Costs of Solar and Wind are: Plummeting, Tumbling, Plunging, Crashing, or Nose-Diving—Pick the Word that Works for You

A reader asks for documentation re: my claim that the costs of solar and wind are “plummeting.” Here you go:

Solar:

The highly conservative International Energy Agency predicts the cost of solar energy will fall to around 4c/kWh in coming decades as “the sun becomes the dominant source of power generation across (sic) the world. Rooftop solar, it says, will now account for one half of the world’s solar PV installations, because as a distributed energy source the technology is unbeatable.”

Now one could say, “OK, that sounds like ‘will plummet’ (future tense) rather than ‘is plummeting’ (present).”

A rightful criticism.  But to those who raise this concern, I refer the following historical charts, both on left, courtesy of Cleantechnica (click to see legible version), and below:

… from Solar Cell Central:

From Emerson Process Experts:

From New Energy Finance:

Wind:

This report from the U.S. Department of Energy and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report puts utility-scale wind power-purchase agreement pricing at $0.025/kWh (about half of the cost of a kWh from coal). See graph here: