About this Episode
Around the year 2000, solar panels cost roughly five to six dollars per watt of generating capacity. Today, the price is around 12 cents per watt — a drop of roughly 98 percent.
The biggest driver has been the enormous expansion of manufacturing, particularly in China, where large-scale production and intense competition have pushed prices down. The International Energy Agency says solar-module prices fell by more than 60 percent between 2019 and 2024 alone.
Those falling prices are helping solar spread far beyond wealthy countries. Businesses and households in countries including Pakistan, India, the Philippines and across Africa are increasingly installing their own systems, often because electricity from the grid is expensive or unreliable.
In Pakistan, for example, solar already provides more than a quarter of the electricity used at one major cement plant. In India, a government-backed rooftop programme has put solar panels on more than five million homes.
Globally, small-scale solar capacity reached almost 1.2 terawatts by the end of 2025.
But the solar boom also creates challenges. Traditional electricity grids weren’t designed for millions of households producing their own power, sometimes sending electricity back into the network. Utilities therefore need to adapt their infrastructure, pricing and forecasting.
Still, the fundamental change is striking: technology that was once prohibitively expensive has become cheap enough to be deployed on an enormous scale.
Solar isn’t just getting better. It’s becoming accessible to far more people.
