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The following is a fun graph I recently ran across on Wikipedia. It shows the completely explosive solar power growth that has occurred in California, Arizona, New Jersey, Nevada, and New Mexico since 2010. Different factors have been at play here. For one, the price of solar panels has come down dramatically. In some of these markets, 3rd-party solar that lets people go solar for $0 down or close to $0 down has been important. In California, it accounts for about 7080% of the residential solar market. The SREC market in New Jersey has been big for stimulating growth there. No matter how you look at it, though, this is awesome:
Spot prices for solar modules around the world hit 63 cents per watt in 2014′s second quarter — an all-time low.
Spot prices are the cost of any good or service at any given time and place. (In this case, the aggregate world spot price in Q2.) The numbers come via the research arm of GreenTech Media, and while spot prices can’t encompass all market trends — a majority of solar modules are bought and sold via bilateral contracts rather than immediate market transactions — they do fall in with the ongoing collapse of solar module prices over the last few decades.
The modules are a packaged collection of solar cells, and the basic unit out of which any solar photovoltaic array is constructed. GreenTech Media attributes the new low for spot prices to several factors. First, the price of the wafers and solar cells that make up the modules dropped from 2014′s first quarter, thanks especially to an unusually large fall in the price of their building materials — mainly polysilicon. There was also a slight drop in module price for the some of the traditionally more expensive markets, such as Japan’s utility-scale sector. And finally, demand for modules in major markets like China dipped a bit, while sales in the lower-priced regions like Latin America increased.
