‘Cottage industry’: Gurus say nuclear no match for solar energy
London | The debate on nuclear power is a “distraction” from solar, which is about to tip into exponential growth that will sweep aside all other energy sources, say Australia’s much-garlanded pair of leading solar inventors.
Andrew Blakers and Martin Green, often dubbed the “fathers of photovoltaics”, described nuclear energy as “a cottage industry”, with no chance of reaching economies of scale in any useful timeframe.
Professor Andrew Blakers receives the 2023 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering from the King at Buckingham Palace.
Solar, though, “is going to take over energy it is in a way that will be utterly astonishing for most people”, Professor Blakers said.
“It is going to do it as fast as we went from film photography to digital photography. In the space of 20 years, basically we’re going to flip from solar being a few per cent to solar being everything but a few per cent. It really is the fastest energy change in all of history by a large margin,” he said.
The two men were in London to collect the latest in a string of prizes for their work on PERC solar photovoltaic technology, which has brought down the cost of solar panels by 80 per cent in the past decade.
At Buckingham Palace on Thursday (Friday AEDT), the King awarded them and their colleagues Aihua Wang and Jianhua Zhao with the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.
Professor Green described nuclear as “pie in the sky” – including the small modular reactor technologies that have enthused the British government and the opposition in Australia as countries race to transition to green energy.
“They are going to have a few prototypes up by 2030, but it really needs the economy of volume to get the prices down to where they’re projecting,” he said. “So
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