Its not AI, its the greenie failure
But there is a very important “law” to take into account: Wright’s Law, which states that when you double the total quantity ever produced of a given thing again and again, you will concomitantly improve your production methods to achieve that - with the result that unit cost of production will, with each doubling, decline by the same the same percentage.
This means that if you plot unit cost on a log scale against total quantity produced, also on a log scale you will find that a straight line fits the data quite well.
You’ve heard of Moore’s Law, about the unit cost of transistors in computer chips falling in half every year or two? You can get the same prediction by Wright’s Law if you assume that the rate of production of such transistors happens to increase at a geometrical rate.
The thing that has snuck up on the general public (and here I have to include my own self) is that for many decades the production of solar panels has been mounting up - with the result that the cost-effectiveness of solar panels has been improved drastically since the time solar panels got the bad rap most of us grew up associating with them.
. . . and it is that dramatic improvement which accounts for an engineering wunderkind such as Elon Musk declaring that the way to harness nuclear fusion is to use solar panels to get the energy from the nuclear fusion reactor in the sky. And to use rechargeable batteries (note that the production of such batteries has likewise gone ballistic in recent decades) to store solar energy for when the sun isn’t shining.
. . . and the value of batteries is not restricted to their use in conjunction w/ solar panels; anywhere electric rates vary w/ time of day is a potential application. Note that solar panels are now cheap enough to make it practical to install more than the minimum required by the best case - such that cloudy weather still can produce enough energy.