2014 was hotter than 1998. 2015 data in yet?

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The decline in the installed cost of solar should have slowed down two or more years ago, and the fact that it hasn't is surprising even the most experienced energy analysts.

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After 2008, the cost of solar modules started falling precipitously, sending the installed cost of solar tumbling as well. When module prices started flattening out around 2012, many expected the installed cost to do the same. But that never happened.

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The national average installed cost of residential solar fell 9% from 2013 to 2014, and 8% in the first half of 2015, a pace similar to price declines when module prices were also plummeting, according to "Tracking the Sun VIII," the annual survey of U.S. photovoltaic solar prices from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

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Why the installed price of distributed solar keeps dropping | Utility Dive

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Another PDF link is embedded the text.

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Photovoltaic Prices Drop for 5th Straight Year

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Solar power keeps getting cheaper
August 15, 2015

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The installed price of distributed solar power fell by 40 cents per watt for U.S. residential and small-scale photovoltaic (PV) systems between 2013 and 2014, while large nonresidential systems saw costs fall by an average of 70 cents per watt, according to new Energy Department data released this week.

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And in some major U.S. markets, plummeting prices for solar PV continued into the first six months of this year, with drops of an additional 20 to 50 cents per watt, or 6 to 13 percent, according to DOE's latest "Tracking the Sun" report, published this week by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

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Galen Barbose, a research scientist with LBNL's Electricity Markets and Policy Group and the report's lead author, said in a statement that the findings mark the fifth consecutive year of significant price reductions for distributed PV systems in the United States.

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Much of the downward price pressure for installed PV systems came from a reduction in "soft costs" and did not result from lower module prices, which have been mostly stable since 2012, according to the analysis. Soft costs include factors such as marketing and acquisition costs, system design, installation, permitting, and inspections.

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Photovoltaic Prices Drop for 5th Straight Year - Scientific American

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US Solar PV Cost Fell Over 50% In 5 Years: Government Report
August 13, 2015
Attention, all American businesses and homeowners interested in adding solar to your property: Here’s a half-off coupon, courtesy of the US solar industry.

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Well, not exactly — but the average price of adding solar to a home or business has dropped by more than 50% over the past years, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (LBNL) eighth-annual Tracking the Sun report.
http://cleantechnica.com/...ell-50-5-years-government-report

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And the increase in energy from the sun has indeed reduced the price of other energy sources (like oil) as it reduces demand. I wish that angle would get explored more often. Every gas-fired plant built ultimately increases prices. Every solar-panel purchased decreases the cost of both solar and natural-gas, oil, coal.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.

The production costs keep dropping and the efficiency of the panels keeps increasing as technological advances make improvements. This industry is still in it's infancy, and like computing power I would expect the trend to cheaper solar energy to continue for some time.Enjoy.

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RAZD
The production costs keep dropping and the efficiency of the panels keeps increasing as technological advances make improvements. This industry is still in it's infancy, and like computing power I would expect the trend to cheaper solar energy to continue for some time.

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The disruptive potential of solar power
As costs fall, the importance of solar power to senior executives is rising.
April 2014
Sharply declining costs are the key to this potential. The price US residential consumers pay to install rooftop solar PV (photovoltaic) systems has plummeted from nearly $7 per watt peak of best-in-class system capacity in 2008 to $4 or less in 2013.1

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Most of this decline has been the result of steep reductions in upstream (or hard) costs, chiefly equipment. Module costs, for example, fell by nearly 30 percent a year between 2008 and 2013, while cumulative installations soared from 1.7 gigawatts in 2009 to an estimated 11 gigawatts by the end of 2013, according to GTM Research.

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While module costs should continue to fall, even bigger opportunities lurk in the downstream (or soft) costs associated with installation and service. Financing, customer acquisition, regulatory incentives, and approvals collectively represent about half the expense of installing residential systems in the United States. Our research suggests that as they become cheaper, the overall costs to consumers are poised to fall to $2.30 by 2015 and to $1.60 by 2020.
Page not found | McKinsey & Company

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A found a really good (long) article, and I can try to get some parts of it here, but please read the entire article.

