NO. 1 $34 PER MEGAWATTHOUR

THAT’S THE NEW FIGURE

from the investment bank Lazard for the average cost of utility-scale solar power. That is, if you have a bunch of solar panels in a field, that’s how much it costs to produce electricity from them. To understand why it’s a figure that could change the world, you need to know a couple of other things.

One, it’s far, far lower than it was a decade ago: The price of renewable energy has dropped as much as 90 percent since then.

And two, it’s lower than any other way of producing energy. The only thing that comes close is a wind turbine catching the breeze, which checks in at $39 per kilowatt hour. Running a gas-fired power plant, still the most common solution in America, runs you $59; a coal-fired power plant, in these calculations, produces power at $108 a megawatt hour; nuclear is more expensive yet. (Though there’s hope that new developments, like fusion, could eventually bring that total down. If we can get through the next few decades intact, innovation will give us lots more tools to work with.)

This is a seismic shift that could, in relatively short order, allow us to break the 700,000-years-long human habit of setting stuff on fire. We’re used to thinking of renewable clean energy as “alternative energy,” the Whole Foods of energy compared with the Piggly Wiggly of gas or coal: luxe, not mainstream. But that has shifted dramatically.

And that’s an advantage that should continue to grow. A remarkable study from Oxford scientists published in 2021 makes clear that solar and wind power (and the batteries to store that power when the sun sets or the wind drops) are firmly set on what economists call “learning curves.” That is, the more you build them out, the better you get at doing it, and so the price drops.

At the moment, when solar installations double, the price drops by a third.

A learning curve is a remarkable thing — it tends to persist over time, which means the price of renewables should keep dropping. Some of that’s in the lab: Researchers keep finding new and more efficient ways to convert the sun’s rays into energy. Some of it’s up on the roof: If you have a hundred people putting up photovoltaic panels, they’ll figure out new workarounds. Some of it’s down at city hall, where the cost of permits and so on should fall as regulators gain experience with new tech. The power of that learning curve is so great that it tends to overwhelm all the obstacles that get in the way. A few years ago, for instance, some thought wind power would slow down because lightweight balsa wood was in short supply; it took a year for manufacturers to come up with synthetic foams to be used in the blades instead.

Not all power sources are on learning curves, however. Fossil fuel was pretty cheap from the start, but it hasn’t gotten significantly cheaper. That’s because it’s less a technology than a commodity — and you have to work harder to find that commodity now that the easy stuff has been burned. The coal is farther back in the mine; the oil is down at the bottom of the ocean now, or under a polar ice cap. There’s hope — but no certainty yet — that nuclear power might get back on a learning curve, as we move from behemoth projects to “small modular reactors,” but at least for now atomic power comes at a premium.

So the price gap between fossil fuel and renewable energy should continue to widen. Indeed, the Oxford study says that the faster we convert to renewable energy the more money we will save, simply because we’ll be able to stop burning expensive hydrocarbons sooner. The savings could be in the tens of trillions of dollars, which sounds unlikely until you remember the other difference between the old and new technologies. With renewable energy, you still have to mine — cobalt or lithium or the like. But once you’ve mined it, you put it in a battery or a wind turbine, and it stays there for decades, doing its work. If you mine gas or coal, you set it on fire, and then you have to go get more. Forty percent of ship traffic is simply moving coal and gas and oil around so it can be burned. The sun and wind deliver energy for free.

So it makes sense that the fossil-fuel industry hates renewable energy: If you prospered by making people pay you for energy, simply waiting for the sun to rise is the stupidest business model ever. And boy, has the industry ever prospered. As in: