It took time for those driving the energy transition to understand that solar could become so much more. When Adair Turner, an influential technocrat, became the first chair of the UK’s Climate Change Committee, a body tasked by parliament to chart the path to net-zero emissions, solar was not central to his plans. “We didn’t anticipate that solar costs would fall this far,” he says. “In 2008, we thought capital costs would fall 19% by 2020. In fact, by 2020, they had fallen 95%.” In its 2014 report setting the agenda for the 2015 Paris Agreement, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change placed far more emphasis on carbon capture from fossil fuel plants and biomass than on photovoltaics.
Since then, however, solar has proven to be the best option. In 2015, Bloomberg NEF estimated that the global levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) for solar was $122 per MWh, nearly 50% higher than buy phone number list the LCOE for onshore wind, which was $83 at the time. Coal’s LCOE in regions without carbon prices was $50-$75 at the time. Today, both solar and onshore wind are around $40, while coal remains at the same level as it was then.
cheaper than wind energy, they have done so without being too invasive. Improving the efficiency of wind energy requires building ever larger and taller turbines, while solar panels, being two-dimensional, are much less visible from afar and can be easily transported: 300 panels can fit into a standard shipping container. Although some people are opposed to the presence of solar panels in rural areas, in general, they enjoy a high level of social acceptance, greater than any other form of energy generation, be it renewable, fossil or nuclear.