Finding the chase and cutting to it

You’re one in a million is one of those adages that crops up from time to time. In a world with 8,224,932,469 people (at time of writing, please see the latest figure at https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ ) in it, it is meant to make you feel a little bit special – it is such a great marketing tool.

Cynicism aside, it’s not the first time we’ve been in this position – I was in the first 500,000 on facebook, we were one of the first million to buy a Nissan Leaf (reached in July 2023) (Nissan beat Tesla to the figure by some margin thanks to being a lovely car for only £35,000 a pop giving you a top of a line Leaf compared to over £50,000 for the base model Tesla), one of the first million homes to get solar (reached in November 2021).

This time it’s for our Powerwall, our home battery. Nearly a million people have bought them across the world.

Batteries make a great deal of sense if you have solar or wind power. Around 1.6 million homes in August 2025 have solar panels fitted, about 5.5% of the housing stock. That’s given that the estimate is for 50% of homes to have ideal roofs to generate solar power. And another 17% could make some use of solar power.

Prices have come down for all these technologies. Given the increase in electrical power being supplied to homes – when we first moved into this house the charge per kWh (aka a unit in the UK) was 11p. The price is currently 25p per kWh with a solar export guarantee price being 12p a unit – as much as we used to buy electricity for…

Which really brings me to the point of this article, and its inspiration apart from being one in a million.

Carl Sagan used to teach his students that any intelligent civilisation on any planet will eventually have to harness the energy from its parent star exclusively. In the 19th and 20th Century humanity did this through the use of fossilised vegetation through coal and oil or gas.

But solar power can easily replace that – as a planet we are barely taking advantage of the 111,600 petawatt-hours the sun delivers daily. Given our solar cells only efficient enough to grab 20% of that power – covering just 0.3% of our planet in solar cells would grab all the power we need as a species.

Elevating those panels allows plants and farm animals to thrive in the shade cast by the panels. Placing them on roofs allows humans to live under them. Team solar panels with wind turbines or hydroelectric plants and we have a completely sustainable means of supplying the tools which enable life as we know it.

We can’t do this today due to cost. If we made the choice as a planet to do so, we could easily form a plan to do so before the damage is non-reversible.

The current news streams are all about immigration and the weather – I know which one I am significantly more concerned about!