Graph of the Day: How America is driving down big solar costs

The US government has announced that the US solar industry is more than 60 per cent of the way to achieving cost-competitive utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) electricity, an achievement it credits partly to support from the Energy Department’s SunShot Initiative.

SunShot was set up in 2011 to re-establish US leadership in the solar marketplace by partnering with industry, universities, local communities and the Department’s National Laboratories to aggressively drive down the cost of generation.

To achieve this goal, says the DoE, SunShot aimed for a price of $0.06 per kilowatt hour (KWh) – a target that would make solar-generated power fully cost-competitive with traditional energy sources by the end of the decade.

As you can see from the chart below, published on the Department of Energy’s website earlier this month, SunShot is making an impact, with he average price per kWh of a US utility-scale PV project dropping from about $0.21 to $0.11 since its inception.

*Click on the chart to view the interactive version of the chart, which breaks down this fall in costs of utility-scale PV over the past three years.

The report notes that the Obama government is investing $25 million to strengthen US solar manufacturing for both PV and concentrating solar power technologies – investments it says will support innovative projects aiming to improve manufacturing processes in ways that save time and money.

Government investment to help drive down large-scale renewable energy costs? Who woulda thunk it!