Cost of Renewables Projects to Fall Lower Than Fossil Fuels

“Solar is Going to Get Ridiculously Cheap,” says the headline in a story by Fortune Magazine’s Katie Fehrenbacher.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s annual report (BNEF) shows that energy prices will fall across the board in the coming years, but the promise of renewables, solar especially, will attract the lion’s share of global investment over the next 25 years. Solar will become the cheapest power source in many countries over the next 15 years.

Worldwide, renewables are likely to overtake gas in the electricity sector in 2027, and coal in 2037, according to the BNEF report. Fossil fuel power is projected to generate $2.1 trillion in investments in that time, while renewables will attract some $7.8 trillion in investments, with solar accounting for almost half of that.

 

Annual electricity output by the major generating technologies, 2016-40, thousand TWh

“By 2040, the cost of solar photovoltaics is expected to fall by 60 percent from its current low prices.”

According to the Fortune story:

“The low cost of solar will encourage solar panel installations to the point that solar could account for 43% of all the new power generation added worldwide between now and 2040,” says the report. “That’s enough solar projects to represent $3 trillion of new investment”¦By 2040, 15% of the world’s electricity will come from solar panels,” says Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “Each year, people and businesses will invest nearly $135 billion into solar energy infrastructure.”

Against entrenched fuel sources, solar has at times fought an uphill battle to enter the energy mainstream. This BNEF report demonstrates that solar is here to stay, and over the next three decades will be a dominant source of the world’s new electricity.

“Ridiculously cheap” solar can only mean good things for clean, economically robust energy development here in the U.S., and around the world.