More reasons why the Abbott Liberals are doing serious damage to Australian long-term interests: A day earlier, the International Renewable Energy predicted that solar costs would fall substantially in coming years, underlying its competitiveness with fossil fuels. If government policy makers did not understand this, IRENA said, then they risked making bad decisions about their energy future. Last week, the Saudi Arabian power company ACWE, with some $24 billion in assets, set a world record low for the price of solar in the world’s largest tender. Its CEO, Paddy Padmanathan, told RenewEconomy in an interview on Monday that the price of solar will fall by at least a third in coming years. He expects at least half of the 140,000GW of power capacity to be installed in the Middle East and north Africa in the coming decade to be solar. Padmanathan’s prediction accords with our story from Deutsche Bank last week, which said that solar could extend its reach of “grid parity” to 80 per cent of global markets within the next two years, assuming a 40 per cent cut in solar costs by the end of 2017.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 08:31:47 +0000