A new renewable energy sources study has been carried out by the UK government’s chief climate change adviser, Ross Garnaut – and conducted by the University of Melbourne’s Energy Research Institute.

The summary findings of the study have suggested that the prices of wind, thermal and solar power will fall in the future as more alternative energy sources are plugged in to national grids around the globe.

“We found that the current cost of technology such as solar and wind today are already cheaper than the data that is currently used by Australian Government and industry planning,” said one of the study’s researchers Patrick Hearps.

“Not only that, the cost of solar and wind are expected to drop quite significantly over the next decade,” he added.

Hearps goes on to suggest that this study uncovers some new economic truths related to renewable energy, “It’s expected that, especially in the case of solar technologies, that they’ll become very close to competitive with fossil fuels over the next five to 10 years. What this means is that we should be planning for a future with much larger penetrations of renewable energy and focusing on how we get that built and how we can integrate into the system as fast as possible.”

The survey’s findings have been lauded by sources at EGSHPA, although somewhat macroeconomic and large scale in their nature – the general thought processes and concepts appear to be sound and worth taking note of.

“If you take the data from the International Energy Agency or the data from the US Energy Information Administration or the US DOE, it shows that for instance rooftop solar … [it] can be down as low as 10 cents a kilowatt hour,” said Matthew Wright, the executive director of think tank Beyond Zero Emissions. “[That] is one-third of what people will be paying at the meter in a decade, so obviously everybody will be putting that up and it won’t need subsidies.”