On the day he almost died, Kimbal Musk had food on the brain. The Internet startup talent and restaurateur had just arrived in Jackson Hole from a conference where chef Jamie Oliver had spoken about the benefits of healthy eating. This was something Musk thought about a lot- how he might make a difference to the food industry—but beyond expanding his farm-to-table movement along with his restaurant, Musk hadn’t yet broken the code. Then he went sailing down a snowy slope (坡) and fell over, breaking his neck. The left side of his body was paralyzed.

Musk eventually made a full recovery, but it involved spending two months on his back, which gave him plenty of time to come up with a plan. Since then, he has launched an initiative to put “learning gardens” in public schools across America; attracted Generation Z to the farming profession by changing shipping containers into high-tech, data-driven, year-round farms; and this year, is kicking off a new campaign to create one million at-home gardens.

Aimed at reaching low- income families, the Million Gardens Movement was inspired by the pandemic, as both a desire to feel more connected to nature and food insecurity have been at the forefront of so many people’s lives. “We were getting a lot of inquiries about gardening from people that had never gardened before,” says Musk. “People were looking to garden for a bunch of reasons: to supplement their budget, to improve the nutritional quality of their diets, or just to cure the boredom that came with the lockdown.”

The program offers free garden kits that can be grown indoors or outdoors, and will be distributed through schools that Musk's non-profit, Big Green, has already partnered with. It also offers free courses on how to get the garden growing and fresh seeds and materials for the changing growing seasons. “I grew up in the projects when I was young, in what we now call food deserts,” says EVE, one of the many celebrities who have teamed up with the organization to encourage people to pick up a free garden. “What I love about this is that it's not difficult. We are all able to grow something.”

There was a point in time when the solar industry was considered dead money. It was too expensive, too inefficient, and too inconsistent to be a viable (切实可行的) alternative energy source for really anything, let alone your home or office.

But those days are long gone.

Solar energy costs have dropped more than 70% over the past 10 years, and are now cheaper than fossil fuels in most parts of the United States. Better yet, the drivers of these cost declines — economies of scale (规模经济) and technological improvements — are durable (耐久的) , and therefore, solar is only going to get even cheaper. Indeed, these forces are so powerful in the solar industry that they have their own law — Swanson’s Law — which states that the price of solar modules (模块) decreases by about 20% for every doubling in global solar capacity.

Meanwhile, solar panels have become very efficient at transforming light from the sun into usable energy. Back in 1992, researchers at the University of South Florida made a thin-film solar cell with 15.9% efficiency — and that was considered a breakthrough at the time.

These days, though, your average silicon solar cells’ efficiency rate is around 20%. That’s standard. And some research efforts have even managed to achieve near 50% efficiency in certain lab tests.

At the same time, these solar systems have become dramatically more consistent. One of the biggest hurdles for solar in the early 2000s was its intermittency — the sun doesn’t shine every day, so what do you do when its cloudy?

Well, that’s why the clean energy industry has developed energy storage solutions, which are basically just big batteries that homeowners and office building managers can install on-site and link to their solar panels to store excess (过度的) solar power on super sunny days, and use that power on cloudy days.

Cheapest. Most efficient. Most consistent. That’s a powerful combination. No wonder solar industry has accounted for 58% of all new energy capacity additions so far in 2021 and is only going to get stronger and more active over the next 10 years — to a point where, by 2030, I wouldn’t be surprised to see solar industry accounting for 90%+ of all new energy capacity additions.