Over the past six years, the cost of solar energy has dropped dramatically, to the point where it is now even cheaper than wind power in emerging markets like China and India. This may be largely due to rising investments in solar over the last few years. Now, there is electricity being produced in Chile for $29.10 per megawatt hour–half the price of power produced by coal.
"Renewables are robustly entering the era of undercutting" energy made by fossil fuels, Bloomberg New Energy Finance chairman Michael Liebreich wrote this week.
This is great news for developing nations, which do not generally have the kind of infrastructure that developed countries have dedicated to fossil fuels already in place. As they build their energy infrastructure, it will make sense to go with cheaper, renewable options, more so than it does for a country like the United States to abandon our formidable fossil-fuel based infrastructure.