Costs of Renewable Energy Can Only Decline

Here’s an article about a breakthrough in solar power efficiency, which serves as a reminder of an important fact: the cost of renewable energy can only fall, while the cost of fossil fuels can only rise.

I’m not saying that there is no technology involved in extracting fossil fuels and building nuclear power plants; in fact, quite the contrary. But renewable energy is completely based on technology, principally materials science and engineering, focused mainly on developing more efficient ways of converting the energy from the sun, in one form or another, into useful work.

Insofar as the Earth receives 6000 times more energy from the sun each minute than all 7 billion of us are using, it’s only a matter of time until breakthroughs like the one above get us to the point where we have an abundance of clean, cheap power.