Nearly half of solar capacity will be co-located with storage by 2060, says DNV
Source：pv magazine
Almost half of all global solar capacity will be co-located with storage by 2060, compared to around 2% today, a new report published by DNV predicts.
The Energy Transition Outlook 2025 report says that solar power will account for 47% of electricity generation worldwide by 2060, increasing fivefold from 2024. It adds that from the mid-2030s onwards, around half of new solar installations will be co-located with storage, up from around 6.6% of installations today.
This trajectory is expected to lead to some regions of the world, namely the Middle East and North Africa, the Indian Subcontinent, South East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, having more co-located solar-plus-storage capacity than standalone solar capacity by 2060.
DNV explains that by the mid-2030s, the difference in average received energy price between co-located and standalone solar projects will be significant enough that the annual revenue of a co-located utility plant will be around 15% higher than a standalone solar plant, despite an OPEX twice as high and a lower capacity factor.
The report also predicts that in some regions of the world, distributed generation, encompassing behind-the-meter (BTM) residential and commercial solar and off-grid solar installations, will reach parity with or outpace utility-scale installations in the coming decades.
Utility-scale solar installations are expected to slow in Greater China, Europe and North America due to constricted grids and price cannibalization, while BTM distributed solar generation is projected to play a growing role in addressing the energy demand of buildings.
While BTM distributed solar generation for self-consumption supplied 2% of the total building electricity demand in 2024, this figure is expected to rise to 10% by 2060. By the same year, DNV expects BTM solar will represent 30% of all solar power and 13% of all global power generated.
The installation of off-grid solar systems is also expected to continue growing, providing electricity access to up to 10% of the global population by 2060. However, BTM installations are expected to outpace off-grid installations, accounting for around 40% of all distributed systems by 2050.
Elsewhere in the report, DNV says solar’s levelized cost of electricity is beginning to stabilize after a decade of rapid decline that brought an average annual drop of 8% over the last ten years. DNV is expecting an average annual drop of approximately 5% for the rest of this decade, followed by 3% in the 2030s and under 1% in the 2050s.
The report predicts future LCOE reductions will span from installation efficiencies and learning curves in components such as inverters. When considered globally, grid costs are forecast to be a larger part of a project budget than solar modules from the late 2040s.
The report’s headline figures also reveal that solar and wind energy will account for 32% of the global power mix by 2030. It continues that the growth of the two energy sources, combined with other sources including nuclear and hydropower, will lead to non-fossil fuel energy dominating from the mid-2050s onwards.
The report calls this energy transition inevitable. “No policy reversals, budgetary deficits, or geopolitical crisis will stop it,” it says. “Solar PV, onshore wind, and batteries – the three most important technologies needed for the transition – are now so inexpensive that they outcompete fossil energy in a constantly growing number of areas.”