Some highlights:

• Solar modules now cost 8.9 US cents per Watt (higher in US, India due to trade barriers). Solar panels are cheaper than ordinary fencing materials. For rooftop installs, non-module cost is still $0.50-3.00 per Watt, so further module price declines make little difference.

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• By 2030 most countries will have spot power prices of zero in sunny hours. This will be passed on to end consumers, to encourage them to shift power demand to sunny periods by electric vehicle and battery charging, preheating, precooling, etc.

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• It's very easy to say "but batteries!" and those are definitely part of the solution. California has over 14GW of batteries in a grid with roughly 50GW peak demand, and the reliability of the grid has improved as its carbon emissions go down.
• ...but batteries are still small. In 2024, about 181GWh of lithium-ion stationary storage was deployed worldwide, plus 974GWh lithium-ion batteries in vehicles. (www.bnef.com).

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• There is no way we can build a big enough battery to shift energy from summer to winter. The economics of battery storage are nearly impossible at one cycle a year.

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• Examples of real long-duration storage technologies are pumped hydro (reservoir size is decoupled from turbine capacity), or big tanks of molten salt or hot water, or hot rocks. But all of these do still cost a lot of money if they are only cycling once per year.

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• BNEF’s New Energy Outlook model doesn’t want to just solve the intermittency problem with loads of batteries. This is because the batteries get lower utilization rates the more you build. Batteries cannibalize batteries long before you get 100% clean power.

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• Europeans shouldn't feel guilty about using electricity for airconditioning, it'll all come from the sun anyway by 2030. Solar generation times and seasons match airconditioning demand pretty well, which is good news for really hot countries as well.

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• Data centers are increasing power demand, but let's keep a sense of proportion. BNEF estimates total electricity demand from data centers of 373TWh in 2024 (1.2% of global generation) and expects this to increase to 1,596TWh (4.4% of global) in 2035. (www.bnef.com )