How solar power became so affordable

It is the year 1953.

The first silicon solar cell used in commercial applications is purchased by the US from Bell Labs.

However, the initial solar cells are not particularly effective.

They would cost you roughly $300,000 a month if you tried to generate electricity with them on your roof.

In just 70 years, the price has decreased.

very low.

The cost of solar energy has never been lower—nearly 90% less so than it was in 2009.

Solar energy is currently more cost-effective in many locations than coal, natural gas, or nuclear power for producing electricity.

This success story is without exception.

And if we can learn the proper lessons from it, this tale can aid in the development and deployment of all the To keep our world habitable, we will need additional technology.

They just dropped in price so soon.

It's a truly remarkable development that will come to characterize the twenty-first century.

So how did solar energy go from being unaffordable to being more affordable than fossil fuels?

"An energy crisis currently exists."

Due to the oil crisis in the 1970s, there was a significant push for alternative energy research and development.

"Today, we are taking the energy that God gave us and directly harnessing the power of the sun to replace our depleting supplies of fossil fuels."

The US federal government allocated more than $8 billion to solar research and development through Project Independence.

That really made a big difference and most likely doubled the cells' efficiency.

Paul Maycock, who was from Texas Instruments, was the person in question.

How about the calculators?

Working on calculators, he discovered that the more they were produced, the less expensive they became.

"The same thing applies to solar," he added.

The price will decrease if we construct more.

However, Project Independence was canceled by President Reagan before the US could actually test Maycock's theory.

Fortunately, two nations were prepared to intervene and test Maycock's theory.

Japan had suffered greatly from the oil crises of the 1970s, much like the US.

Around the same time, they began funding solar research and development, and soon they created solar cells. small and strong enough to power toys, watches, and calculators.

It was trivial in terms of the global energy system, but vital because huge corporations were now showing interest in solar energy and, more importantly, because it was becoming clear how to build solar at incredibly low prices.

When the Japanese government announced a significant subsidy for rooftop solar in the mid-1990s, that knowledge proved useful.

However, the solar technology market was still comparatively small on a global scale.

up until Germany intervened and genuinely altered the situation.

If I had to choose one policy to be crucial across the entire chain, it would be the German feed-in tariff.

Feed-in taxation.

which was essentially a program that widely spread solar energy.

This is how it went.

From 2000 onward, the German government essentially told energy corporations:

Hey, we'll buy your renewable energy if you start producing it.

For the next 20 years, we promise to pay you at that rate, which is double the going rate.

And thus, all of a sudden, for German solar project developers...

It became apparent that this should be done.

Despite the fact that Germany is not a particularly sunny country.

Companies constructed solar farms like this one in response to the incentives.

The number of solar installations increased by a factor of 4 in just one year, and they continued to rise.

The cost of using solar energy to create power decreased as more panels were produced.

Then another nation took over and managed to make solar more affordable than even Maycock could have imagined.

Deng Xiaoping had this idea in the 1980s to send 1,000 Chinese students overseas and then have them return to see what they had learned.

One group of students traveled to Australia's University of New South Wales, where they collaborated with a group that was making some of the most effective solar cells ever.

One of those students returned to China a few years later and established Suntech, the nation's first commercial solar manufacturer, in 2002.

The company had great success selling solar panels to Germany thanks to the new German regulations.

Suntech's success attracted rivals, which assisted in bringing prices down in part because all of this demand encouraged Chinese producers to produce at a previously unheard-of level.

As a result of the lower prices, legislators from several nations, notably the US, developed laws to open up new markets.

A significant law was approved in the United States.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 is its name.

Additionally, an investment tax credit was concealed deep within that law.

It may sound dull, but it turned out to be crucial for the deployment of solar energy because it stated that if you launch a new solar project, you can claim a tax credit for 30% of the costs incurred.

This gave rise to a phenomena known as solar leasing, where businesses looked for locations to install solar in order to pay less in taxes to the federal government.

Other laws contributed to the development of solar module markets in China, Italy, and, crucially, Spain.

The Chinese created their own subsidy scheme, based on the German system of guaranteed prices.

China was the largest producer of solar in 2011, as well as the largest producer of solar electricity.

Over the course of one lifetime, solar energy has evolved from a specialized technology to the most affordable way to provide clean, dependable power to billions of people worldwide.

However, the markets that gave rise to these lower prices didn't just appear by magic.

These marketplaces were established by political leaders in nations all across the world, who then lavished decades of billion-dollar subsidies on them.

By investing that money, you were able to drive down the price of solar energy to the point where you could stop providing subsidies.

With technologies like batteries and electric automobiles, we're doing that on purpose.

With products like heat pumps, we already do that.

We have a roadmap for doing that for other technologies thanks to solar.