What are the technological advancements that have made solar power so much more economically viable over the last decade or so?
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As a technology becomes more and more available, more people will learn to work with the technology as well as materials will be more produced. All of these will drive the prices down.
1. Efficiency of the panels has gone up. Watts per square inch. More power out for the same size
2. Price of the panels has gone down due to economic scale.
3. Battery technology has gotten a lot better. SLA to flooded LA to lithium ion to LiPo4. Better power density for the size.
4. Price of the batteries has gone down. (Lithium batteries have dropped hard in the last 3 year)
They are somewhat more efficient now, but the real revolution has been that the cost to produce them has gone down by orders of magnitude since the 1980’s when the silicon based tech we use today was introduced. If it’s cheap to make in bulk then suddenly a huge field with panels becomes an affordable option, even if the efficiency tops out at around 15%.
In the near future however we’re likely to see that change, with perovskite based panels boasting greater efficiencies, lower costs, and *far* less waste from the process of making them.
Slight incremental improvements over the last few decades have made manufacturing less expensive, and solar panels more efficient. The combo of those two meant that it finally hit a tipping point and became financially worthwhile about 10 years ago (it was just too expensive for most people prior). With that came ‘manufacturing at scale’. When a factory is able to sell hundreds of panels a day, they get better deals on all the ‘per unit’ costs. Shipping, custom parts, extrusions, and manufacturing machines all go down in cost the more of them you order at a time.
And then there’s Tesla. There may be a trash human running the company, but they have done an absolute ton to get the prices in the US down to something manageable for normal people.
It’s not any one thing, but many things combined. Economies of scale have kicked in, competition keeps prices low, incremental efficiency improvements over the past few decades have made the amount of power a single panel produces higher, electricity has gotten more expensive to produce by other means.
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What are economics of scale? Better tools to make products, bigger factories, more automation, adjustments of all parameters to produce fewer deficient product, cheaper raw materials due to supply chain management, growing pool of machines that paid off acquisition costs.
All of those are both for the panels and for the machines that produce the panels and the machines that produce the machines that…. And so on.
No fancy new tech is needed. Mostly better usage and finances.
Something not related directly to the panel is energy efficient appliances and fixtures. By reducing the load you require much lower inputs. LED lighting and ground source heat pumps get you a much better return on input than resistive heating and lighting.
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I have a related answer but not exactly an answer. I’m in my 50s and have been around for a lot of the advancements in solar power. It is absolutely stunning the amount of obvious corporate brigading that has been going on since my childhood all the way up to discussions today bout the Texas power grid. It’s not like solar energy was this long shot pipe dream that suddenly became miraculously viable. It had followed the exact path of every technology we use, including fossil fuels.
If you grew up thinking solar was impractical, or today if you live in Texas and think windmills cause power failures or live in Arizona and think solar panels “use up all the sun” then you’re going to think the next few decades are a series of miracles and divine intervention. But if you are a normal person who understands that investment and incremental gains in engineering add up in the long term to outsized impact then you will not be surprised at all.
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