View of mountains and new solar panels at Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in Utah

Stephen Lacey at green tech media is bringing us these stunning statistics of the overwhelming growth of global solar.



If you want to understand why people so often compare deployment trends in solar photovoltaics (PV) to Moore's law in computing, consider this statistic: two-thirds of all solar PV capacity in place worldwide has been installed since January 2011. Let's put that into perspective. It took nearly four decades to install 50 gigawatts of PV capacity worldwide. But in the last 2 1/2 years, the industry jumped from 50 gigawatts of PV capacity to just over 100 gigawatts. At the same time, global module prices have fallen 62 percent since January 2011. Even more amazingly, the solar industry is on track to install another 100 gigawatts worldwide by 2015 -- nearly doubling solar capacity in the next 2 1/2 years.

These figures represent a sea change in the solar industry, and even more importantly, in the energy industry. The boom in distributed solar is underway.