Dubai, UAE: According to a news article in the Emirates News Agency (WAM), a Japanese study has noted that the UAE’s support for adopting renewable energy has resulted in solar energy becoming cheap, making it cheaper to produce, even. It further said that bid prices for solar and wind power projects in Europe and the Middle East had dropped to levels comparable to coal-fired thermal power.

The article said that the study was conducted by Japan’s Nikkei. Due to the availability of sunlight for long hours in the Middle East, there is a stable production of solar energy, said the news article, adding that Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) had received bids in the range of USD 2 cents per kilowatt-hour in proposals for solar projects. The article also mentioned that DEWA had awarded a solar project to Masdar at a low price of USD 2.99 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Quoting a portion of the study, the article said: “Renewable energy has been costly in the past, but many countries began to subsidise it in the 2000s in an effort to fight global warming and diversify their energy sources. This has helped the costs of equipment and construction to decrease as the market expands, and making number of Western companies in such fields as information technology have begun buying all their energy from renewable sources as prices fall.”

The article further cited data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which said that solar energy production costs had dropped 80% in the last five years, while onshore wind power costs fell by close to 70%.