Here comes the Sun King
April 14, 2021 Email
Having jostled for the title for some time, the International Energy Agency made headlines late last year when it crowned solar PV as the new “king of electricity markets” worldwide, ahead of wind, hydropower and all other generation technologies. Citing drastic reductions in price over the last decade in particular, the IEA – which is reasonably famed for having underestimated solar PV’s potential in the past – projected that solar would smash deployment records in each year from 2022 onwards, becoming the preeminent source of power in Europe by 2025.
That projection came within the IEA’s World Energy Outlook report for 2020, wherein all of the association’s models projected that renewables would grow rapidly over the coming decade. Solar, however, was said to be at the centre of that growth, a mixture of maturing technologies and supportive policies opening up ultra-cheap access to capital and, in tur