Shining Light on the Cost of Solar Energy

The sun packs some serious power. Even taking into account the all the energy that’s lost in space, enough still reaches Earth in an hour to power the entire planet, theoretically, for a year.

So why doesn’t the world harness all this energy? The truth: Capturing that power, and putting it to work in the form of electricity, is relatively expensive.

It’s true that the cost of solar electricity has declined over the past ten years. Along the way, the popularity of solar electricity has risen. A decade ago, fewer than 25,000 solar cells and modules were shipped in the United States every year. In 2008, that number had skyrocketed to more than 500,000. But that is still a drop in the bucket. Only about one-tenth of 1 percent of the energy consumed in the United States came from solar sources in 2008.

In Germany, a country with a much more robust government incentive program, solar’s share is much larger, but still only 1.1 percent of that nation’s electricity.

And, while most scientists agree solar power will be an important part of the future energy mix, there’s no clear consensus on when it will be able to compete on a large scale. In fact, the experts don’t even agree on how much solar electricity costs today.


Shining Light on the Cost of Solar Energy