Solar is not merely getting cheaper; it is riding a brutal cost curve that has held firm for half a century. According to renewable energy futurist Ray Wills, what we are witnessing right now is the single fastest shift in electricity generation in human history—outpacing coal, oil, gas, and nuclear at their absolute peaks.
The most astonishing part? It is still accelerating.
Mainstream forecasting models repeatedly project that this momentum will stall. Yet when you break down Wills’s core framework into three fundamental messages, it completely reframes how you look at the global energy grid.
Message 1: The Relentless Learning Curve
Over the last 50 years, the price of solar modules has dropped roughly 10,000-fold as cumulative global capacity exploded.
This trajectory adheres to what energy analysts track as the learning rate, or Swanson’s Law: every time global installed capacity doubles, module prices decline by roughly 20%.
Every gigawatt deployed drives down the cost of the subsequent gigawatt. Fossil fuels are commodity-based resources constrained by extraction costs, geopolitical shocks, and finite reserves. Solar, by contrast, is pure hardware manufacturing—and as automated lines displace human labor, manufacturing efficiencies continue to multiply.
Message 2: Raw Velocity and the 100 TWh Starting Line
To measure pure comparative deployment velocity, Wills established an objective baseline: the exact year each major generation source crossed 100 terawatt-hours (TWh) of annual output.
From that common starting line, solar and wind have outpaced every conventional power source that came before them:
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Nuclear: Scaled rapidly during the 1970s and 1980s before stalling into a quarter-century plateau plagued by capital cost overruns.
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Coal and Gas: Required decades to build out physical distribution lines, rail corridors, and pressurized pipelines.
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Solar: Has climbed at an exponential vertical angle unseen in industrial history.
Then come batteries. Measuring from their own 100 TWh milestone, stationary battery storage is ascending even faster than solar.
Storage provides the critical balancing mechanism that turns intermittent daylight into dispatchable, 24/7 firm capacity. In Australia’s most advanced renewable grids, big battery installations are already displacing peaking gas plants during the lucrative morning and evening demand spikes. The legacy argument that modern industrial economies cannot survive without fossil-fueled “baseload” power is evaporating against real-world grid data.
Message 3: 80% Renewables by 2035 and the Forecaster Blind Spot
Based on current deployment trajectories, Future Smart Strategies’ global model projects that solar, wind, and battery storage will reach approximately 80% of global electricity generation by 2035.
Coal, oil, and gas will not disappear overnight, but their operational role will be pushed to the structural margins—transitioning into rarely dispatched reserve backup before being deactivated entirely.
The starkest takeaway is the institutional inability to forecast this shift:
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The S-Curve Blind Spot: Institutions like the International Energy Agency (IEA) and BloombergNEF (BNEF) have routinely baked an artificial plateau into their long-term outlooks, assuming growth must stabilize.
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The Upward Revision Loop: Since 2015, virtually every institutional prediction calling for an impending slowdown in renewable additions has been incorrect. Rather than revising growth downward in retrospect, analysts are consistently forced to revise historic deployment figures upward.
Conventional econometric models struggle with exponential technology curves. They were calibrated in an era where energy meant mining physical fuel out of the earth, failing to account for what scaled Chinese manufacturing and automation would do to module, inverter, and cell pricing.
As Ray Wills points out, the logical question is no longer “Why is the transition happening so fast?” The only rational question left to ask is: Why on earth would it be slow?
There is zero empirical evidence in equipment prices or grid interconnection queues that the market is tapping the brakes. If you are still betting on a fossil fuel resurgence or an impending renewable plateau, you are betting against the steepest learning curve the industrial world has ever built.
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