Two years ago, Greg Nemet spent a year touring the globe, talking to people in 18 different countries about the strategies they had used to implement cost-efficient solar energy systems.
That research, funded by a Carnegie Fellowship, formed the basis of Nemet’s first book, How Solar Energy Became Cheap: A Model for Low Carbon Innovation. Published in June, the book landed Nemet, a professor with the La Follette School of Public Affairs, the World Citizen Prize in Environmental Performance from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM). The APPAM World Citizen Prize was created this year to recognize research on pathways to achieve measurable but as-yet-unrealized gains in overall environmental performance to reduce consumption and waste.
Nemet will receive the prize at APPAM’s annual meeting next month in Denver, Colorado.
“I am excited to see that by starting this prize, APPAM is elevating environmental policy and bringing recognition to the strong set of scholars, especially younger ones, who are committed to improving public policy on environment and climate change,” says Nemet.
Nemet combined interviews and data analysis to track the decline of solar energy costs. One of the book’s key findings: Solar energy’s success is heavily dependent on the unrestricted flow of information between countries.
Nemet has spent the last several weeks sharing his book’s many lessons, including a recent presentation in China.
“I talked about what a future energy system would look like where energy is plentiful because of solar and other complementary technologies, like electric vehicles and electrolyzers,” explains Nemet. “The last third of the book is about applying the lessons from solar to other technologies. This part I see as the main contribution—and, I think, where the work is getting the most interest.”
Nemet will also soon present his findings in Japan, where officials are interested in developing technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In the coming years, Nemet hopes to apply the lessons of solar energy to scaling up an important carbon removal technology known as direct air capture. His insights from the book will also be included in the next assessment report for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“Soon, someone will need to write a story on what we can learn from batteries, which are on a similar trajectory to solar energy,” Nemet says. “In five years, I am sure we will be reading about how batteries became cheap. We will see who steps up to write that book!”