Excellent charts about deployment and costs of Renewable Energy | ZacharyShahan.com

About Renewable Energy | ZacharyShahan.com

I’ve shared the following two graphics a few times in the past couple years. They make a rather important point that doesn’t seem to get enough attention: solar power projects go up relatively fast, while nuclear and coal power plants require many more years to get designed, planned, permitted, and built. With nuclear and coal costs rising while solar costs are quickly falling, by the time a new nuclear or coal power plant would be built, its electricity would already be more expensive than electricity from solar (or wind, for that matter):

Solar is cheaper than coal, practically speaking. (To enlarge, hold down ‘ctrl’ or ‘command’ and click the ‘+’ key, or click on the image and then click on the link to the image on the next page — that’s the link that indicates the size of the image.)

Solar is cheaper than nuclear power, practically speaking. (To enlarge, hold down ‘ctrl’ or ‘command’ and click the ‘+’ key, or click on the image and then click on the link to the image on the next page — that’s the link that indicates the size of the image.)

In fact, one report from 2010 found that the solar–nuclear crossover occurred a few years ago.

Solar and Nuclear Costs: The Historic Crossover

Now, an assumption in all of these projections mentioned above is that solar prices will consistently drop at a good rate. And that’s exactly what’s been happening. As I just shared a couple weeks ago, here are a few nice graphs of solar PV price drops in Germany:

October 2012

Lest you think it’s only Germany seeing such price drops, below are similar graphs from the US.
This first one shows that the installed price of residential and commercial solar dropped from an average of about $12/W in 1998 to about $6/W in 2011 (~50%).
Similarly, this next one shows the drop in the price of solar modules from 1985 to 2011 (from over $6.5/Wp to about $1/Wp):