Thanks to R&D and the introduction support policies undertaken by the national government, photovoltaic power (PV) systems in Japan generated more than 250,000 kW of electricity in the year 2002 and have shown an average growth rate as high as 46% over the past three years. As shown in Figure 1, this amount occupies about 49% of the worldwide PV total generation amount, making Japan the top PV country of the world. If the price of the 3 kW PV systems that are marketed for general households in Japan is examined, a price of 11 million yen in 1993 had dropped to about 2.36 million yen by 2001 as is shown in Figure 2, "Change in PV System Prices." The 2001 price is equivalent to a power generation cost of 60 yen/kWh, which is still about 2.6 times higher than the current residential-distribution power price of 23 yen/kWh. It is important to encourage more people to choose to purchase PV systems without fear of feeling a large economic burden. This will help achieve the governmental target for FY2010 of an accumulated power generation capacity of 4.82 million kW and expand the market availability of PV systems in the future. While the system sale price is surely decreasing as shown in Figure 2, the prices of solar cell modules are not decreasing satisfactorily compared to the increase in the production quantity. This fact indicates that the mass-production effect is still low at the current production technology level.
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