‘The Clean Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think’

More than $1.7 trillion worldwide is expected to be invested in technologies such as wind, solar power, electric vehicles and batteries globally this year, according to the International Energy Agency, compared with just over $1 trillion in fossil fuels. That is by far the most ever spent on clean energy in a year. Those investments are driving explosive growth. China, which already leads the world in the sheer amount of electricity produced by wind and solar power, is expected to double its capacity by 2025, five years ahead of schedule. In Britain, roughly one-third of electricity is generated by wind, solar and hydropower. And in the United States, 23 percent of electricity is expected to come from renewable sources this year, up 10 percentage points from a decade ago… [F]rom Beijing to London, Tokyo to Washington, Oslo to Dubai, the energy transition is undeniably racing ahead…

[C]lean energy became cheap far faster than anyone expected. Since 2009, the cost of solar power has plunged by 83 percent, while the cost of producing wind power has fallen by more than half. The price of lithium-ion battery cells fell 97 percent over the past three decades. Today, solar and wind power are the least expensive new sources of electricity in many markets, generating 12 percent of global electricity and rising… The rapid drop in costs for solar energy, wind power and batteries can be traced to early government investment and steady improvements over time by hundreds of researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs around the world. “The world has produced nearly three billion solar panels at this point, and every one of those has been an opportunity for people to try to improve the process,” said Gregory Nemet, a solar power expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And all of those incremental improvements add up to something very dramatic.” An equally potent force, along with the technological advances, has been an influx of money — in particular, a gusher since 2020 of government subsidies…

In the United States, President Biden signed a trio of laws during his first two years in office that allocated unprecedented funds for clean energy: A $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law provided money to enhance the power grid, buy electric buses for schools and build a national network of electric vehicle chargers… Combined, the three laws have prompted companies to announce at least $230 billion in manufacturing investments so far… The U.S. solar industry installed a record 6.1 gigawatts of capacity in the first quarter of 2023, a 47 percent increase over the same period last year. And those low costs have led many of the United States’ biggest corporations, such as Alphabet, Amazon and General Motors, to purchase large amounts of wind and solar power…