The Ledger · Entry 03
Solar panels cost a tiny fraction of what they used to
Price of a solar photovoltaic module, per watt of capacity (2023 US$)
Data: Our World in Data, based on Nemet (2009), Farmer & Lafond (2016), and IRENA
In 1975 a solar panel was a space-program luxury, priced by the watt like a precision instrument. Every time the world doubled how much solar it had built, the price fell by about a fifth, and fifty years of that compounding is the curve below, drawn on a log scale so the whole collapse fits.
The key rows
Solar is now the cheapest source of new electricity in most of the world. The physics that made it expensive did not change; the manufacturing did.
Asked often
Why did solar power get so cheap?
A learning curve. Solar module prices fell by roughly a fifth for every doubling of installed capacity, a pattern that held for decades as manufacturing scaled, taking the price from $128.27 per watt in 1975 to $0.26 in 2024.
Is solar now the cheapest electricity?
In most of the world, new solar is now the cheapest source of new electricity generation, a reversal from its origin as one of the most expensive.
The world also got better today.
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