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Commentary

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Lower oil prices but more renewables: What’s going on?

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Why the renewables sector is more resilient than ever.

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June 2015 | by Scott Nyquist

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Not that long ago, the plunge in oil prices that has occurred over the past year would have been to renewables what kryptonite was to Superman, as the Financial Times put it.Not any more. Yes, it’s true that American investors would have been better off putting their money into the S&P 500 from April 2014 to April 2015 than in clean-tech funds. That was the period that saw oil prices drop from almost $100 to less than $50 a barrel, before recovering a bit
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Why haven’t the much lower oil prices been kryptonite for renewables? And what does this mean for the future?
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They operate in different markets. Oil is predominantly used for transportcars, trucks, planes. Very little of it is used for power; oil accounts for less than 1 percent of power generation in the United States and Canada, for example, and not much more in Europe. Globally, the figure is around 5 percent. Renewables, in contrast, are used mostly to create electricity. The more important factor for renewables, then, is not the price of oil, but the price of electricity, and the latter is not entirely a function of the cost of fuel. The electrical grid itself is expensive, which is why US power costs, which are relatively low in global terms (an average of 12 cents per kilowatt-hour), have been rising. In Europe and Japan, electricity costs are significantly higher, and the relative position of renewables is correspondingly better.

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In some markets, gas is linked to the price of oil. Because gas is a major player in power production (27 percent in the United States and 18.6 percent in Europe), in effect it becomes the floor price for power. That matters because in most markets, most renewables are still more expensive. So it is certainly possible that cheap gas can drive out or at least slow the growth of renewables
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As long as renewables keep getting cheaper, there is room for both.
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the most important reason that renewables have held their own, and then some, even as the oil price fell so drastically. To put it simply, renewables are getting cheaper all the time.
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In the United States, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimated in 2014 that the cost of residential and commercial solar photovoltaic (PV) systems fell an average of 6 to 7 percent a year (depending on size) from 1998 to 2013, and by 12 to 15 percent from 2012 to 2013. Costs kept falling in the first half of 2014 and are expected to continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

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In fact, when it comes to the price of solar, even the most optimistic estimates have not been optimistic enough. As NREL notes, today’s price projections to 2020 are about half of what was being predicted a decade ago. The IEA, which has had a reputation of being cautious about renewables, now estimates that the levelized cost of solar PV (total lifetime costs divided by total output) is at or near parity in many markets. In the United States, McKinsey projects, solar will be competitive with conventional fuels in most states by 2020
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Crucially, there is no reason to believe that the economics of renewables are going to deteriorate. Coal could get cleaner, but no one really expects a big change in its efficiency, and tighter regulation is driving up costs. For gas, the best technologies in use are already highly efficient. But for renewables, particularly solar, substantive improvements in cost and efficiency are not only possible but likely.

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In production, for example, economies of scale can be expected to continue driving down costs. More significant savings are likely to come on the service side, known as soft costs, such as permitting, licensing, and maintenance. In the United States, there is a wide variation in the cost of installation; if and when best practices spread, one would expect to see convergence at the lower end of the scale
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For governments and companies considering the long term, one way to think about it is that the cost of conventional fuels may go down. Or up. More likely, it will do both, as we have seen in 2014—15. Renewables, in contrast, are going in one direction only: down. That’s an intriguing proposition with regard to creating a resilient energy portfolio.
Page not found | McKinsey & Company

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It gets real interesting when one looks at the countries around the world, but I will only cover a small bit of what is said.

