Cheap solar came from a market that initially made almost no sense

Max Roser’s article, originally published in 2020 and partly updated in April 2025, follows solar power from an extraordinarily expensive technology to a competitive source of electricity.

Early customers such as satellite programs valued solar even when ordinary power users could not justify its price. Their demand supported production. As cumulative manufacturing increased, learning and improvement reduced costs, opening additional markets and supporting more production.

This feedback differs from a fossil-fuel plant’s continuing dependence on purchased fuel. For solar, a large part of the economic challenge lies in manufacturing the equipment; sunshine does not arrive with a commodity invoice.

The article’s updated figures put the decline in utility-scale solar’s levelized electricity cost at 88% between 2009 and 2024. That measure covers a plant’s lifetime generation costs, not every cost of an electricity system. Storage, backup, transmission and variable output still matter. Cheap generation and a cheap, reliable complete grid are related but distinct achievements.