Solar and wind costs plummet, reshaping the energy landscape
Once-expensive renewables became the cheapest source of new power in much of the world, driving a global surge.
A quiet revolution has transformed the economics of energy, as the cost of generating electricity from solar panels and wind turbines has plummeted over the past decade, making renewables the cheapest source of new power in much of the world and driving a global surge in clean energy.
The scale of the decline has been staggering. The cost of solar power has fallen by around 90 percent over the decade, and onshore wind by roughly 70 percent, driven by technological improvements, manufacturing at scale, and growing deployment. What were once niche, subsidy-dependent technologies have become mainstream and, increasingly, the lowest-cost option for new generation.
The implications are profound. In most of the world, building new solar or wind capacity is now cheaper than building new coal or gas plants, and in some places cheaper than running existing fossil fuel plants. This has upended long-held assumptions and accelerated the shift away from fossil fuels on economic grounds alone.
The result has been record investment and installation of renewable capacity around the globe, with solar in particular being deployed at a breakneck pace. Analysts who once dismissed renewables as too expensive or unreliable have been repeatedly forced to revise their forecasts upward.
Challenges remain, including the need for storage and grid upgrades to manage variable supply. But the dramatic fall in costs has fundamentally changed the trajectory of the energy transition, turning the shift to clean power from an expensive aspiration into an increasingly compelling economic reality.