How Solar Energy Became Cheap
A Model for Low-Carbon Innovation
Gregory Nemet traces how solar photovoltaics fell in cost by a factor of ten thousand, from a niche technology powering satellites to the cheapest source of electricity in much of the world. The story runs through American research labs, Japanese and German subsidy programmes, Australian university research, and Chinese manufacturing scale-up. No single country did it. Nemet’s interest is in what the sequence teaches about accelerating other low-carbon technologies before they are needed.
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Azeem Azhar
I’m not going to pretend it’s not. However, what Gregory Nemet does is explain this really strange phenomenon, which is that solar power has got incredibly cheap. It’s got almost comedically cheap and continues to get cheaper. The question is, why did that happen? The trivial answer people come up with is that it’s all being subsidised by governments, but that’s simply not the full, or the correct, picture.
Interview · December 2021
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