The falling cost of renewable electricity
What does a unit of electricity cost to generate and what is the cost of installed generation capacity? Hover or use the arrow keys for the numbers.
Levelised cost of electricity is what a plant's output has to earn, per unit, to cover building and running it over its life. It is a plant-gate number: it excludes the cost of connecting to the grid, of firming a variable output, and of storage. Cheap solar is not the same as a cheap system.
These are IRENA's global capacity-weighted averages of projects commissioned in each year, deflated to constant 2024 dollars. Only onshore wind runs back to 1984; everything else starts in 2010, so the early years are a single line by necessity, not by choice. A thin year moves a lot: these are averages over the projects that happened to be built.
The fossil fuel range is IRENA's own comparator for 2024 — a single band, not a series, and not re-estimated for earlier years. Read it as "where fossil generation sits today", not as a history.
Cost per kW is nameplate capacity cost, so it says nothing about output: a kilowatt of solar and a kilowatt of geothermal earn very different amounts. The shaded band is the 5th to 95th percentile of that year's projects.
Solar module price is a component price — not an installed system, and not a cost per unit of electricity. Modules are now a minority of what a solar project costs, so the fall shown here outruns the fall in generation cost. It is drawn on a logarithmic axis: at 497× over fifty years, a linear one would pin everything after 1990 to the floor.