EigoPro 準1級 読解 — Harnessing the Sun

A decade ago, electricity from solar panels was an indulgence affordable only to the environmentally minded wealthy or to governments willing to subsidise it heavily. Today, in most of the world, it is the cheapest source of new power humanity has ever built. The cost of photovoltaic modules has fallen by roughly ninety per cent since 2010, a collapse so steep that energy forecasters who once dismissed solar as a marginal curiosity have been forced into a series of embarrassing upward revisions. What changed was not a single breakthrough but the relentless logic of manufacturing scale: each doubling of cumulative production shaved a predictable slice off the price, until the technology quietly crossed the threshold of being cheaper than coal. Yet cheap generation is only half the story, and arguably the easier half. The sun, inconveniently, does not shine at night or on demand, and a grid built around fossil fuels assumes that supply can be dialled up to match consumption at any moment. Solar inverts this assumption, flooding the system with power at midday and abandoning it at dusk. Without somewhere to store the surplus, utilities are sometimes forced to pay customers to consume electricity, or simply to switch the panels off—a phenomenon known as curtailment that quietly wastes a growing share of what is generated. This is why the energy transition increasingly hinges less on panels than on batteries and the unglamorous business of rewiring the grid. Critics seize on intermittency to argue that solar can never anchor a modern economy, but the objection mistakes a present limitation for a permanent one. Storage costs are now falling along a trajectory uncannily similar to the one panels traced a decade ago. The transition will not be frictionless, and incumbents with stranded coal assets have every incentive to exaggerate its difficulties. But the direction of travel is no longer seriously in doubt; only its pace remains to be negotiated.

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