states that allow it on paper, because the systems are very different from how household electricity usually works:
Residential households are only designed to pull power off the grid, through wires to outlets, and into plugged-in devices. Balcony solar does the opposite by creating power and pushing it backward into the outlet and “upstream” through a home’s wires, Ward explained. “Utilities tend, in general, not to want anybody else to make power,” he said.
In addition, to prevent risks to electrical workers, the systems must be designed to shut off within seconds if the power grid goes down. The concern is that if electrical workers are trying to repair a line they think is dead, but a solar panel is backfeeding electricity into a building’s wiring, the worker could be electrocuted. Because of that design necessity, balcony solar, unlike rooftop systems designed to work independent of the grid, can’t be used as a power backup during a blackout.
For those reasons, the laws also require systems to be certified by Underwriters Laboratory, and so far, no manufacturers have yet completed the UL certification process. But several manufacturers have products going through certification now, and they’re likely to start arriving in retail outlets sometime next year. Cool beans!
Finally, to return to our Here Comes the Sun book clubbing, here’s an April 2026 book talk by McKibben, followed by a conversation with environmental / sustainability activist Benita Law-Diao. The two discuss what the hell we can do to move forward on clean energy even if the leaders of this backward nation think “climate change” is just a scary story liberals tell to scare everyone into socialism and one-world government. Enjoy!
Another good listen, if you’re into podcasts, is this Volts interview with McKibben and collaborator Jamie Henn, about clean energy activism at a time when economics provide the most powerful arguments for the energy transition, even if you don’t say the word “climate” at all.
[Techspot / San Diego Union-Tribune / Grist / Volts / Here Comes The Sun (Wonkette partner link)]
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Surprise Adam Smith twist: market forces have now made the clean energy transition inevitable. Renewables are cheaper, more efficient than fossil fuels.
But first we gotta pry Big Oil's dirty, very visible hands off our necks.
Step I: Compost the techbros.