Read the article - yes other countries also contributed but it was mainly China that propelled the majority of the price drop through aggressive production.
I did, suggesting China was the only country responsible would mean the price would have been unchanged across 12 years which really doesn’t fit the available data.
Further that article is from 2016, it’s hyper focused on a specific shift in manufacturing while things continued to evolve over time.
The price is not really relevant without looking at volume. Go look at a price and volume chart. Nobody was buying solar panels in significant quantities for $1000/watt. I don’t know what you’re so hung up on that.
You can sell some custom panels for $50,000 a watt and scale production the next day to $5,000 a watt - if volume didn’t change and price per watt was purely due to technological advance it isn’t relevant.
Find a chart that controls for panel tech, go look at who is buying said panels of said type and it’s obvious why and who is causing the price drop.
Look at the first curve, adoption was increasing even just between 1990 and 1991, 1991 and 1992 etc etc.
So I am saying the opposite, the price drop after solar became cheaper than coal is largely irrelevant. Once it was cheaper than coal anywhere without subsides it demand would skyrocket and prices would continue to fall as adoption increased.
Before that point PV was still useful for an ever wider range of niche applications, satellites for example can’t connect to the electric grid. Various applications where connecting to the grid was expensive or inconvenient swapped to solar at various points on that cost curve ex:sailboats. That was sped up by subsides, without which panels might still be 50$/watt and mostly used for calculators etc.
After bridging the vast technical gap to become cost competitive with coal adoption was going to increase dramatically, no subsides needed. So sure without China panels might be 20-50% more expensive, but that simply isn’t a big deal because PV would still be the cheapest option.
