What Will We Do With Our Free Power?
"I simply cannot believe where we are with solar," says Jenny Chase, the BloombergNEF analyst and quite possibly the person in the world who knows the most about the business of turning the light of the sun into electricity. "And if you'd told me nearly 20 years ago what would be the case now, 20 years later," she continues, "I would have just said you were crazy. I would have laughed in your face. There is genuinely a revolution happening." By just 2030, Chase estimates, solar power will be absolutely and reliably free during the sunny parts of the day for much of the year "pretty much everywhere."
In 2023, the world installed 444 gigawatts of new solar photovoltaic capacity, according to BloombergNEF. While that figure can be hard for normie brains to process, it represents a staggering step forward: nearly an 80 percent year-on-year jump and more than was cumulatively installed between the invention of the solar cell in 1954 and 2017. Although solar power still provides just under 6 percent of global electricity, its share has nearly quadrupled since 2018, an exponential curve that is expected to continue for some time.
"When it was a 10th of its current size 10 years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown," The Economist noted in a recent cover story. "The next tenfold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world's entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them." By the 2030s — not very long from now — solar power will most likely be the largest source of electricity on the planet.
Even more remarkable than the scale is the cost. By one measure, the cost of solar power is less than one-thousandth of what it was when hippies and environmentalists first made a point of installing panels on their roofs in the 1960s. A decade ago, it was considered a moonshot goal to reduce the price of a solar module to a dollar per watt; now they are being manufactured for one-tenth as much. The price fell by nearly half in 2023 alone...
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