DUSTIN MULVANEY: It was very, very promotional in the industry, and in many ways it still is. But it became even more uncomfortable for me once I started seeing the people that traditionally interrogate production systems, just being gung-ho on solar. You know, it’s not to say we shouldn’t make solar panels; it’s to say that we can make all this stuff better. And we only can make it better if we think there’s something wrong with it, and we need to be pointing to where those problems might be.

My name is Dustin Mulvaney. I’m an associate professor at San Jose State University, in the environmental studies department. And I’m the author of Solar Power: Innovation, Sustainability, and Environmental Justice.

The book that I wrote is a story of how innovations in the solar industry could be scaled up, and what kinds of environmental impacts and social issues might come from scaling those industries up. So, for example, if we want to see electricity from solar power be a major source of energy in the future, what does that look like from a land use perspective, from a chemical use perspective? What does it mean for the end of life of photovoltaics, once they’re expired or not putting out the same amount of power that they were when they initially were made? So in that sense the book is really trying to highlight, what are the things that we want to think about as we transition to solar power, from an environmental justice perspective? Meaning, we want to see the evolution of an energy system that doesn’t have the same kind of disproportionate impacts we see with our energy systems today, right? That’s the definition of environmental justice: that our environmental burdens are unequally shared amongst society. And then also from a sustainability perspective, what does it mean to have an industry that’s really dependent on the chemical industry and the semiconductor industry? A green halo was being put on these particular technologies. So I was interested in this space. How do we think about promoting the technology that we want more of, solar power, without reproducing the things that we want to see less of, which is environmental inequality?

Photovoltaics—or the idea that you can have light hitting matter and excite an electron that could then be used in an electric circuit—that goes back a very long time, almost 200 years now. But the idea that it could be harnessed as a technology that could power things wasn’t really realized until about 120 years ago. The thing to remember is, the first hundred years of us realizing that when you stuck a piece of matter out into the light and then this electricity was being generated, we didn’t even have a theory of the electron yet. And it’s not until, really, the early 20th century that we start to understand what’s actually happening with photovoltaics. And Albert Einstein famously wins his Nobel Prize for describing the photoelectric effect.

It doesn’t really become a product in the form that we see it until the 1950s, and that’s when Bell Laboratories created what they called the solar battery at the time. It really wasn’t a battery in the way we think of it, but it was a photovoltaic cell. And then in the 1960s, we really start to see the first manufacturers of commercial solar cells as we think of them today. The industry really starts to grow quite a bit more in the 1970s. The 1980s and ’90s we start to see a little bit of a lull, but in the 1990s, and slowly toward the 2000s, you start to see the thin films take off. The thin films were developed in the national labs through the 1980s and ’90s, but they really start to hit their commercialization in the mid 2000s, which is where my book starts. It’s really around this time when there’s lots of interest in investing in thin film technologies as the next wave of solar technology that would be hitting the rooftops and deserts of the world.

There was also a really pivotal energy policy passed in 2005. And that was a bipartisan bill. If you could look up the pictures, you’ll see George Bush signing it, with Barack Obama, the Senator, standing over his shoulder. So it’s very bipartisan: I think 78 senators voted yes on that very big energy bill. And that started to set up some of the instruments that would end up financing solar during the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which is a really important moment toward the end of that decade.

I think part of the amplification of thin films comes from the venture capital community, as well as, like, a blogosphere that kind of forms around them. You start seeing this very evocative imagery that were being produced about these photovoltaics. Literally, like, every surface would be covered. You would have, you know, building facades covered. You would have fence lines covered. And of course they were always a bit hyperbolic, but in some ways very literal, because that’s how these thin films were made in the manufacturing lines. The things that really attracted the venture capital community... First of all, the thin films were really easy to make, in the sense that you just put a piece of glass on a conveyor belt and it moves around all day and at the end of the day you have a solar panel come out the other side. Now there were issues getting the molecules to kind of align correctly, but crystal and silicon, the incumbent technology, is made in batches.

Now, the other piece that was really attractive was the materials. What was happening also in the mid 2000s is the crystal and silicon industry was going under a major change in their supply chains. For many, many years they had a very large and robust after market for off-spec polysilicon. Basically you take sand and you eventually make polysilicon—it’s a very, very pure form of silicon, and it’s what’s used in transistors and in the semiconductor industry. When they don’t get it to the same purity as is required in electronics, they could still use it for photovoltaics. So that was the main supply chain up until the mid 2000s. As solar started to ramp up, we saw that basically get outstripped, and the industry actually had to start building out its own polysilicon capacity. And in that moment there was a really big price spike in polysilicon supplies. And that’s when everybody started saying, “Oh, that’s why we got to go to thin films.” Because thin films require only, like, one one-hundredth of the width of a wafer.

Thin films, by the way, have the added benefit from that geopolitical perspective of being patented. A lot of the main workhorses in that industry are not patentable processes, and that’s the way to protect the industry from China. Now what happens with China is, they suddenly start ramping up production, as a country that has a strong industrial policy does. That coincided with the U.S. focused on thin films, and a couple of years later we realize those thin film investments are not going to pan out.

It’s geographically heterogeneous where all these pieces are coming from and how they’re being assembled and how they’re eventually being totally put together and packaged and tied into a system. So if you think about a manufacturing processes involving natural resources that are eventually processed into feedstocks that are eventually made into materials, into products, and then we use those products, you literally can follow the commodity and tell a story. And I think that that is a very effective way of getting at these questions of environmental justice in the context of thinking about green jobs. If we’re starting to say we like certain things, like green jobs, then we should really interrogate what we’re promoting. And that’s where, you know, the other motivation for this book comes from is that the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, who I collaborated with at the time, we were really the only ones questioning this whole kind of... What about the workers? What about the landscapes? What about the supply chains?

We produced a white paper in 2009 that was documenting some of the chemical hazards to be concerned about, and even in that document we had to lead with, “We really want to see this industry succeed. Here are the things that we want to work on.” And that, I think, made me sensitive to the fact that I could be positioned in ways that I didn’t want my work to be positioned. My biggest learning experience was getting ready to be on Fox News, who invited me to talk about an article that I had written, and in preparation for that interview, they realized that I was not going to be pouring hot oil on the solar industry, that I was actually going to be positioning solar against coal. I learned to never do an honest preinterview with Fox News at that point, because they called me back about an hour later and said, "Oh, we decided we’re not going to have you on," and they put some other guy on who basically spouted nothing but nonsense. And it actually affected projects that I decided to flank myself with. I started doing work on water and natural gas. I started work on public lands and fossil fuel development. Work that showed that I was even more critical of another industry in some ways.

Sustainable supply chain efforts, disclosure, better transparency, recycle the solar panels, use green chemistry and manufacturing inherently safer design—there’s a whole list of things that I think that the industry can continue to pursue, and hopefully make a transition to a solar-powered civilization a just one.