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Last year, China was the world’s biggest single investor in renewables ($83.3 billion), almost 40 percent more than in 2013; the United States was second ($38.3 billion), and Japan third.
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It’s also worth noting that some countries in the Middle East are getting much more thoughtful about the possibilities of solar. A Saudi conglomerate recently purchased a major Spanish solar developer, Fotowatio Renewable Ventures, which has a pipeline of almost 4 gigawatts of capacity. Egypt wants to increase renewables to 20 percent of capacity by 2020 and is nearing approval of a $3.5 billion, 2-gigawatt solar project with Bahrain’s Terra Sola. And Dubai’s state utility signed a deal late last year with a Saudi solar company for what could be the cheapest solar in the worldless than six cents per kilowatt-hour. McKinsey estimates that even at prices of $35 to $45 per barrel of oil, solar PV pays for itselfand that frees up more oil for Saudi Arabia to sell.

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When one reads the article, it is easy to see how oil & gas will owe much of their lower price to solar investments(not that the petroleum producers really want the price to be low, except when a self-serving predatory method is felt to call for more production). People really need to understand that the $33 per barrel that Saudi Arabia charges now (which is a drop from $115 a little more than a year ago) has come about from just increasing production a few percentage points. Conversely, a drop in production of a few percent could send prices up like 300%. People complain about the $200 billion (over the past 10 years or less) we have spent on the 30% tax deduction for solar panels, but solar has done so much to reduce demand for fossil fuels and coal that it is hard to imagine that it hasn't paid for itself.It's real ironic but a 10 cents reduction in the per gallon gas tax might not reduce the price per gallon even a penny, but it would cost the government about $12 billion in revenue per year. The price is demand driven and supply driven. The price would have to raise enough so that the market couldn't afford to buy more than the available supply. It would essentially go back up 10 cents so that prices would discourage purchases.Even more ironic is that a $12 billion government investment in solar panel deployment would indeed reduce gas prices because the increased solar energy would reduce demand for oil-energy and the supply (assuming the oil boys would maintain production as the same level and not decrease it) would become cheaper.It is a reality that is just so missed.Anyway, the article mentions technological issues as well.

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The science is improving. New solar technologies could allow solar cells to be rolled out via 3-D printer and applied almost anywhere

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That and many other things should really have up optimistic about the possibilities.

Your statement is false no matter how you consider it because it presumes us doing more with less and that is crap.The beauty of our technology is that it allows us to do more with more. How many more uses for petroleum have we found? Do you think discovering those uses had led to us using less or more petroleum?Our technologies - and especially the most revolutionary ones - have all been directed at finding ways for us to consume more and more of the earth's resources. This example is about efficiencies within industries. If we look at the whole picture, it becomes clear that we are doing more with more. In fact, efficiencies for certain processes almost always lead to us using more of whatever resource we've saved than what those efficiencies eliminated the need for.Our societies are prosperous not because of all the efficiencies developed within industries but because the cheap energy of fossil fuels has enabled us to cut, mine, and extract more resources to turn them into more stuff. Fossil fuels have so far been shown to do the job the best. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, though, and that's the purpose of asking all the questions I've been asking here.

Agreed, as long as ALL the costs are included in the equations. And even larger hidden costs that are not included in your balance sheet: ecological disaster on a global scale. This is not something to be treated lightly.The lands where fracking is now being done to extract fossil fuel energy has laid the landscape as desolate and barren as 'Mordor,' causes earthquakes in surrounding areas and permanently poisons water aquifers that people rely on to live.I put that in the real costs outweigh the benefits column.The 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf is still wreaking havoc on the ecosystems there and poisoning the food supply. (and you can still find lingering effects of the Exxon Valdez spill).I put that in the real costs outweigh the benefits column.The number of explosions and oil spill from the Tar sands distributions have impacted ecologies and homes in a continuing pattern.I put that in the real costs outweigh the benefits column.The massive methane gas leak has caused evacuation of all residential areas down-wind at great disturbance to homeowners lives. And they still don't know how to cap it (BP oil spill scenario played out again?)I put that in the real costs outweigh the benefits column.Global climate change due to use of fossil fuels is causing increased extinction of species and alteration of livable areas, and has already caused civil unrest in Syria, with more to follow. The massive emigration from that area is impacting all of Europe.I put that in the real costs outweigh the benefits column.Then there are the Iraq wars fought to gain control of oil supplies at the cost of millions of lives and the disruption of whole societies not just families.I put that in the real costs outweigh the benefits column. And those hidden costs that outweigh those benefits are catching up to us now, and it is time to pay the piper. Starting with getting off fossil fuels and onto renewable energy. The technology is there. The resources are there. What is missing is political will from corporate controlled governments.EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : .Edited by RAZD, : ..

