https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2024/10/nearly-half-the-electr...
If you look at the chart it is clear that as renewables are rising (both wind and solar), fossil based electricity declines (including gas).
This is easily understood when you consider that gas is used to generate way more than the baseload. When solar energy is producing, it is more often than not cheaper than gas, and when it isn't it is easy enough to supplement with gas. That means solar competes, but doesn't replace.
There are lots of problems with the transition we are making, some are real, some are due to stupidity and others to greed and malice. It doesn't help that the solutions have become so politicized. I'm convinced that at the end of the transition we'll have an abundant amount of cheap, renewable and clean energy.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2024/06/17/longi-claims-34-6-eff...
The article kind of sucks, like most gee-whiz solar reporting. Battery reporting IMO has gotten a bit better where they actually address cycles/density/materials.
Multijunction solar is still ridiculously undeveloped industrially, and perovskite or silicon+perovskite multijunction could lead to a lot of progress.
What's important about these articles is that solar, which is already exceptionally cheap in LCOE terms, still has runway to likely drop 50% in price in the next 10 years.
I continue to be frustrated with the cost of home/residential solar, which I think is a key part to avoiding excessive grid restruction, increasing resilience in disaster scenarios, double-utilizing already-industrialized/developed land/structures rather than using "pristine" land, and providing key competition to inherent-monopoly utilities.
So cheaper spray-on or coating-based solar might help close the residential vs grid solar gap.
Can this be fixed with (for example) some kind of spray-on acrylic ?
I'm assuming a thing sprayable film which you would most certainly want to be lead-free and inherently would have a higher surface area of air exposure has addressed both, so this would be very promising at 20%+ efficiencies.
For example perovskites, which are the focus of this article have gone from having 3% conversion efficiency to 25% efficiency in the last 15 years.
That's amazing progress in the lab but deployment into standard PV markets is effectively zero.
This might change this year, hence articles about deployment, but still only 1GW or so predicted this year.
And even that is "just" tandem cells where you have a layer of standard PV and perovskites working together.
Some of the real sci-fi possibilities of perovskites are of being able to print them easily and cheaply onto flexible lightweight structures entering whole new markets.
But with wider context, it's weird this gets brought up so often in regards to solar PV and batteries which may actually be two of the most impactful technical revolutions in human history, totally reshaping the whole world right now at a breathtaking speed that surprises even enthusiasts that are paying attention.