In 1975, a solar module cost about $128 per watt in today's money.
By 2000 it was $6.29. By 2010, $2.44. In 2024, about 26 cents. Chinese TOPCon modules were trading around $0.116/W on the spot market this June. US prices sit higher behind tariffs — a blended median of $0.28/W in Q1, with fully domestic US-cell modules at $0.46/W. Even the expensive American version of a solar panel costs less per watt than a cup of coffee.
That's a 99.8% decline over fifty years, and it happened the way commodity prices always fall: costs drop roughly 20% every time cumulative global capacity doubles. Not because of a policy. Not because of a movement. Because of manufacturing scale, which is indifferent to politics.
We wrote a while back about whether solar was dead in 2026 — a question about one quarter's numbers. This is a different question: what kind of thing is solar now? Because if you're deciding whether to build a career or a company in this industry, that's the question that actually matters, and the answer is that solar stopped being a technology bet somewhere in the last decade and became a commodity input to the power system.
Commodities behave differently than fads. Here's how you can tell which one you're standing in.
1. It clears on cost, not on virtue
Lazard has published the industry's reference cost study for close to twenty years. The 2026 edition, released July 13, puts unsubsidized levelized cost of energy at:
| Technology | $/MWh, unsubsidized |
|---|---|
| Utility-scale solar | $40 – $98 |
| Onshore wind | $37 – $99 |
| Gas combined cycle | $51 – $129 |
| Nuclear | $175 – $255 |
| Gas peaking | $144 – $276 |
Note the honest part: solar's LCOE went up. It rose about 18% year over year on higher capital costs, interest rates, tariffs, and supply-chain pressure — including tariffs on lithium-ion battery imports and restricted access to low-cost cells. Anyone telling you solar only ever gets cheaper isn't reading the same reports.
And it still starts below gas. Its cheapest case beats combined cycle's cheapest case, and utility-scale solar is down roughly 81% since Lazard's 2009 edition. Solar doesn't win every project — but it wins on the same criterion as everything else on the list, which is what "commodity" means.
2. The demand isn't political anymore
For twenty years American electricity demand was basically flat. That's over.
EIA's 2026 Annual Energy Outlook, published in April, projects electricity demand growing 0.9% to 1.6% per year through 2050, with total generation up 25–50% and installed capacity up 50–90%. The dominant driver it names is data centers, whose server electricity use could reach 818 billion kWh by 2050 in the high case — more than sixteen times the 2020 level.
Somebody has to build all of that. Look at what's queued up to: Berkeley Lab's Queued Up 2026 counts 773 GW of solar and 749 GW of storage in the active interconnection queue at the end of 2025, against 253 GW of gas. Gas grew faster off a small base, and plenty of it will get built. But the queue is what physically shows up on the grid over the next decade, and the queue is mostly solar and batteries — for the boring reason that they're fastest to permit, fastest to build, and cheapest to finance.
The near-term data says the same. Solar and storage were 91% of all new US electricity-generating capacity added in Q1 2026 — solar alone, 60%. Fairly stated: solar's own Q1 volume was down 27% year over year at 7.8 GWdc, so that's a bigger slice of a smaller quarter. It's still the case that when America builds generation right now, it is overwhelmingly building this.
3. Policy shocks make dips, not endings
This is the pattern worth memorizing, because you'll be asked about it at kitchen tables for the rest of your career.
- 2018, Section 201 tariffs. The industry called it an extinction event. US installs came in at 10.6 GW, down 2% — and residential, which had contracted 15% in 2017, grew 7%.
- 2022, the anti-circumvention probe. Modules got detained at the border and installs fell 16% to 20.2 GW. The next year the market rebounded roughly 52% to about 32 GW, beating the industry's own best-case forecast.
- 2023, California NEM 3.0. Export compensation was cut by roughly three quarters. Berkeley Lab found total California residential installations in the first year came in roughly equal to the prior year — while battery attachment went from about 10% to over 60% and the top five installers' share of the state grew. The product changed. The volume didn't disappear.
