Solar Bargain Hits World Record

A Jaw-Dropping World Record Solar Price Was Just Bid in Abu Dhabi; It’s for a planned sprawling solar farm for a utility in the Middle East.

Katie Fehrenbacher, September 19, 2016 (Fortune)

“A shockingly low price [of 2.42 cents per kilowatt hour] for energy from solar panels was recently bid during an auction for a [350 MW] solar farm near the [sun-rich] city of Abu Dhabi…[by a] consortium of the Chinese solar panel maker and project builder JinkoSolar JKS -1.56% and the Japanese developer Marubeni…That’s by far the lowest solar panel farm bid out there. A few ultra low-cost large solar panel farms have recently achieved around 4 cents per kilowatt hour, and earlier this year the previous record bid for a solar panel farm in Chile was 2.91 cents per kilowatt hour…In comparison, in the U.S. average costs for energy from all types of new sources, like gas and coal, can cost between 5 and 6 cents per kilowatt hour. So getting to under 2.50 cents puts solar panel farms in an entirely new category and makes it competitive with fossil fuels…[And] that bid is for an auction that hasn’t yet concluded…” click here for more

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