Milestone: 10 Gigawatts of Solar Panels in 2010

Source: Greentechmedia

As Solar Power International looms and we approach the milestone of 10 gigawatts of solar installed in 2010, Greentech Media asks a few solar luminaries to reflect on the event.

This year we will cross the threshold of 10 gigawatts of photovoltaic solar installed globally in a single year — a record-setting and once-inconceivable number. The analyst community sees the total number for 2010 in the 12 gigawatt to 15 gigawatt range. Expectations for next year are close to 20 gigawatts.

Rewind to ten years ago: the total amount of photovoltaics installed in the year 2000 was 170 megawatts. Since then, the solar photovoltaic industry has grown at a 51 percent annual growth rate, and 170 megawatts is now the size of a healthy utility installation or a small solar factory. As Andrew Beebe mentions below, Suntech has a single building with a one-gigawatt capacity.

Photovoltaic module pricing has made radical progress as well, moving from $300 per watt in 1956, to $50 per watt in the 1970s, to $10 per watt in the 1990s, to $2 per watt today. It’s not exactly Moore’s law, but it is that drop in pricing, chicken-or-egg with policy and technology, that is driving this industry. Pricing of $1 per watt is not that far off.

Ten gigawatts is a significant milestone for the PV industry, but it warrants some perspective:

• That’s the total power that five or six nuclear power plants generate — and there are about one hundred nuclear plants in the U.S. alone.
• The wind industry installed 27 gigawatts in 2008, 38 gigawatts in 2009 and has a total installed base of more than 158 gigawatts compared to PV’s installed base of about 20 gigawatts. 2010 will see more than 200 gigawatts of installed wind and the Global Wind Energy Council expects that to double to 400 gigawatts by the end of 2014.

A few more points about today’s PV market: From a demand standpoint, it’s healthier, with less reliance on “savior” markets and feed-in tariff hotspots. Note the diminishing reliance on Germany as solar savior in the chart below and get many more details in Greentech Media Research’s recent PV demand analysis.

Still, the 10-gigawatt-PV-installed mark will occur, barring disaster, sometime this month. Our calculations put it at 2:15 PM on October 13. It’s a milestone worth noting and a stepping stone, as Travis Bradford note below, on the way to 100 gigawatts installed in 2020.

Here are some reflections on the achievement from some of the technologists, entrepreneurs and investors making it happen:

Dan Shugar, CEO Solaria Corporation

In 2004, we built the world’s first 10-megawatt PV project at PowerLight Corporation — Bavaria Solar 1. Constructed in six months with investment-grade financing, this project exceeded performance expectations. That project and many others like it have validated PV as reliable power-plant technology. In 2004, total shipments were 1 gigawatt; since then our industry has scaled tenfold. No other energy technology has ever grown this rapidly. Costs for high-quality crystalline tracking PV have fallen by half over this period, while fossil-fuel-generating sources like coal have increased in cost over 70 percent; in sunny areas, PV is less costly today than energy from “gas peaker” plants, which is the best “apples-to-apples” comparison to PV.

In the U.S. over this six-year period, the Sierra Club and its allies have thankfully killed over half of all new proposed coal projects. The environmentalism momentum — combined with recent catastrophes in fossil fuel extraction — will further accelerate a transition to solar. I believe we have passed the “PV tipping point” and must now rally our efforts to accelerate PV’s role as a mainstream energy source. Solaria Corporation, and other innovative companies, have developed new PV products that further reduce PV cost and significantly improve the rate of return on invested capital for new manufacturing capacity. It is very exciting to be part of this industry as we scale environmentally responsible solutions for meeting growing energy requirements, all while growing green-collar jobs and improving energy security.

Paul Detering, CEO Tioga Energy

As I thought about 2006 and 2007 (when I got started in solar) and what has happened in the past three years, it all pales in comparison to what must happen if distributed solar PV is to be another transformative, innovation-driven industry like personal computing, mobile communications, the internet, etc.

Yes, 10 gigawatts is a milestone. But it is not even the first lap of a long race. The worldwide installed electricity capacity in 2006 was about 4,000 gigawatts.

Today solar is where the Motorola brick was in 1983 — 27 years ago. We must innovate the technology, infrastructure (network) and business systems in the same way the mobile communications industry has, achieving the same relative improvements and getting us to our solar iPhone (or solar Droid)

10 gigawatts represents about $50B of power generating capacity — that is remarkable. Subsidies in one way, shape or form paid or will pay for about half of that. We need to take our solar bricks and create solar iPhones (or solar Droids) and wean ourselves off the subsidies. We need to do that before we get to 100GW or we will never get to the 1,000GW mark.

Andrew Beebe, Chief Commercial Officer, Suntech Power

We have a building (that’s one building!) in China that this year should be capable of cranking out one gigawatt of product per year. I think that’s larger than the entire industry’s capacity ten years ago. So, I’d say, yes, we’ve come a long way.

I think the other interesting statistic is: what percentage that 10 gigawatts is of all new global power generation capacity that’s come online in the same year (much more interesting than the percentage of total global energy production for the year). Even more interesting is the percentage of new generation capacity produced in the last year, with production initiated in the last year. In other words, while nukes are interesting, their two-gigawatt reactors take 17 years to build, while we can go from sand to power generation in 12 months.

So, yes, we’ve come a long way.

I’m proud of the industry’s capacity, but I think you will see anxiety and a lack of sleep in the eyes of everyone in the industry until we hit true grid parity in large regions of the world. In California, we’re damn close. With the federal tax credit, and the small amount left in the CSI, residential buyers are finding that leasing and PACE and PPA options all make the economics work. This is great, but until we see this happen without those support mechanisms, we’ll still have to live with inorganic growth driven by policy.

I predict that within three years, we’ll see grid parity in parts of California, Japan, and parts of Europe. Then the real fun begins.

Travis Bradford, Founder of the Prometheus Institute, Author of Solar Revolution

When I first started talking about the “Solar Revolution” in 2003, there was little interest or confidence that solar would ever matter. Despite almost 30 years of double-digit annual growth at that point, most folks neither saw the unfolding changes nor were willing to extrapolate those into the future. Now we are at the doorway of 10 gigawatts of annual production, grid parity in a diversified set of national markets around the world, and an awakening of the inevitable role solar will play in our future.

When my book came out in 2006, I would give talks that suggested that it would probably take 30 years for solar to become a dominant part of our energy asset base and 10 years to become a meaningful part of our annual new additions, but that we would likely see the most important achievement of what I termed “economic obviousness” — the point at which the expectation of solar’s eventual economic dominance was widely recognized — within five years. Given that installed commercial and industrial system prices will fall below $3 per watt by the end of next year and electricity prices are rising faster than predicted, it seems like we are right on schedule.

Ten gigawatts of annual installation will not even be a footnote when the history of solar is written, but it is likely that 100 gigawatts will. I look forward to that milestone at the turn of the next decade, if not sooner. Viva la revolución.