BUSINESSANALYSIS
‘’PV will be a mainstream technology by 2020 and it will become a major contributor to the electricity supply worldwide by 2030,’’ explained Adel El Gammal, EPIA secretary general, during the news conference to present the study in Brussels.
Fiscal factors At the end of the day, cost is the name of the game, which the EPIA says photovoltaics is winning and will win decisively, Winfried Hoffmann, vice president and chief technical officer at California-based Applied Materials, told the news conference.
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‘’We will be able to drive down the cost of PV kilowatt hours, ‘’Hoffmann said. ’’We have already been driving that down from 1.10 EUR twenty years ago to 20-40 cents today. That will be going down to anywhere in the range of 4 to 8 Euro cents a kilowatt in the Sunbelt region by 2030, making it one of the most cost-effective ways to produce electricity, compared with any other technology.’’
Figure 1: Comparison of solar irradiation, share in electricity demand and cumulative installed PV capacity
The immediate effect: for the 1.5 billion people in the Sunbelt who don’t have electricity, PV can make it possible, Gammal said. As countries have invested in mobile phones to leapfrog fixed-line telephone grids, they can also leapfrog building regional power grids by installing solar power locally.
Infrastructure failings
The Sunbelt’s 148 countries are ‘’characterised by poor infrastructure resulting in high electricity costs. At the same time, due to the high solar irradiation, PV will be of course very competitive. PV is already competitive today in some of those countries with peak generation technology,’’ Gammal said.
Driven by local and global demand, the Sunbelt could have up to 60 percent of all PV installed capacity in the world, Gammal said. At the moment, 75 percent is installed in a less-sunny Europe.
That’s why Hoffmann has a dream - to take it global: ‘’If we start to think what could happen in 40, 50 years from now, you just combine those national supergrids, or supernational supergrids to a worldwide one which would be able to meet our energy needs without any problem,’’ he said, showing a map of an interconnected world.
Figure 2: Sunbelt countries in scope of study The EPIA has no illusions either. PV faces a tough
www.solar-pv-management.com Issue IX 2010
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