But the steamship was much cheaper - and still is. Nor are circumnavigation and orbiting "the same task". Your example is actually "doing something completely different with way more resources"."Doing more with less" is, in fact, nonsense. It's political mumbo-jumbo, nothing more.

So as I already said, all that's focused on re fossil fuels are the negatives.Included in that mix is the silly attempt to blame almost every ill on the things. Civil unrest in Syria from fossil fuels? Don't be ridiculous! So let's balance it out; let's discuss the benefits:Fossil fuels have given us advanced societies with access to impressive amounts of cheap and reliable energy for improving lives. That's energy to build schools, hospitals, shopping centers, grocery stores, and the roads to get people to them. That's energy to light laboratories where life-saving medications are developed - and power all the energy-hungry lab equipment. That's energy to grow more food than we know what to do with and energy to get it where the hungry people are. And on and on; cheap energy makes the wealth and well-being of modern civilizations possible. And that cheap energy has almost all come from fossil fuels.That's why despite all the doomsaying, quality of life and life expectancy have skyrocketed in every society that has made the decision to fuel itself on those ancient plants. Meanwhile nations like Kenya have more solar systems per person than anywhere else and yet they remain nations like Kenya. The costs aren't hidden in the sense that we don't see them at all. Even if we don't tabulate them separately, their impact still shows up on the final account. And the fact that people live longer, happier, more productive lives than they ever did without fossil fuels tells me - and should tell any rational and honest person - that the costs of fossil fuels absolutely do not outweigh their benefits. Yes, the technology is there, and that technology has its own risks and benefits associated with it.Some of the risks associated with renewables include their unreliable and low output of energy and the related inability to power the modern societies that make us so much happier, healthier, and more productive. The production of renewable energy technology is also ecologically devastating and when all the costs for that industry are accounted for has been estimated by some to be more environmentally damaging than producing energy with fossil fuels (potentially an overestimation, but a demonstration, nonetheless, of the very serious, and comparable, environmental impact of renewable energy).It's very unlikely - close to zero - that the costs outweigh the benefits for either fossil fuels or renewables. But as to which one is better requires an honest evaluation of both from the cost and benefit side - including all the costs and all the benefits.

You have your biases Jon and I have mine. Except that there actually is documentation of the cause -- several years of unnatural drought caused by global climate change caused by fossil fuel use caused collapse of agricultural farming and cattle raising. The farmers moved to the cities when they could no longer live on the farms and petitioned their government for assistance on the farms. Protests started and got larger as nothing was done to help them. Then the government started attacking and killing the protesters, and the rest you might know if you paid any attention.Yes -- fossil fuel overuse lead to the Syrian conflict. Look it up and educate yourself rather than blithely dismiss it.Here's some more hidden cost to balance against perceived benefit:

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Goodbye, oceans! Study finds ecosystems headed toward a major collapse

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Hungry for some mahi mahi? Too bad! According to new study from the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, seafood may soon be a thing of the past.

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Researchers from the University of Adelaide analyzed 632 recent papers on ocean ecosystems and found that the ability of these systems to acclimate to warmer water and increased acidification is limited. As both continue unabated, few marine species will be able to survive the cascading effects of global climate change, and food chains will start to collapse. The one exception? Microorganisms.

