“Suddenly”? This has been an obvious trend for many years. Anyone paying even cursory attention to the cost curve of renewable energy could see this was coming.
Basically my conclusion (in amidst a lot of embarrassingly arrogant stuff) was that maybe silicon PV was going to get a lot cheaper, because I looked long and hard for any fundamental cost floor within an order of magnitude or so of where we were, and I couldn't find one. But even if silicon PV didn't, there were several plausible alternative technologies that could move in to fill the gap.
As it turned out, silicon PV is now about 20 times cheaper than it was then.
This is extremely fascinating to me. Why? Was it worth the effort?
But the content I am enjoying!
You're welcome to reskin Dercuano with a different stylesheet that you like better! You might have better taste than I do. I hope I get a chance to see it!
I'm glad you're enjoying the content!
The oligopoly of energy industry by OPEC, Russia and few other countries has possibly impacted geopolitics more than anything else. The fights of today and future might all be about intellectual property on everything new and shiny that is discovered.
Energy became immensely cheaper after Watt, and all of the above events happened in the world thus created. Making energy cheaper still won't solve most of the world's major problems impacting most of the world population.
Congrats to solar on reaching 3% of our energy mix. I'm genuinely glad that science and industry finally figured out clean energy that met the approval of environmentalists. I don't think the billion or so tons of extra CO2 spent waiting for cheap solar were worth it, but what's done is done and we just have to live with the consequences.
It does? I'm not finding any citations that support that. The largest figure I'm seeing is ~ 10%
> ... and would have provided 100% of our power today if we hadn't stopped building in the 80s and had merely kept up the pace.
Well if we'd embraced solar + wind + storage systems in the 80's or earlier, we'd be 100% solar / wind by now. Academic counter-factuals are often equal parts fascinating and depressing.
But the reason I remember people saying the trend would plateau is because while the solar cells themselves can get cheaper, they questioned if the installation could.
Kind of reminiscent of Amdahl's law.
So I'm wondering if that proved not to be the barrier people thought.
The panels are quite expensive and the labour is not cheap, but when you're installing 50-100+ panels on a big box store roof, it seems the economics far more than works out, at current energy price and subsidy levels.