44 comments on Ambitious Solar Plans in France
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44 comments on Ambitious Solar Plans in France
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GAIA Host Collective
You say that the cost has little changed since the year 2000. I believe most in the industry see cost continuing to fall, especially over the next couple of years as several new manufacturing plants come on line at the same time as credit is harder to arrange.
The above graph is taken (without permission) from here, where the source is quoted as Deutsche Bank.
Although I am just attacking some points in your article, I'm glad for the discussion. I take your point that solar does have limitations. My view is that we need every technology available to us. Solar will not be the answer to maintaining business as usual, but it does have the potential to be a serious low carbon energy source for homes, farms and most businesses.
France has led the world in maintaining its investment in the nuclear industry. I think we would all be well placed to emulate France in its energy policy, nuclear and solar.
You say that the cost has little changed since the year 2000.
I tend to watch this site for trends in solar PV prices:
http://www.solarbuzz.com/Moduleprices.htm
Since 2005, prices have climbed slightly.
Actually, module prices have fallen considerably between 2000 and 2005. Since then, because supply could not satisfy the steep rising demand, prices have climbed again. However, the manufacturing costs have continued to fall. As the PV module shortage is finally dissolving, expect this year module prices to fall by 15% to 20%.
Also note that the PV module represents roughly only half of the total cost of a PV installation. Other costs (installation, inverter, ...) did continue their way down and more than compensated for the rise in PV module prices since 2005.
Do you have a link for 2000-2005 data, or a link that includes the total cost of the installation? I don't think I have ever run across anything like that.
I must admit that it isn't easy to find good statistics on the web.
First, take care with the prices from solarbuzz, as they are based solely on prices for a single module purchase, found on the web. Real purchase prices are clearly lower. Moreover, it was quite astonishing that, although the U.K. market in absolute terms is totally negligible in comparison with the rest of Europe, the recent devaluation of the British Pound had such an effect on the European Module Price Index. From http://www.solarbuzz.com/moduleprices.htm (January 2009):
Nevertheless, the statistics from Solarbuzz are still valuable, especially because they are updated monthly. Me too, I regularly check them.
For 2000-2005 data, IEA-PVPS could be a source:
http://www.iea-pvps.org/products/download/rep1_17.pdf
Figure 10 on page 28 gives a nice graph with 1997-2007 module and system prices for Germany (country #1), USA (country #2) and Japan (country #3).
For trends since 2006, personally, I have more trust in some other statistics, like these from photonconsulting (module and system prices for 2006 and 2007, Table 1):
http://www.photonconsulting.com/files/sa_2008_exec_summary.pdf
or from BSW-Solar (updated every quarter, in euro):
http://www.solarwirtschaft.de/preisindex
To end with, I would like to point to a rather old (2003), but still interesting presentation, saying something more about the importance of BOS Cost (Balance of System Cost = System Cost - Module Cost):
http://www.ecn.nl/fileadmin/ecn/units/bs/PHOTEX/PV_expert_ws/introductio...
They were also correct expecting price increases because of silicon feedstock problems.