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Care to calculate the cost to repair the ocean ecosystems? And now we are paying the price for it. It was only "cheap" because not all the costs are included in your balance sheet.Look at the cost benefit of nuclear energy and include the cost to treat and dispose of the waste in a safe and sane manner.It should not take a rocket scientist to figure out that the cost of restoration of the extraction of energy costs more than you can realize from the fossil fuel and nuclear energy ... because entropy. The only way you beat that is with an external source of energy ... the sun. No Jon, it is balancing those negatives against what was borrowed in the past by NOT properly focusing on them at the time.But fossil fuels are no longer cheap either when those costs are still ignored. Every time I fill up my car and get giddy over prices under $2/gallon I remind myself that it used to cost $0.25/gal when I first started driving. And the energy to advance technology like solar power generation and LED lights so that we can move forward to an even better society that doesn't have to destroy the earth to have those benefits. Look at India using solar panels to spread electricity to their rural areas and see that this is the future. Look at the tar sand wastelands and see that it is the past.The time has come to change, and the change that is available right now is better for us and for the planet, and it can only get better.EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : added oceans and nuclear to the list

You still haven't dealt with the fact that increased overall well-being proves the benefits from fossil fuels outweigh their costs.As for droughts in the ME, you're forgetting that drought has always been a problem with history offering plenty of examples of droughts far more severe than what the ME is now facing - many at great loss of life and livelihood.Advanced, first-world societies have not successfully dealt with droughts by trying to keep the planet cool but by burning large amounts of fossil fuels taking steps to minimize their impact on human life.Fossil fuels or not there will always be droughts. It's just that with fossil fuels we can at least survive them.

If you're talking about cheaper in a monetary sense, that's not exactly relevant to the "more with less" thesis. The price of goods, material, and labor is subject to the vicissitudes of the sociopolitical environment. Money is an industrial tool -- an artifact of human ingenuity -- which is only one way of measuring the total value/cost of an endeavor. Sure it is. It's the task of getting a member of our species to begin at one point of the earth, circle around it, and arrive back at that approximate point. But, if this example doesn't do it for you, then the "more with less" narrative can be extended to aircraft instead of rockets. With way more resources as measured by mass? Do you have empirical evidence to validate the idea that more mass was required on the back-end to engineer the first rocket that orbited the planet than the mass required to engineer the first steel steamship to circumnavigate the earth? It doesn't even have to be empirical evidence; I'm just curious why you think that "more resources" (as measured by mass, 'cause that's what "more with less" is all about) were required for the rocket than for the ship. It's not really political, though.

A simple illustration should suffice to discredit your thesis:Newcomen's engine was highly inefficient. Watt improved its efficiency, enabling more water to be pumped with less coal ("more with less").But at the larger level, did Watt's improvements in efficiency to Newcomen's engine increase or decrease the amount of coal England used?Did it really mean more with less or did it actually mean more with more?

You don't understand the thesis. The thesis is that advancing technology has enabled us to do more with less per unit of mass. It has nothing whatsoever to do with whether civilizations subsequently scale their use of some technology. It's still doing more per unit of mass than previous technologies allowed us to do. The key phrase here is "per unit of mass."So no. Your example only confirms the thesis. Watt's engine allowed the English to do more per unit of mass with arguably less energy. That the English subsequently used this technology to great extent has nothing whatsoever to do with the thesis.So I wonder, again, why you're harping on this. The point I was making was this: that this general technology-enabled trend of doing more (per unit of mass) has permitted the growth of civilization; it is not the paleobiological nature of the energy used that allowed this advance. Easy stuff. Edited by Genomicus, : No reason given.Edited by Genomicus, : No reason given.Edited by Genomicus, : No reason given.

As I said, you have your biases and I have mine Curiously I see the pending extinction events and whole-sale destruction of ecosystems to be way more costly to life in general and human life in particular than the temporary benefits that have been rung from fossil fuels. Pathetic. Obviously you did NOT look into the evidence, but are just another denialist apologist for the fossil fuel industry.Global warming helped trigger Syria's civil war | Mashable

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Manmade global warming helped spark the brutal civil war in Syria by doubling to tripling the odds that a crippling drought in the Fertile Crescent would occur shortly before the fighting broke out, according to a groundbreaking new study published on March 2.

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The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to attribute the drought in Syria in large part to global warming.

