May 18, 2020 08:00:00

Predicting that the cost of solar power generation will be cheaper than running fossil fuel power plants in the 2030s

Investor and writer Ramez Nam, who is familiar with clean energy, had predicted that the price of solar energy would fall 10 years ago, but in reality it is falling at a pace faster than that forecast, and it remains as it is. Ike says, 'The more you change the world, the cheaper it becomes.'

Solar's Future is Insanely Cheap (2020) – Ramez Naam

https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-2020/

By 2020, solar costs have fallen to a quarter of what the IEA had predicted in 2010, a half of Nam's 2011's fairly optimistic forecast. Turning this inside out, it is said that the price drop actually predicted the IEA's 2010 forecast by 50 to 100 years. It is 10 to 15 years ahead of Nam's 2011 forecast, and Nam

recalculated the forecast in 2015 to give a more optimistic number, but it is still 7 years ... It was 10 years ahead.

Originally, the module used for photovoltaic power generation applies to Wright's law that 'the cost decreases exponentially with the increase of the cumulative production amount', and the cost decreases about 25% when the production amount doubles. I knew.

However, module cost is about one-third of the cost of solar power generation. It was unclear if Wright's law would apply when including the labor costs for installing the panel and the costs other than the module. So, when Nam calculated, Wright's law applies in the form of a 20% to 40% drop in prices when the number of power plants doubles, even for solar power generation as a whole.

Nam predicts when 2030 to around 2035 will be when the “discounted solar power generation” will come into play when costs have fallen. By this time, it would be cheaper to construct and operate a new solar power plant on a daily basis than to operate a thermal power plant using fossil fuels.

It is expected that the demand for electricity will further increase in the world due to increasing income and consumption in developing countries and electrification of transportation means. On the other hand, the contribution of solar power generation is expected to increase further due to the cheaper battery that stores electricity and the flexible demand such as 'charging at low electricity costs'.