World capacity for the production of new solar panels is significantly under-used right now. There are no raw material limits in the short-medium term[1]. The rate of expansion of solar production is limited more by demand than supply at the moment.
Some countries have dense populations and poor availability of sunny land, like Belgium and the Netherlands. The US has better sun and lower population density. There is some resistance to retiring coal from people who make money from coal. But generally speaking solar has always had a favorable public image apart from the high costs -- and the high costs are now turning into moderate and even low costs.
Since large cost reductions have been so very recent, it's just taking a while for everyone to catch up. Just this month Florida Power and Light surprisingly announced plans to build more solar power than any other regulated utility in the world, for example:
Their first large-scale solar project was a 25 megawatt facility built in 2009. Last year and this year they're adding solar capacity of about 300 MW per year. With the "30 by 30" announcement they apparently want to accelerate that to beyond 1000 MW per year.
[1] In the long term, manufacturers will have to stop using conductive silver pastes to make cell contacts and switch to more abundant base metals like copper, tin, nickel, or aluminum. Multiple companies have already used copper metallization instead of silver at an industrial scale so I'm reasonably confident that this eventually-necessary transition will not be too difficult.
I don't doubt any of the stats you cite, but it seems that one of the biggest impediments to solar is the huge amount of area it requires. The real estate costs of putting such plants nearby large population centers seems to be one of the major costs.
Rooftop solar seems to be a good solution, but it's still not economical without generous government incentives.
Anecdote: A colleague of mine is trying to get approval for solar panels on top of a property she owns in a high density area of New Jersey. After doing an in depth cost/benefit analysis, she found it was economical, but only because New Jersey has very large incentives. Roughly 2/3 of the project would be financed by the government either in grants or tax credits.
I have calculated the contribution of real estate prices for California solar farms. The cost of land accounts for a tiny part of large scale PV electricity costs -- less than 1%. But of course California is both sunnier and much less densely populated than New Jersey.
Rooftop solar is not especially cost-effective. It yields less energy per installed watt than large solar farms and it costs multiple times as much per watt to install in the US. If the US could get its permitting and inspection for rooftop solar streamlined and standardized like in Germany or Australia, then the price premium over ground-mount systems would be more like 40% than 400%, and it would be worth considering in states without large open spaces.
Even in Germany rooftop systems are less cost-effective than ground mount systems though the cost-effectiveness gap isn't as large as in the US. I attribute Germany's continued incentives for rooftop solar to a desire to maintain broad societal buy-in to the energy transition. Millions of households and businesses all with their own stake in solar makes for a large and stable coalition of supporters. Just having the legacy energy utilities build their own big solar plants is more cost effective but doesn't give so many people a personal stake in the transition.
Some countries have dense populations and poor availability of sunny land, like Belgium and the Netherlands. The US has better sun and lower population density. There is some resistance to retiring coal from people who make money from coal. But generally speaking solar has always had a favorable public image apart from the high costs -- and the high costs are now turning into moderate and even low costs.
Since large cost reductions have been so very recent, it's just taking a while for everyone to catch up. Just this month Florida Power and Light surprisingly announced plans to build more solar power than any other regulated utility in the world, for example:
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/florida-power-a...
Their first large-scale solar project was a 25 megawatt facility built in 2009. Last year and this year they're adding solar capacity of about 300 MW per year. With the "30 by 30" announcement they apparently want to accelerate that to beyond 1000 MW per year.
[1] In the long term, manufacturers will have to stop using conductive silver pastes to make cell contacts and switch to more abundant base metals like copper, tin, nickel, or aluminum. Multiple companies have already used copper metallization instead of silver at an industrial scale so I'm reasonably confident that this eventually-necessary transition will not be too difficult.