Sometime in 2024, without a press conference or a dramatic announcement, solar photovoltaic electricity became the cheapest source of electricity ever recorded in human history — cheaper than coal, gas, nuclear, and hydro in most markets. This is one of the most significant economic and technological facts of our time, and most people have no idea it happened.
How we got here
The cost of solar panels has fallen by approximately 90% in the last decade, driven by Chinese manufacturing scale, improved cell efficiency, and the learning-curve dynamics that characterize any mass-manufactured technology. In 2010, the average cost of utility-scale solar was around $350 per megawatt-hour. By 2024, new solar projects in the sunbelt were signing power purchase agreements at $20–30 per megawatt-hour — competitive with the fuel cost alone of existing natural gas plants.
The storage problem
Solar's Achilles' heel is intermittency — it doesn't produce power at night or on cloudy days. Battery storage is the critical complement, and it's experiencing its own cost collapse: lithium-ion battery pack prices fell roughly 90% between 2010 and 2024. Grid-scale battery projects are now being built at a pace that would have seemed impossible five years ago.
What comes next
The International Energy Agency now projects solar will provide 33% of global electricity by 2030. The constraint is no longer cost — it's grid infrastructure (transmission lines, substations) that hasn't been upgraded to handle distributed generation, and permitting processes designed for a world where new power plants were built rarely. The technology has won; the institutional and infrastructure catch-up is the hard part.