"Why did renewables become so cheap so fast? And what can we do to use this global opportunity for green growth?" by @MaxCRoser https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth

"Just 10 years ago it wasn’t even close: it was much cheaper to build a new power plant that burns fossil fuels than to build a new solar photovoltaic (PV) or wind plant. Wind was 22%, and solar 223% more expensive than coal." /

"Electricity from utility-scale solar photovoltaics cost $359 per MWh in 2009. Within just one decade the price declined by 89% and the relative price flipped"

@maxcroser tells a story that is not a surprise to students of technology adoption: in 1956, the cost of just one watt of solar photovoltaic capacity was $1,865 (in 2019 prices). It survived thanks to a niche application: providing electricity to satellites /

Thanks to this high tech application, we learned how to improve the production process, leading to cheaper panels, which led to increased sales, more learning, etc. What economists call "learning by doing" .

The second application was slightly less niche: "The first terrestrial applications in the 1970s were in remote locations where the connection to the wider electrical grid is costly – lighthouses, remote railroad crossings, or the refrigeration of vaccines."

@MaxCRoser then goes on to illustrate the spectacular learning effects in wind power and, much more spectaculalry, in photovoltaics - learning effects than do no longer exist for fossil fuel powered plants /

Nuclear power has become more expensive, as the result of increased regulation for nuclear power, but also because "the world has not built many nuclear power plants in recent years so that supply chains are small, uncompetitive & are not benefiting from economies of scale."

"While nuclear technology is not very standardized and gets build very rarely, solar PV modules and wind plants are the exact opposite, very standardized and extremely often built"