The New Solar System, a major new report from Stanford’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, calls for a smarter approach to scaling up solar power for the world — an approach that would involve a more sophisticated view of U.S. and Chinese comparative advantage. On Wednesday, April 19, from 10-11:30 a.m., Jeffrey Ball, the report’s primary author and the Steyer-Taylor Center’s scholar-in-residence, and Dan Reicher, one of the report’s co-authors and the Steyer-Taylor Center’s executive director, will discuss the report’s findings and implications.

Refreshments will be served. All are welcome.

The New Solar System, two years in the making, illuminates key and little-understood changes remaking the solar enterprise in China, the center of the global solar industry; busts several outdated and counterproductive Western myths about the Chinese solar industry; and recommends changes to U.S. policy to put solar power on a more economically efficient course for the world. The changes would involve the United States and China each playing strategically to its comparative strengths.

Ball and Reicher released The New Solar System last month at The Brookings Institution in Washington and wrote a New York Times op-ed reflecting key themes from the report. Since then, the report has drawn extensive media coverage, including in Greentech Media, the MIT Technology Review, China Daily, and the Stanford Report.

If you plan to attend the April 19 event, please click here to register.

Jeffrey Ball (@jeff_ball), an award-winning writer whose work focuses on energy and the environment, is scholar-in-residence at Stanford’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance and a lecturer at Stanford Law School. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Fortune, the New Republic, Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Slate, among other publications. At the center, Ball heads a project assessing comparative advantage in the globalizing clean-energy industry. He was the primary author of the Stanford report based on that research, The New Solar System, which was released in March 2017 and lays out a strategy to boost solar energy to a level that would contribute meaningfully to global carbon reductions. Ball came to Stanford in 2011 from The Wall Street Journal, where he spent some 15 years, as the paper’s environment editor and before that as a columnist and reporter. He has reported from five continents and more than 15 countries, and he speaks widely about energy, the environment, and writing. He and his wife are resident fellows of Roble Hall, Stanford’s largest four-class undergraduate house, where he launched and directs the Roble Living Laboratory for Sustainability at Stanford, which encourages students to wrestle daily with the possibilities and difficulties of living more sustainably. Ball graduated from Yale University, where he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News.

Dan Reicher (@dan_reicher) is executive director of the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford, a joint center of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Stanford Law School, where he also holds faculty positions. Reicher has more than 25 years of experience in energy and environmental policy, finance and technology. He was a member of President Obama’s Transition Team, assistant secretary of energy in the Clinton administration and a staff member of President Carter’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island. Reicher came to Stanford in 2011 from Google, where he was director of Climate Change and Energy Initiatives. Prior to joining Google, he was president and co-founder of New Energy Capital Corp., a private equity firm funded by the California State Teachers Retirement System and Vantage Point Venture Partners to invest in clean energy projects. He was also executive vice president of Northern Power Systems, one of the oldest renewable energy companies in the U.S. and recipient of significant venture capital investment. Reicher earned a BA in biology from Dartmouth College and a JD from Stanford Law School. He also studied at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and at MIT.