Prices for new wind and solar plants continue to plunge at an astonishing pace.

Driven by steadily improving technology and the use of auctions to set prices, the cost of solar and wind dropped 25 percent this past year — and even more in some key emerging markets like China.

That drop comes on top of an 80 percent reduction in the previous 10 years, which is why building new renewable energy sources is now cheaper than just running old coal and nuclear plants.

China’s electricity price on a solar deal for Inner Mongolia plunged 44 percent last year. And solar module prices dropped 26 percent.

Auctions have been driving down renewable energy prices everywhere they’ve been used. In a Saudi Arabian auction last month, solar crushed its own record for cheapest electricity “ever, anywhere, by any technology” — so much so that the lowest price for solar power last year is the highest price now.

At the same time, renewable technology just keeps improving. For instance, wind turbines today can generate the same power in an 11 mile-per-hour wind that turbines a decade ago required a 22 mph wind for.

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Solar energy is expanding rapidly across the United States – increasing more than 100-fold over the past decade. But, there are still many untapped opportunities to harness the nation’s nearly limitless solar potential. The United States has the technical potential to produce more than 100 times as much electricity from solar photovoltaic (PV) and concentrating solar power (CSP) installations as the nation consumes each year. Given our abundant solar resources, America must take advantage of untapped opportunities to install solar technologies – like using rooftops of large superstores and “big box” retail stores as hosts for clean electricity generation.

The roofs of these large stores are perfect locations for solar panels – they are largely flat and vacant and almost always fully exposed to the sun. The big box stores, large grocery stores and malls considered in this report account for 5 percent of electricity use in the United States. Solar panels produce energy that can offset this large electricity demand while contributing to a cleaner grid. Rooftop solar power also brings benefits to the communities in which it is situated. By producing electricity close to its final point of use, distributed rooftop power reduces costs and energy losses associated with electricity transmission and distribution.

According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the United States has the technical potential to generate enough electricity from rooftop solar installations alone to meet nearly a quarter of the nation’s electricity demand. The United States has more than 102,000 big box retail stores, supercenters, large grocery stores and malls with more than 4.5 billion cumulative square feet of available rooftop space on which solar panels could be installed.

The rooftops of America’s big box stores and shopping centers could host 62.3 gigawatts (GW) of solar photovoltaic capacity, equivalent to the amount of electricity used by more than 7 million average U.S. homes or more than 7,500 average Walmart stores, and more than triple the solar photovoltaic capacity that has been installed in the U.S. to date.

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They are calling it the “most efficient rooftop solar module in the world.”

Residential solar company SolarCity announced that its Buffalo, New York “gigafactory” will be producing solar panels that are more efficient — and 30 percent more powerful — than its previous version.

This is good news for customers. Using more efficient, more powerful modules means homeowners will get more bang for their buck, so to speak. Installation costs go down. Hardware costs go down. SolarCity wins, too, of course.

Keith Emery, a scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, called the announcement a “very significant advancement, which should lower their cost, which should at the very least improve their profit — and I assume they will pass that on to their customers.” The module’s efficiency rate is comparable to other leading modules, Emery said.

Solar prices keep coming down. Average installed costs have fallen 9 percent since last year, according to the most recent report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. The cost of residential solar has dropped 50 percent in the past five years. Economies of scale will also help push costs down, Emery said.

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