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Only if you assume that the growth is expoential / compounding.

I don't know much about the field, but given the vast investments and land needed for country level solar projects I would argue the growth rate is much more likely to be linear, in which case it looks like it won't be overtaking oil this century.

It's relatively easy to make large percentage gains when the current amount is so small.



Solar already hit a supply shock this year that has increased the cost of installation (it has been reliably going down before this). Solar growth is expected to be closer to just linear this year. I hope this is temporary due to all the supply shocks going on right now.

Looking longer-term there will be growth slow-down when wind/solar reaches a larger scale due to the intermittent nature of the energy unless we can figure out how to deal with this. Currently dealing with it requires lots of gas peaker plants, hydro (which has its own environmental damages) or batteries (the resources required to produce and continually replace these are not sustainable but hopefully the net carbon emission can stay low). Malaysia recently had to stop incentivizing solar because their grid couldn't handle it.


There was a similar price shock back around 2010 (?) due to polysilicon shortage. After the hand wringing about how the learning curve was over, capacity increased, and prices continued downward, making up for lost time.




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