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Comment by fooblaster | Hacker News Reader

why does solar produce an exponential decrease in cost over time? I understand how cmos lithography reduces costs. over time smaller and smaller features drives chips smaller which increases yields. I don't understand how that is true for solar - I don't see panel efficiency increasing dramatically. why are the cost curves different for solar than any mass manufacturing, like stamping steel chassis for cars?

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Car production costs did fall dramatically in their first decades. Production learning curves tend to be log log over cumulative volume. So the early gains are gone. It’s easy to forget that mass production of automobiles has gone on for a century.

Mass manufacturing of solar panels is a lot more complex than stamping steel parts.

For example, one of the big wins was diamond (I think?) cutters for crystalline silicon, which allowed panels to be made rig far less inputs. A big competitor before that was thin film, and maybe you have heard of Solyndra, who had a heat tech that was made obsolete because this advancement in cutting silicon.

Any improvement along the chain of silicon production to siping to assembly has a chance to reduce costs, and it's usually small incremental bits of 1% here or 2% there.

It's just a traditional learning curve. More similar to panel than cmos.

The reason we are getting steady cost reduction is steady volume increase in production.

For decades we have been massively under-served in PV production volume. Even now, we are still somewhere in the middle of that S-curve.

I haven't seen such data, but panel in the early C20th probably followed a similar learning curve to PV now.

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