The cost of solar panels has dropped by more than 99% since the 1970s, enabling widespread adoption of photovoltaic systems that convert sunlight into electricity. A new MIT study drills down on specific innovations that enabled such dramatic cost reductions, revealing that technical advances across a web of diverse research efforts and industries played a pivotal role. The research appears in PLOS ONE.
The findings could help renewable energy companies make more effective R&D investment decisions and aid policymakers in identifying areas to prioritize to spur growth in manufacturing and deployment.
The researchers’ modeling approach shows that key innovations often originated outside the solar sector, including advances in semiconductor fabrication, metallurgy, glass manufacturing, oil and gas drilling, construction processes, and even legal domains.
“Our results show just how intricate the process of cost improvement is, and how much scientific and engineering advances, often at a very basic level, are at the heart of these cost reductions. A lot of knowledge was drawn from different domains and industries, and this network of knowledge is what makes these technologies improve,” says study senior author Jessika Trancik, a professor in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.
Trancik is joined on the paper by co-lead authors Goksin Kavlak, a former IDSS graduate student and postdoc who is now a senior energy associate at the Brattle Group; Magdalena Klemun, a former IDSS graduate student and postdoc who is now an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University; former MIT postdoc Ajinkya Kamat; as well as Brittany Smith and Robert Margolis of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Identifying innovations
This work builds on mathematical models that the researchers previously developed that tease out the effects of engineering technologies on the cost of photovoltaic (PV) modules and systems.
In this study, the researchers aimed to dig even deeper into the scientific advances that drove those cost declines.
They combined their quantitative cost model with a detailed, qualitative analysis of innovations that affected the costs of PV system materials,…
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