Mark Thoma:

Paul Krugman:

Rising Sun: Joe Romm draws our attention to the third slice of the latest IPCC report on climate change, on the costs of mitigation; the panel finds that these costs aren’t that big — a few percent of GDP even by the end of the century, which means only a trivial hit to the growth rate. …

In fact, you should be optimistic…: the technological prospects for a low-emission economy have gotten dramatically better.

It’s kind of odd how little attention the media give to the solar revolution, but this is really huge stuff:

In fact, it’s possible that solar will displace coal even without special incentives. But we can’t count on that. What we do know is that it’s no longer remotely true that we need to keep burning coal to satisfy electricity demand. The way is open to a drastic reduction in emissions, at not very high cost.

via economistsview.typepad.com

By the power of transitivity, Paul Krugman loves Joe Romm (as his climate expert) and Joe Romm hates economists, therefore … Paul Krugman hates economists? 

I wonder how much of that cost path is due to subsidies? I'll just be left wondering, because there is no way I'm going to trouble myself reading the Solar Market Report (when I know that Mike Giberson will do it for me, I hope)! 

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  1. Hassankhan Avatar

    The drop in solar module prices can be largely attributed to three things: shrinking supplier margins, plummeting costs of raw materials (crystalline silicon), and economies of scale. All three of those are driven by what happened in China’s market where — anecdotal evidence suggests — solar firms were able to secure extremely cheap financing from the state to support scaling up.
    While demand-side subsidies play a big role on installation in the Western World, it seems that Chinese firms took advantage of the guaranteed demand with the help of the state.

  2. jroumasset Avatar

    The price shown on the graph is the unsubsidized retail price for solar modules. The low price is partly due to supply-side subsidies as discussed above and demand-side subsidies that presumably allowed firms to take advantage of economies of scale. Note that the price fell in half each decade from 1980-2010, exactly as some economists (see e.g. Chakravorty et al., JPE 1987)had forecast. However the cost of modules is said to be only 35-40% of the total installed cost of a solar energy system (e.g. including the cost of inverters and labor).

  3. Mal Avatar

    So in this case China produced stuff is a good thing? And by the way where does the power come from at night. Dual power generation with dual facility costs and probably CO2 producing backup unless the NO NUKES side somehow looses ground. All to solve a problem that 98% of working climatologists agree on. What other subject can you get a 98% agreement on anyway. Seems odd doesn’t it?

  4. Michael Giberson Avatar

    Look, I had to read the latest LBNL Wind Market Technologies Report and the NREL Cost of Wind Energy Review for the report on wind power costs that I did (twice each because it took so long to write the report that both LBNL and NREL did annual updates and I had to make revisions!).
    Now the solar market report? Not without a paying contract.

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