Solar power trends

Via Early Warning, BP has a graph and report on world solar energy that has some rather interesting implications:

What jumps out at me is that a) it seems to be growing exponentially, there’s a classic curve in here.

B) that growth is almost entirely European. Early Warning also points out that growth has averaged 39% 1996-2011, which is stunning (and hasn’t fallen below 20% in that time).

Now, as a percentage of global energy supply, Solar is still 0.5%. But it if doubles every two years, then solar energy becomes very interesting in the 2020s, hitting 30+% of the share at the turn of that decade. With the implication that Europe will be leading the curve of this adoption rate according to that chart, with all the benefits that not depending on foreign oil as much will accrue, as well as not being susceptible to oil shocks and rapid price swings.

And solar is constantly getting cheaper:

Filed under the topic Uncategorized on June 11th 2011 at 11:46 am. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.