It’s time solar energy gets the leading role it has earned

The good news first. The world’s installed solar capacity broke through the 1-terawatt mark last year, up from 100 gigawatts only a decade before. Adding the next terawatt will take a lot less time: that milestone looks set for 2024, 2025 latest. The not-so-good news: as impressive as solar technology has been scaling, it’s not yet enough. Going by the most aggressive projections, global PV installation should grow to as much as 80 terawatts in 2050. That would mean that we should start deploying multiple terawatts per year pretty soon.

There’s every reason to be optimistic about this – for a change, you might add, since institutions such as the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have a history of severely underestimating the power of PV. Year after year, the solar industry has shamed cost reduction and adoption estimates from these organizations, yet they keep refusing to adjust their models. Which is odd, because the experience curve is a well-established phenomenon in manufacturing.