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Friday, September 2, 2016

Globally, solar power has doubled seven times since 2000


Solar power has grown 100-fold in the U.S. in the past decade and it cost come down by a factor of 150 since 1975. The price drop and the sales volume increase are directly linked - over the past four decades, for every doubling in scale of the solar industry, the price of solar modules has dropped roughly 26 percent.
Dubai received a unsubsidized bid recently for 800 megawatts of solar at a stunning “US 2.99 cents per kilowatt hour”. For comparison, the average residential price for electricity in the United States is 12 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Solar energy has been advancing considerably faster than anyone expected just a few years ago thanks to aggressive market-based deployment efforts around the globe. BNEF projects that by 2040, the world will invest an astonishing $3.4 trillion in solar. That’s more than the projected cumulative investment of $2.1 trillion for all fossil fuels — and $1.1 trillion in new nuclear — combined. Read more at https://thinkprogress.org