SOLAR POWER SOLID : MASTER GLOBAL ESSAY

 

ENERGY '' too cheap to meter '' has long been a sci-fi dream. But as the cost of solar power plummets toward zero, it might just become a reality. 

In 2023, the world installed 444 gigawatts of new solar photovoltaic capacity, according to BloombergNEF. While it can be hard for normal 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.

One result is that, by some ways of tabulating, solar power is already cheaper than all other new sources of electricity for something like 95 percent of the world.

Another result is that the price of a solar panel is becoming a smaller and smaller fraction of the true cost of generating electricity from it - with a much larger portion coming from the price of installation and interconnection, grid expansion and whatever it is you might be doing to supplement that solar at night and in winter.

Of course, because the sun can be simply counted on to rise every day, you don't need to pay in any ongoing way for a commodity input, like oil or gas, to keep the system humming - only to set it up initially to manage and endure the novel challenges of drawing reliable energy from the giant fireball 94 million miles away.

All over the next decade, even that all-in cost is expected to fall in half again. Negative electricity prices, in which consumers are actually paid to consume electricity, are already a recurring feature in the world's mature markets.

This summer, they have been almost a regular phenomenon in Texas and in California, where a particularly rapid battery revolution has essentially eliminated the state's need for a natural gas to offset the sun's famous  ''intermittency.''

This Master Functional and Cost-of-Living Essay continues into the future. The World Students Society thanks David Wallace-Wells.