During the last couple of decades, a few sectors in the world economy experienced a bigger 'boom' than solar energy. There is almost no expert or analyst in the world who accurately predicted the movement in the solar market, everything from the dramatic drop in the price of energy produced in this way to the amount of installed PV gigawatts that we currently have on our planet.
According to data from The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), from 2010 to the end of 2022, the average world price of electricity produced using solar energy has dropped by 89%!
PV magazine states that the prices of solar modules have fallen by an incredible 99.8% from 1976 to today. But what's even more interesting, the same source provides data from a study that analyzed 3,000 different forecasts about the future of solar over the past decade, and all of them were wrong. More precisely, none of them were ambitious enough because it turned out that the results were much better than expected. On average, there was predicted a 2.6 percent drop in the price of solar panels for the last few years, and it turned out that they fell by around 15% per year.
According to the IRENA study in 2010, the cheapest energy produced from this renewable source was 710% more expensive than energy obtained from fossil fuels. By last year, there was a spectacular turnaround, and solar energy was 29% cheaper than the cheapest one obtained from fossil fuels!
Installation of almost 400 GW of solar panels in the world this year, and the growth of up to 1TW of new projects per year expected by 2030, represent an additional confirmation of this success story.