Cheaper Solar Power Heads Mainstream
Solar power should become a mainstream energy choice in three or four years as companies raise output of a key ingredient used in solar panels and as China emerges as a producer of them, according to a report by an environmental research group.
“We are now seeing two major trends that will accelerate the growth of photovoltaics: the development of advanced technologies, and the emergence of China as a low-cost producer,” Janet Sawin, a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute and an author of report, said in a statement. 
Investors have flocked to solar and other renewable energy sources amid worries about the high costs of oil and natural gas and greenhouse gas emissions. Solar is the fastest growing energy source, but still provides less than 1 percent of the world’s electricity, in part because its power can cost homeowners twice as much as power from the grid.
But costs could fall 40 percent in the next few years as polysilicon becomes more available, Sawin said,
More than a dozen companies in Europe, China, Japan, and the United States will boost production over the next few years of purified polysilicon, which helps panels convert sunlight into electricity, and is the main ingredient in semiconductor computer chips, according to the report.
Polysilicon’s feedstock is abundantly available sand. But a downturn in silicon refining after the high-tech bubble collapse in the late 1990s has constrained the panel market.
In some of the world’s sunniest places, like California, electricity from solar panels costs the same as power from the grid. A drop in solar panel prices could expand that to places that only get average sunlight, making solar more of a mainstream choice, Sawin said in an e-mail.
Last year, China passed the United States to become the world’s third largest producer of solar panels, trailing only Germany and Japan.
“To say that Chinese PV producers plan to expand production rapidly in the year ahead would be an understatement,” Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute, a Massachusetts-based group that promotes renewables, said in a release.
“They have raised billions from international IPOs to build capacity and increase scale with the goal of driving down costs,” said Bradford, who helped write the report.
Many companies are producing thin-film solar technologies that cut the amount of silicon used in panels. Thin-film could grab a 20 percent share of the market by 2010, up from 7 percent of the market in 2006, the report said.
Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited.
Actually, rather than “its power can cost homeowners twice as much as power from the grid”, solar power is free, and has a payback period on capital expense of from 10 to 20 years, and less every year. After that it continues to be free. The sun is a well constructed nuclear fusion power plant located a safe distance from major population centers. Solar energy, electric cars and mass transportation are the solution to global warming. One large solar installation in the southwest can supply all of the energy needs of the United States. Covering the Sahara Desert with solar panels would provide 54 times the current world demand for energy. For night-time use giant hydro-storage facilities can be used.
Yes, solar energy, electric cars, and mass transportation are components of a solution to global warming. The problem is that the petro-chemical industry is doing everything it can to prevent the development of safe, renewable, economical energy. They’re buying back their stocks, buying off politicians, and buying up green technology to keep it out of our hands.
Ultimately, we must overcome corporate/political greed if we are truly to solve the problem of global warming. No problem!
As I looked at the picture of the solar farm, I thought that one could combine a solar panel farm with a wind energy farm. I realize the windmills would produce some shadow, but with the newer more stramlined one the shadow would be very small. The idea of creating energy from two sources on nearly the same amount of ground would lower the cost. Corporations should like the idea of multi tasking for a piece of ground.
Seville, I assume is in Spain. Always remember the time I got lost in Spanish mountains outside Madrid, and found myself smack dab in the middle of a wind farm. Seems Europeans are far ahead of the US in the development of alternative energy. Tragic to see Bush pushing for ethanol, just another way of starving the poor to keep the rich comfy.
Thanks, Chris, for your obviously well-informed comments on solar energy. Yggberg,
multi-tasking on the same land might be achieved through the use of solar towers (google this).
Personally, my last goal of this lifetime-I’m getting up there in age- is to figure out how we can live off the grid, or better, yet, sell power to the grid while meeting our own needs.
Anything is possible. This country has NO political will to try the options. Go to Latin America, many many small villages for years have had small solar panels for a bulb and the TV. Many places in Peru have solar heated showers.
How can anyone possibly claim it is easier or more efficient to sink a well five miles below the surface of the ocean or invade sovereign nations to extract oil? I do not get it…
Someone at Worldwatch saying “…and the emergence of China as a low-cost producer” –? Fine! Let them use those solar panels in China, NOT sell them here. (They need to clean up their air even more than we do.)
