The past few years have seen the rise of large-scale, low-priced solar energy projects around the world. Oil-producing countries in the Middle East, in particularly the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, have become unexpected leaders in this movement with record-low power purchase agreement prices, below 3¢ kWh⁻¹, for a number of new photovoltaic installations, beating the cost of fossil fuel generation. In this Analysis, we bring together technical, economic and financial information from global and local sources to study whether these prices can be replicated elsewhere and further reduced. We find that hardware costs, cost of labour, favourable cost of capital, low taxes and low, but positive, profit margins contribute to the reduction in costs. Reduced hardware prices contributed the most and also led to further reduction in cost of capital. We demonstrate how similar costs can be and have been achieved in other markets.

在过去的几年中，全球范围内大规模，廉价的太阳能项目兴起。中东的石油生产国，特别是阿拉伯联合酋长国和沙特阿拉伯，以低于3美分/千瓦时^-1的创纪录低价购电协议价格，成为这一运动中出乎意料的领导者，对于许多新的光伏装置，其成本超过了化石燃料的生产成本。在此分析中，我们将来自全球和本地资源的技术，经济和财务信息汇总在一起，研究这些价格是否可以在其他地方复制并进一步降低。我们发现，硬件成本，劳动力成本，有利的资本成本，低税率和低但正的利润率有助于降低成本。降低的硬件价格起了最大的作用，也导致了资本成本的进一步降低。我们展示了在其他市场上可以实现和已经实现的类似成本。