The Road to Solar Competitiveness

摘要

What Sits At the foundation of widespread solar adoption is no huge secret: The technology has to be inexpensive (relative to fossil fuel power generation), broadly available, reliable long-term and self-sustaining. So, it's not so much what lies at the end of the road that's debatable; it's the milestones along the journey that warrant discussion. The recently published International Technology Roadmap for Photovoltaics (ITRPV)1 sheds light on the aggressive advances in all areas - material use, manufacturing equipment output and process developments -required to significantly reduce cost and raise efficiency of solar-generated electricity. The study, which centers on crystalline-silicon (c-Si) solar cell/module processes and materials (c-Si cells, incidentally, account for nearly 80% of today's installed solar modules), points out that while the cost of solar modules has been reduced by about 17% to 25% (according to its historical learning curve), this trend has to continue at an aggressive pace over the next decade in order to achieve the overall cost-reduction goals.