Australia’s most pre-eminent solar researcher, Dr Martin Green, says the cost of solar PV technology will fall substantially in coming years, and while bad for the country’s thermal coal industry it will spell good news for other Australian mineral and materials exports.

Green, the director of the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics at UNSW, spoke at an Australian Renewable Energy Agency function in Canberra last week, and we caught up with him on Monday.

“Solar PV is the cheapest form of new power, and soon it will be even cheaper,” he says.

Solar PV, Green expects, will fall in price in some areas in the world to around $US20/MWh this year, but by the mid-2020s costs of just $US10/MWh will be obtained, and prices in the $US20/MWh range will be routine across the world.

But the underlying message of Green’s presentation in Canberra, and his later remarks to RenewEconomy, was that this would be good for the mining industry, rather than bad, as it is often portrayed by the mining lobby.

“It’s great for Australian resources,” he says. A global surge in solar capacity would lift demand for key Australian exports such as coking coal, iron ore, bauxite, alumina and copper, while the battery storage industry will be good news for miners of lithium, nickel and cobalt and other materials.

It’s ironic, because the biggest opponent of renewable energy in Australia has been the mining lobby, and its proxies in the Murdoch media. But Green says the export boost from other materials will offset the reduction in revenues from thermal coal exports by a factor of more than five.

One terawatt of solar PV – that is 1,000GW, or one million megawatts – would, by his estimates, be installed by the early 2020s, and possibly become the annual installation rate.

“Over the last 18 months, solar fields … have become the cheapest way of generating electricity – and they are quickly becoming cheaper,” Green says. “And Australians have played a major role in this and in future cost reductions.

“The really important development is not that solar is now two-and-a-half times cheaper than coal, but that solar is now becoming cheaper than coal fuel costs – with solar costs still decreasing. This is important because in future, solar systems can be financed solely from fuel savings.”

Green says the solar industry has already moved from its “pre-production phase” and its “industry development” phase, and is now in its “mass production” phase, but its “learning rate” is still rising – to 40 per cent. Forecast price drops are being met earlier than expected. “Australia has played, and continues to play, a major role in this transformation, beginning in the lab,” he says. UNSW held records for silicon cell efficiency for 30 of the last 33 years, and is now leading with the PERC technology, which currently has a 20-25 per cent market share in the world. It is now aiming for a further 50 per cent boost in efficiency by stacking a second cell onto silicon, sustaining ongoing cost reductions.

“We are approaching 1 TW installed solar PV and, at present growth rates, installing 1 TW/year by the mid-2020s is feasible,” Green says. If this is achieved by the mid-2020s, then CO2 emissions can reduce close to the 2°C trajectory rate.