{"id":14279,"date":"2015-09-10T08:00:55","date_gmt":"2015-09-10T12:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/?p=14279"},"modified":"2015-09-09T11:12:06","modified_gmt":"2015-09-09T15:12:06","slug":"solar-prices-will-drop-much-further-below-fossil-fuels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2015\/09\/solar-prices-will-drop-much-further-below-fossil-fuels.html","title":{"rendered":"Solar prices will drop much further below fossil fuels"},"content":{"rendered":"

\r\nHigh-placed utility executives have told me solar panels can’t get any cheaper.\r\nHere’s why economies of scale will continue to drive solar prices down,\r\njust like for Henry Ford’s Model T.\r\nThere’s no excuse for new pipelines or nukes.\r\nLet the sun rise!\r\n

\r\n

\r\ntl;dr: If current rates of improvement hold, solar will be\r\nincredibly cheap by the time it’s a substantial fraction of the\r\nworld’s electricity supply.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nRamez Naam, on his blog, 10 August 2015,\r\n\r\nWhat’s the future price of solar?<\/a>,\r\n\r\n\r\n

\r\n

\r\nWhat this graph shows is that, if solar electricity continues its\r\ncurrent learning rate, by the time solar capacity triples to 600GW\r\n(by 2020 or 2021, as a rough estimate), we should see unsubsidized\r\nsolar prices of roughly 4.5 c \/ kwh for very sunny places (the US\r\nsouthwest, the Middle East, Australia, parts of India, parts of\r\nLatin America), ranging up to 6.5 c \/ kwh for more moderately sunny\r\nareas (almost all of India, large swaths of the US and China,\r\nsouthern and central Europe, almost all of Latin America).\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nAnd beyond that, by the time solar scale has doubled 4 more times,\r\nto the equivalent of 16% of today’s electricity demand (and somewhat\r\nless of future demand), we should see solar at 3 cents per kwh in\r\nthe sunniest areas, and 4.5 cents per kwh in moderately sunny areas.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nIf this holds, solar will cost less than half what new coal or\r\nnatural gas electricity cost, even without factoring in the cost of\r\nair pollution and carbon pollution emitted by fossil fuel power\r\nplants.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nAs crazy as this projection sounds, it’s not unique. IEA, in one of\r\nits scenarios, projects\r\n\r\n4 cent per kwh solar by mid century<\/a>.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nFraunhofer ISE goes farther, predicting\r\n\r\nsolar as cheap as 2 euro cents per kwh in the sunniest parts of Europe by 2050<\/a>.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nThese are all unsubsidized prices<\/em>.\r\nAnd they don’t take into account energy storage.\r\nNor, as Naam hints, do they take into account the massive disruption\r\nin other power sources that’s already happening:\r\ncoal is crashing, new pipelines are meeting opposition everywhere,\r\nand the “nuclear renaissance” is dead.\r\n

\r\nSo it’s not much of a stretch to predict that Naam is once again\r\nbeing too conservative.\r\nSolar prices will drop even faster than that,\r\naccelerating solar deployment, which is\r\nboth of which are already going faster than predicted<\/a>.\r\n

\r\n -jsq\r\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"High-placed utility executives have told me solar panels can’t get any cheaper. Here’s why economies of scale will continue to drive solar prices down, just like for Henry Ford’s Model T. There’s no excuse for new pipelines or nukes. Let the sun rise! tl;dr: If current rates of improvement hold, solar will be incredibly cheap by […]","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[47,141,216,14,6124,6687,24],"tags":[8719,8745,8753,8189,8704,8701,4777,8702,12,7,8698,562,6076,29,8697,6597,8714,6966,6],"class_list":["post-14279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climate-change","category-co2","category-coal","category-economy","category-natural-gas-2","category-pipeline-2","category-solar","tag-climate-change","tag-co2","tag-coal","tag-economies-of-scale","tag-economy","tag-georgia","tag-henry-ford","tag-lake","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-model-t","tag-natural-gas","tag-pipeline","tag-price","tag-ramez-naam","tag-sabal-trail-transmission","tag-solar","tag-spectra-energy","tag-valdosta"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-3Ij","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14279"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14285,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14279\/revisions\/14285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}