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In doing so, it provides powerful evidence backing up the Pentagon and intelligence community’s assessments that climate change is likely to play the role of a threat multiplier in coming decades, pushing countries that are already vulnerable to upheaval over the edge and into open conflict.

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How Global Warming Helped Cause the Syrian War | WIRED

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The bloody conflict in Syriawhich enters its fifth year this monthhas killed almost 200,000 people, created 3.2 million refugees, and given rise to the murderous extremist group known as the Islamic State. The roots of the civil war extend deep into Syria’s political and socioeconomic structures. But another cause turns out to be global warming.

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When violence erupted in Syria during the Arab Spring in 2011, the country had been mired in a three-year droughtits worst in recorded history. Government agricultural policies had led to an overreliance on rain, so desperate farmers had to turn to well waterand they ended up sucking most of the country’s groundwater reserves dry. What happened next upended the country. A lot of these farmers picked up their families, abandoned their villages, and went en masse to urban areas, says Colin Kelley, a climate scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of a new paper on the conflict. Add 1.5 million refugees fleeing the US-led invasion of Iraq, and the population of Syrian cities grew by 50 percent between 2002 and 2010. The influx led to illegal settlements, rampant unemployment, and inequality. But the government hardly did anything in response (corruption didn’t help, nor did the fact that the hardest-hit areas were populated by Kurdish minorities, who have long been discriminated against and ignored). Soon, frustrations boiled over.

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The drought didn’t cause the violenceit just made Syria susceptible. But what’s more important here is that the drought, Kelley found, was severe likely because of human-caused global warming. It’s behind the drop in precipitation researchers have seen since 1930, the beginning of the data record. The researchers compared two climate models of the region: one that included the warming effects of greenhouse gases and one that didn’t. They found that in the model with global warming, severe, multiyear droughts like the one that preceded the Syrian uprising were two to three times more common than in the other model. A statistical analysis of the data also showed that the long-term trends of rising temperatures and drier climate make droughts more likely and severe. ...

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Syria's civil war 'linked to global warming'

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Syria's civil war 'linked to global warming'
Syria may have fallen into its vicious civil war due, in part, to a drought caused by climate change in what scientists say is strongest connection between violence and human-caused climate change

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The conflict that has torn Syria apart can be traced, in part, to a record drought worsened by global warming, a new study claims.

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In what scientists say is one of the most detailed and strongest connections between violence and human-caused climate change, researchers from Columbia University and the University of California Santa Barbara trace the effects of Syria's drought from the collapse of farming, to the migration of 1.5 million farmers to the cities, and then to poverty and civil unrest.

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Syria's drought started in 2007 and continued until at least 2010 - and perhaps longer. Weather records are more difficult to get in wartime.

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"There are various things going on, but you're talking about 1.5 million people migrating from the rural north to the cities," said climate scientist Richard Seager at Columbia, a co-author of the study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "It was a contributing factor to the social unravelling that occurred that eventually led to the civil war."

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That's the top 3 returns on Syria global warming search.So yes it is drought of unusual proportions as I said before that resulted in the social turmoil leading to the civil war. What did they do out west to alleviate their drought? Nothing. Then they spent a lot of time energy and tax dollars fighting the fires that raged in the tinder dry area -- another hidden cost? Bull*hockey*pucks. Your logic stinks.Conditions are getting worse and worse, and more and more extreme effects are being realized every year. The ability to deal with them gets increasingly difficult, and the reliance on cozy brain dead patronizing live in the past statements do not really deal with the situation.Enjoy

Yeah, a wrathful denialist god could vengefully smite us rather than let us prove him wrong.

Well why the fuck didn't you say that three posts ago?How is anyone supposed to understand something that you don't say?You are correct that technology has enabled us to output more units of goods per unit of input. But that increase in efficiency has only really been beneficial because it has, at every turn, fueled an overall increase in extraction and consumption - the rise in material wealth that distinguishes modern civilizations from all the others.We are only better off because on the whole we consume more (in total and per person) than we used to.