- 2025, Section 25D expiring. The homeowner tax credit ended December 31. SEIA's Q2 2026 report forecasts residential contracting 21% this year, with recovery from 2027 — and the market has already pivoted to third-party ownership, where the commercial credit still lives.
Four shocks, four dips, four recoveries. Each one repriced solar and reshuffled who sells it. None of them stopped it being built, because none of them changed the two facts underneath: the modules are cheap, and the utility bill goes up.
4. The companies die. The volume doesn't.
The last two years buried some of the biggest names in the business.
SunPower — nearly forty years old — filed Chapter 11 on August 6, 2024. Titan Solar Power ceased operations June 11, 2024 across sixteen states. Mosaic, the financing platform, filed June 6, 2025; Sunnova three days later. And in April of this year Freedom Forever — the second-largest US residential installer, 6.1% national share — filed Chapter 11 owing between $500 million and $1 billion.
Now put the volume next to the obituaries. The US installed 43.2 GWdc in 2025 — down 14% from 2024, and still the third-biggest year in history. Solar was 54% of all new generating capacity added that year. Cumulative installed capacity reached 279 GWdc, and the country passed six million solar installations.
Firms failing while volume holds near record levels is not what a collapsing market looks like. It's what a maturing one looks like: business models that only worked at maximum subsidy and zero discipline get cleared out, and the demand they were serving goes to whoever's still standing.
5. The rest of the world isn't waiting
Globally, 2025 was the largest solar year ever recorded — 605 GW per the IEA, 647 GW per Ember (the two count differently; take your pick, both are records). China alone installed 378 GW by Ember's count, nearly 370 GW by the IEA's. Solar generation grew 30% in a year, and renewables overtook coal in the global electricity mix for the first time.
Whatever happens to any one country's incentive structure, the manufacturing base that sets the module price is now sized for a world that installs six hundred gigawatts a year. That capacity does not un-build itself because of an election.
What this means if you sell
Commodity markets have rules, and they're not the rules the 2021 solar boom trained people on.
- The product's existence is no longer the pitch. Nobody needs convincing that solar works. You win on price, delivery, and whether the customer believes you — which is why the orgs bleeding trust are the ones actually in trouble, not the ones bleeding subsidy.
- Structure beats hustle. In a consolidating market, the same demand flows to fewer, better-built organizations. Product access, install pricing, and fixed overhead decide who's in that group.
- Volatility is the job, not an interruption. There will be another tariff, another rate case, another credit that expires. The pattern above says: reprice, adapt the product, keep selling.
That's the market GRID was built for. We're a dealer operating platform — the full toolset to run a solar sales org at $0 platform cost, on top of a vetted installer network priced on the network's pooled volume rather than your org's alone, with TPO products in the lineup. We get paid on the install side of funded deals, so we only make money when your installs happen. In a commodity market with thin margins and real volatility, carrying near-zero fixed cost is not a nice-to-have.
If you're rebuilding for that market, it's a 20-minute conversation.
The bottom line
Solar is not a fad, a subsidy artifact, or a political project. It's the cheapest bulk electricity most of the world can build, produced by a manufacturing base measured in hundreds of gigawatts a year, sold into an electricity market that just started growing again after twenty flat years.
Companies will keep failing — some of them big ones, some of them ones you've worked for. Policies will keep changing, in both directions. Neither of those is evidence about solar. They're evidence about companies and policies.
The panels get cheaper, the bill goes up, and the grid needs more power than it has. Everything else is weather.
Sources: Our World in Data, solar PV module prices; pv magazine, Chinese TOPCon spot prices (June 5, 2026); Lazard LCOE+ 2026 via Utility Dive (July 2026) and pv magazine USA; EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2026 (April 8, 2026); LBNL Queued Up 2026 Edition; SEIA / Wood Mackenzie US Solar Market Insight Q2 2026 (June 10, 2026) and 2025 Year in Review; SEIA 2018 year-end release; Solar Power World and Utility Dive on the 2022 tariff dip and 2023 rebound; PV Tech on LBNL's NEM 3.0 findings; IEA via pv magazine and Ember via PV Tech on 2025 global installs. GRID is a dealer operating platform and does not sell solar to homeowners.
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