Or even in the second case maybe it’s one of those “shit we could have found out about this many decades ago” discoveries
Economies of scale and supply chain investments thanks to government subsidies primarily from Germany in the 2000s and China in the 2010s led to Chinese manufacturing of panels becoming extremely streamlined and massive factories dedicated to panel manufacturing.
That said there is still much room for growth thanks to lackluster adoption from major markets like much of Europe and the US. Additionally funneling more money into r&d is worthwhile; current panels have an efficiency of about 20% but lab cells have pushed this to 30% with novel material design and theoretical designs could even push past 40% efficiency.
Europe is the driving force on the big efficiency stuff at the moment, China is the big driving force on manufacturing and production, driving costs down, deployability, etc. speaking broadly of course. Germany has been notably a frontrunner on both since early on (though obviously China has the actual manufacturing capacity).
America is notably fickle here, there is work for both high efficiency cells as well some manufacturing but manufacturing is tricky because (somewhat) of regulatory constraints around lead, the lack of a manufacturing capacity to begin with, and most importantly the lack of a cohesive energy policy over time. Every few years with regime change we tend to see some minor progress then said minor progress undone by fossil fuel lobbying (it creates jobs, you see! Because installing panels isn’t a job that pays well and doesn’t give you black lung).
Then we frack away for a few years and roll back subsidies while China deploys 278 gigawatts of solar to our pathetic 49 gigawatts. They will likely have 1 terawatt of solar power by 2026 and already have 50% of the globes cumulative solar whereas America is projected to have a paltry 182 gigawatts in 2026, 10-12% of the worlds solar, with intense growing need from AI and crypto farms likely being filled by fossil fuels. Expect to see coal plants life extended by Trump, grid failures, increased emissions, etc. the gop orchestrated the removal of all that climate data right from the start to set the stage for this.
Apologies for doomerism
To answer you more directly the pricing could’ve been as low as it is now probably a decade earlier if demand was there to push the supply chain to go to where it needed to be, basically
Didn’t Biden tariff solar panels by 50% during his administration?
Oil production was also higher under Biden than it was under Obama and Trump’s terms.
Fucking the planet up is a bipartisan issue.
There were definitely some new tech developed around that time that helped solar become more economically viable under capitalism. I think the big shift was the economy of scale with China ramping up manufacturing of them though. The improved efficiency helps, but investment in scale really matters more for broad adoption from my understanding.
