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Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

(www.newyorker.com)
353 points dmazin | 1 comments | 09 Jul 25 12:31 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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thomascountz ◴[10 Jul 25 04:37 UTC] No.44517231[source]▶
> ...people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours.

This is amazing! Whether you believe photovoltaics are the most efficient form of green energy production or not, you cannot argue the impressive economics behind them. Successful engineering has to meet the market at the end of the day.

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pfdietz ◴[10 Jul 25 04:54 UTC] No.44517332[source]▶
> are the most efficient form

What does this even mean?

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aaronbrethorst ◴[10 Jul 25 05:27 UTC] No.44517566[source]▶
being a sentence fragment, not much! It helps to zoom out to the context of the entire sentence, where the GP says: "Whether you believe photovoltaics are the most efficient form of green energy production or not, you cannot argue the impressive economics behind them"

It's definitely impressive that the cost per watt of a PV panel is roughly 13% of where it was just 15 years ago.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices

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1. kragen ◴[10 Jul 25 08:45 UTC] No.44518770{3}[source]▶
You're overstating the current price of PV panels by a factor of three to five; it's closer to 3% of the 15-years-ago price than to 13%. That graph ends in 02023, at US$0.31/Wp, toward the end of the solar-panel bubble set up by the price-fixing cartel at the time. The actual current price is €0.11/Wp, or €0.06/Wp for low-cost (low-efficiency, no-warranty) panels: https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...

€0.11 is 5% of US$2.39 (the Wp price on that graph from 02010), and €0.06 is 2.7% of it. However, my notes from 02016 say that the Solarserver price index for July 02010 was €1.62/Wp; sadly I did not note which module class that was. €0.11 is 6.8% of €1.62, but of course the Euro was worth more at the time...

This three-to-five-fold difference is why you're seeing this article now.