Story here. Graphic:
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Update, 2016-06-28
Bloomberg: “Solar Power to Grow Sixfold as Sun Becoming Cheapest Resource”. Excerpt:
The amount of electricity generated using solar panels stands to expand as much as sixfold by 2030 as the cost of production falls below competing natural gas and coal-fired plants, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.
Solar plants using photovoltaic technology could account for 8 percent to 13 percent of global electricity produced in 2030, compared with 1.2 percent at the end of last year, the Abu Dhabi-based industry group said in a report Wednesday. The average cost of electricity from a photovoltaic system is forecast to plunge as much as 59 percent by 2025, making solar the cheapest form of power generation “in an increasing number of cases,” it said.
Renewables are replacing nuclear energy and curbing electricity production from gas and coal in developed areas such as Europe and the U.S., according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. California’s PG&E Corp. is proposing to close two nuclear reactors as wind and solar costs decline. Even as supply gluts depress coal and gas prices, solar and wind technologies will be the cheapest ways to produce electricity in most parts of the world in the 2030s, New Energy Finance said in a report this month.
Update, 30th June 2016
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Solar panel installations in the United States in 2016 will be 94% higher than they were in 2015.
Update, 3rd July 2016
Past references on this blog to the same subject matter:
- Tony Seba’s latest
- The storage necessity myth — how to choreograph high renewables electricity systems
- Disruption to global electricity production during the next 25 years
- Five seismic shifts to shake global electricity over the next 25 years
- The turning point: New hope for the climate
- How cheap can solar get?
- Worldwide growth of photovoltaics
- Pricing sunshine
- Solar industry data
- OilPrice.com attempts to dispute the continued dominance of Swanson’s law, and, judging by the comments, falls short of the mark. In fact, it focuses entirely upon solar cell modules and fails to note, apparently based upon 2005 data, that the trend in total system installations is also exponentially increasing
- The late Hermann Scheer at Google. See also his book (also available on Amazon, and an older but similar one by Buckminster Fuller.
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