It’s little wonder, then, that by 2016 solar power was the fastest-growing source of new energy installations worldwide, outstripping the growth of all other forms of power for the first time. While renewable energy accounted for twothirds of new power added to the world’s grids that year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) found solar was the technology that shone brightest.
The prospects for solar haven’t always seemed so positive. As recently as 2014, the IEA concluded that in the event of current trends persisting through to 2050, ‘the best case will lead to generating costs lower than five US cents a kilowatt.’ Within months of publication, however, that forecast was revealed to be unduly pessimistic. By 2017, the cheapest unsubsidised US solar contract was already below six cents a kilowatt and it now seems inevitable that by 2020 – thirty years ahead of schedule – the cheapest solar in the United States will be below three cents a kilowatt rather than five. If correct, that would mean it makes financial sense for virtually every home on Earth to install PV cells – even in cloudier Northern Europe.
Indeed, just a year after that report Deutsche Bank claimed solar had reached ‘grid parity’ in half of the sixty countries it analysed, predicting further price falls of 30 to 40 per cent before the end of the decade. In plain English that means that by 2020 new installations of solar cells – almost anywhere in the world – will generate cheaper power than a newly built plant that burns fossil fuels. In 2018 the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) repeated that prediction claiming all renewables will be competitive with fossil fuels by 2020. They concluded how turning to renewable energy ‘is not simply an environmentally conscious decision, it is now – overwhelmingly – a smart economic one ’.
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