Sometime this year a worker will plug in an historic solar panel. Whether on a small rooftop or in a sprawling desert array, that panel will put the world over the edge of the first terawatt of capacity to produce electricity from the sun. Source: BloombergNEF Projects installed at the beginning of this century were measured in kilowatts. A thousand of those make a megawatt. Multiply by a thousand again and it’s a gigawatt—a scale that some of the biggest solar farms can now hit. Getting to a terawatt, made up of 1,000 gigawatts, took the world more than two decades. The next one will come in a fraction of that time. The world achieved this scale by racing to cut costs. Generous subsidies in Europe and the U.S. pushed companies to ramp up manufacturing. Low-cost production took root in China. These factors have transformed wind and solar from […]