Phyken Network

The Economist latest cover story on solar energy is packed with interesting stats.  ▫️Solar energy will be the primary source of human energy use by 2040 ▫️$500B spent on buying and installing solar panels in 2024 (nearly same “sum being put into upstream oil and gas”) ▫️Solar on track to produce “more electricity than all the world’s nuclear power plants in 2026, than its wind turbines in 2027, than its dams in 2028, its gas-fired power plants in 2030 and its coal-fired ones in 2032” ▫️Since the 1960s…the levelised cost of solar energy—the break-even price a project needs to get paid in order to recoup its financing for a fixed rate of return—has dropped by a factor of more than 1,000 ▫️From the mid-1970s to the early 2020s cumulative shipments of photovoltaics increased by a factor of a million, which is 20 doublings.  ▫️Over the same span, the “prices dropped by a factor of 500. That is a 27% decrease in costs for each doubling of installed capacity, which means a halving of costs every time installed capacity increases by 360%.” ▫️The cost of a kilowatt-hour of battery storage has fallen by 99% over the past 30 years. The chart below — which they made vertical (kind of weird) — shows global useful energy consumption over the past century. I’ll add two more posts after this one with excerpts on obstacles and opportunities. Full link: economist.com/interactive/es…