The price has been rapidly decreasing in the last 10 years, to the point that it no longer makes sense to not have solar everywhere. It's cheaper than coal, and will soon be cheaper than all the other fossil fuels as well, and will continue to go down, never up.
China now employs over 1 million workers making solar panels. And they're ramping that up as fast as they can, and shelving coal power plants. We've reached that critical tipping point for PV solar to go vertical, and Tesla/SolarCity just built their own factory in Buffalo to take advantage.
I think solar is the future, but these claims are stupid.
> "to the point that it no longer makes sense to not have solar everywhere. It's cheaper than coal, and will soon be cheaper than all the other fossil fuels as well, and will continue to go down, never up."
Then the market should automatically have shifted to 100% solar by now.
Solar is getting cheaper yes, but it is dependent on hours of sunlight available, which like wind energy, is unreliable and doesn't work at periods (like night). Further, the capacity of a solar power plant isn't its produced electricity, because the capacity is mainly peak capacity, which is only reached a few hours a day.
> China now employs over 1 million workers making solar panels
Don't know where that figure is from, but I guess china must be covered in solar panels by now. 1 million is large number of people. Unless your figures are deceiving. For example, walmart sells solar panels. So, you will count every walmart employee as a solar panel retail employee.
>Then the market should automatically have shifted to 100% solar by now.
65% of new capacity in the US last year was wind or solar.[1] The world doesn't change overnight, but expect that trend to continue.
Renewable energy growth is only being slowed by lack of storage. As battery production and other storage techniques come online, it allows higher and higher % of energy to come from renewable sources.
>Don't know where that figure is from, but I guess china must be covered in solar panels by now.
Pretty good summary of the situation here: [2]
"In 2015, China installed half of the world’s wind power and a third of its solar photovoltaic capacity. Last year, solar capacity jumped 81.6 per cent and wind capacity grew 13.2 per cent. Greenpeace has said that China’s renewable energy growth rate is equivalent to installing one wind turbine and covering one soccer field with solar panels every hour. Five of the world’s top six solar manufacturing companies and five of the 10 biggest wind turbine companies are in China. By 2020, half of the country’s new electric generation will come from solar, wind, hydro and nuclear power."
Government subsidies probably. My provincial government (Alberta) just introduced $40 million in solar subsidies. I don't think Solar City operates in AB, but I'm sure other states will come up with similar subsidies to replace the federal one that I believe is expiring.
And when the price undercuts other forms of power generation, you won't even need subsidies anymore. I'm guessing it'll be a while before this is true in latitudes like Alberta, though.
I agree. I don't think we'll see large scale solar power generation in Alberta. The gov subsidies are mostly for residential use. They introduced a revenue neutral carbon tax Jan 1, 2017 and need to return the tax to green projects. This is just one of them.
Alberta does have quite a bit of wind generation though. They blow pretty consistently off the mountains and we have a pretty low density population in the south end of the province. Hopefully under the NDP (left wing) government, we can see some expansion of this. Prior to this, oil sands was the only game in town.
