Over the last few years of work at Terraform Industries, we’ve developed several useful heuristics to understand how rapid progress in solar and

Solar and batteries for generic use cases

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2024-11-10 19:00:03

Over the last few years of work at Terraform Industries, we’ve developed several useful heuristics to understand how rapid progress in solar and battery costs will change industry.

This includes the bifurcation of industry between low capex, high energy material processing (eg synthetic fuels) and high capex high utilization end uses (eg data centers).

Solar panels are a revolutionary technology, one in which manufacturing creates energy as an output not merely an input. Inert glass rectangles that, placed on the ground, print out wealth, at roughly 100x the rate of the best farm land. We should deploy as many as we can!

Since 2009, solar has been on a tear, getting 44% cheaper per doubling of cumulative deployment and coming down in cost roughly 15% per year. Last year, we deployed 446 GW world wide (equivalent to the global nuclear fleet, and about 1 MW per minute) and this year, China alone deployed 160 GW in just the last 9 months. All indications are that this trend continues – indeed since I made this chart earlier this year, the cheapest panels have fallen to just 7c/W, considerably below trend.

Meanwhile, the complimentary technology of batteries has also continued its crushing progress, cutting 23% of cost per doubling of cumulative deployment, and recently hitting lows of just $45/kWh, a previously unthinkable price.

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