Renewable energy products are America’s last best hope of gaining back millions of manufacturing jobs! We need a law mandating that wind turbines, solar arrays, tidal turbines, geothermal devices etc. installed here be MADE IN AMERICA by legal labor.
Hey you rich cats wondering how to “give back”: invest in sustainable technologies research- you may not get as rich as those investors that raped the planet the last 100+ years from non-renewable resources (when they could have invested in available technologies, such as those by scientist, inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla); however, should these scientists actually (and they will) develop these sustainable energy sources and methods of transmission/utilization, EVERYONE, EVERWHERE will want it- so, you WILL see a huge return.
Aside from the exciting developments in solar and wind energy, patents are already being registered for developing power from the “energy vacuum” that surrounds us. All kinds of exciting, efficient, non-polluting, air and earth friendly technologies are being researched- but the researchers face the age-old dilemma: the investors out there with the money typically don’t want to invest in anything that results in what later becomes basically free- utilizing machinery that rarely breaks down or wears out, and therefore doesn’t need replaced. In this case though, the early bird gets the worm- so please, if you have money to burn, why not funnel it into sustainable technologies research and development?
The problem with solar is that it’s hard to centralize so there is little corporate incentive to use. Corporations want centralized energy, like highly subsidized, liability protected, dangerous and more expensive nuclear. Corporations make the rules.
If only there was a way to ship solar power. Australia could carpet the sesert with solar plants, and become permanently wealthy.
Here’s an idea that relates to land use. At Solar Technologies, we have been trying to get BuRec and other holders of reservoir storage in California to allow us to deploy floating rafts with thin-Si over California reservoirs, and the Salton Sea. It is notorious that the peak power production at 7 watts/square foot on half of the Salton Sea, 100,000 acres, and 20% of the reservoirs in the state, another 120,000 acres, would equal the ENTIRE! peak power use of the state, electric, gas, oil. The point is, with the upcoming strong drops in the price of thin-Si (don’t need hitech to grow Si crystals for this technology,) we have it in our hands to produce — and store!! — all of our energy usage in the state. How? Well, when it’s sunny, you run pumps below the dams and pump some part of the water coming through the dams back uphill for storage purposes, putting the rest, right at peak-power time, on the grid. Add to this abundant resources from wind farms, and California could be a net exporter of renewable power, again using the very large reservoir capacity we have in the state, something like 20 million acre-feet, to use in this capacity: with essentially no issue of having to take over land, with the power production widely distributed, and therefore useable locally in theory, and with thin-Si fabrication capacity soon to get into GWatts/year and upward from that. As a bonus, solar panels on the reservoirs deployed in this way would also reduce by approximately 1 million acre-feet per year the evaporation from those reservoirs, which is about half the water production of the Oroville Reservoir on the Feather River sent packing south by the California Aqueduct. People operate electric cars, charge them up for city use using standard AC plugs at home. Does involve a large investment in infrastructure to support much larger flows of power around the state, but the advantages to proceeding in this way are obvious. Can we do it? Yes we can!
All those bare rooftops could be used for solar panels, solar water heaters and wind generators. Connected to the grid, we could make our electric meters run backwards, in effect, selling the energy each one of us produces back to the utility. If you wonder why this simple, common sensical solution is not being considered, it’s because corporations can’t easily centralize this power.
My electric company is trying to get its customers to sign a contract with them to continue buying power from thier company. (electric bills have nearly doubled in the past few months due to the expiration of the price controls on electric). It seems to me the reason for doing the contract thing is obvious…..they fear possiblity of photovolteics and wind power chipping away at thier profit margins.
Until the price of renewable energy is less than the cost of extracting and refining oil, the uptake of renewables will continue to be very slow. Oil is a commodity, and will drop in price if demand goes down. It was not that long ago that oil was $25/barrel, and this obviously was still cheap enough for oil companies to make a profit. It could easily be this cheap again, which would make renewable sources less attractive. If left to the market, I’m afraid we’ll just keep burning oil and coal for another 50 years (just a number from my head) until finally, the cost of extraction is higher than the cost of renewables. We really need to elect governments that will step up to the plate, and invest in cleaner energy because it is the right thing to do! Damn the oil companies. Elect Al Gore?