Al Gore
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Well, they were wrong.
Same year, OPEC predicted that it was just unrealistic to think that solar power would ever be able to compete in cost with the burning of fossil fuels.
But now, it is by far the cheapest source of electricity in all of history.
Now, you know, a lot of other people have been surprised by how quickly these costs have come down.
University of Oxford studied 3,000 past projections, and the average predicted decline was 2.6 percent a year.
The reality was 15 percent per year.
And when you compound a number like that, it makes quite a difference.
It really is quite extraordinary.
My goodness.
Nobody could have imagined that it would be this incredible, but it is, and it's right before us, and they still want to ignore it.
Since 2015, the world's installed twice as much solar as all fossil fuels combined.
Solar is the breakout winner in fuel sources.
Electric vehicles have increased 34 times over since the time of the Paris Agreement.
Vehicle sales in China, 52 percent are already EVs, and within five years, the prediction is 82 percent of all car sales will be electric vehicles.
Also, by the way, China in April installed 45 gigawatts of new solar capacity in one month.
That's the equivalent of 45 brand-new giant nuclear reactors in one month.
It's actually incredible what is happening, and the cost of all of these clean energy technologies has come down quite dramatically, particularly solar, and even more dramatic,
is utility-scale batteries, 87 percent down.
That's making a huge difference as well.
But I have to say this.