Though the price to install new solar panels has been trending downward for a while, it’s officially reached a new milestone: “offensively cheap.”
Provocative new reporting by the Financial Times highlighted the new paradigm around photovoltaics, which are disrupting traditional energy networks with a near-infinite supply, resulting in shockingly low prices.
As Dave Jones, co-founder of the energy research firm Ember, told the FT, solar panels used to run between $5 and $6 per watt of generation capacity. That was 26 years ago. Today, Jones says solar panels sell for just 12 cents per watt — a price he says is “offensively cheap” considering the alternatives.
The FT characterizes that jaw-dropping price decrease as “entirely the result” of a massive rise in Chinese solar panel production, which is making renewable energy available to rich and developing countries alike for bottom-barrel prices.
In rural parts of the world, this means that a “home goes from burning two or three kerosene lanterns to a light that is 20 to 40 times brighter, [turned] on every day,” Anish Thakkar, co-founder of Kenyan solar financing company Sun King told the paper.
And as the barriers to enter a solar-powered world come down, the amount of energy generated by photovoltaics is reaching unprecedented heights.
In China, the undisputed world-leader in renewable energy, new clean energy installations have flooded the grid with electricity faster than it can be used. As executive vice chairman of battery giant BTR New Material Group Youyuan Huang said in a forum covered by Fortune, “China’s grid is a very strong and stable one, but we’ve installed too much green energy.”
In the US, the green energy build-out is likewise making headlines. Despite president Donald Trump’s efforts to revive the declining US coal industry, photovoltaics produced more electricity than coal-fired generators for the first time in June.
And across the pond in Spain, the simply incredible amount of solar panel installations has flipped the domestic energy economy upside-down, resulting in a mass exodus of venture capital as customers have to be paid to use more power.
All in all, there’s never been a better time to buy solar panels — which is especially good news as the crude oil market turns belly up.
More on solar energy: Texas Avoids Blackout by the Grace of Solar Power
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