“WIN, WIN, WIN, WIN” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 149

predictions for cost competitiveness. Enthusiasts project that electricity
from solar panels (which combine many modules) will cost the same
as electricity from fossil fuels before the present decade is out . 25
h e McKinsey study revealed this view in full force. h e authors
added up possible gains in productivity, system design, and technol-
ogy and concluded that dollar-a-wat solar was fully possible by 2020.
Despite solar prices already at $1.50 a wat , this was bolder than it
sounded, because there was broad agreement that solar prices had been
temporarily driven down by overinvestment in solar module produc-
tion factories in China; solar would need to make big gains to achieve
the dollar-a-wat goal. But reaching the target would spur nothing less
than a revolution: the consultants compared the new solar costs with
what they expected for other technologies, and they projected that a
hundred gigawat s of solar would be installed by 2020, ten times the
amount that already existed. h is would be only the start of the solar
boom; the analysts estimated up to i ve hundred gigawat s of additional
pent-up demand for solar by the decade's end.
Similar claims were already grabbing headlines in the wind energy
world. In November 2011, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a research
i rm, released a stunning projection: the average wind farm would be
“fully competitive” with power from coal and natural gas by 2016. 26
Turbine prices, they pointed out, had been cut by more than half in
the past two decades as global installations rose by a factor of nearly a
thousand. At the same time, turbines were becoming far more ei cient.
Combining those two trends and projecting them into the future, they
anticipated that both wind and fossil fuels would provide power for
around the same price—about seven cents for a kilowat -hour—within
a few years. 27
But these sorts of claims at racted more than their share of skeptics.
Most mainstream forecasters anticipate far more modest gains. h e U.S.
Energy Information Administration has estimated that, without new
policies, U.S. solar energy capacity will barely breach seven gigawat s
by 2020, nearly eight times its size ten years earlier but still a small
fraction of what the more aggressive forecasters foresee . 28 Wind would
continue to be the biggest source of U.S. renewable electricity other
than hydroelectric power, but at er continuing its climb through 2013