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07.16

Land demand for solar power

Solar energy for Germany, Europe and the world

There is a picture in the solar scene (picture 1) that probably almost everyone knows, it shows how large the surface area is when the world is switched to solar energy. It was, as far as I know, published by Mrs. Nadine May for the first time in her diploma thesis at DLR [1]:

Figure 1: Space requirements for solar power plants, according to Nadine May [1]
This image is widely used and should be checked for correctness. First of all, Algeria is the country that contains the squares for the world and Europe, and Libya, the country which possibly receives the German solar power plants, are no more colonies.

The squares have an edge length of: world 254 km, Europe 110 km and Germany only 45 km.

How big is the energy consumption in the world?

The energy consumption of the world is constantly growing (see figure 2), so it is difficult to specify the energy requirement without a reference year. Currently the demand is over 30,000 TWh (30,000,000,000,000,000 kWh) using the further processed data from the International Energy Agency (IEA). I have considered transforming factors for certain energy forms (transportation, heating) into electricity.

Figure 2: Global energy demand for electricity, transport and all other forms of demand

This energy should be converted with solar cells (PV) into electricity. There are several factors to consider, the efficiency, the irradiation in the course of a year and the necessary storage of the energy for the night.

Solar cells made of silicon achieve an efficiency of around 20% and are currently the most economical method to generate large amounts of solar energy.

The irradiation is very different in different regions of the earth, in particular one must always distinguish between direct and global irradiation. For photovoltaics (PV) only the global irradiation plays a role. Therefore, only these radiation is considered.

Figure 3: Global radiation perpendicular to the ground (source: WEC [2])
The map shows that many areas have an annual irradiation capacity of 2000 kWh per year, in particular the Sahara, but also on other continents good locations can be found; only exception is Europe.

Necessary Land Area

The necessary areas of the solar cells can now be easily calculated. For the world, we need 30,000,000,000,000,000 kWh per year, since one square meter has an incidence of 2000 kWh which would theoretically be 15,000,000,000 m� or 15,000 km�.
Now the efficiency comes into play, since only 20% is converted into electricity, we need the fivefold area, that is 75,000 km�. However, one has to be able to build the cells and needs paths and additional areas for inverters and storage, which should double the space requirement. This is 150,000 km�.
The transport and storage of energy, which is absolutely necessary, since at night the sun doesn't shine, will consume another 25% of the energy, so we are at 200,000 km�.

This corresponds to a square of 448 km of edge length, roughly twice as large as in the drawing.

Fair World

Currently, only a few people consume a lot of energy and lots of people have little energy. I am convinced that in the long term all people want at least to reach the standard of living as in Germany. For this, an energy quantity of 15,000 kWh per year and per person would be necessary. There are some countries that already have a much higher energy requirement, but we hope that energy efficiency will also save some energy.

With a world population of 8 billion people, this will yield an annual energy demand of 120,000 TWh or 120,000,000,000,000,000 kWh, or four times the current demand. This would increase the area with solar cells to a square with an edge length of 1000 km (Fig. 4).

Figure 4: Supply the world completely with solar energy in the future
Furthermore, the area of ??one million square kilometers is still small compared to the Sahara, but a serious part of the solid surface of the earth. The world has about 15 million square kilometers of sunny deserts, which means about 1/15 of this area must be used in the future for solar cells to deliver enough energy.

Storage requirements

If it is assumed that the energy must be stored for at least one day, this requires a storage capacity of 330 TWh (330,000 GWh)
Compared: Germany has pumped storage with a capacity of 0.04 TWh.
If large Gravity Storage systems with 80 GWh capacity (500 m diameter) solves the problem, a considerable number of 4000 pieces would have to be built.

Using batteries from Elon Musks Gigafactory, the gigafactory produces at a planned capacity 50 GWh per year; over 6000 years of production or 400 Gigafactories for 15 years are required. This is to provide the capacity for the first time and we have to continue production because batteries must be replaced after 15 years.

Gigantic conversion

If the global conversion to solar energy succeeds, huge buildings in the form of gigantic solar fields will be necessary. Surely the roof surfaces are never enough. Furthermore, investments are in the order of magnitude of the global gross social product of one year ($ 80,000 billion). This sounds a lot, but it will help mankind to be sustainable. Especially when one considers that afterwards energy is produced clean, without CO2 and at a low cost.

I think: we can do it!


Sources:

[1] Eco-balance of a Solar ElectricityTransmission from North Africa to Europe, Diploma Thesis of Nadine May, Braunschweig, May 2005

[2] World Energy Resources Solar 2016, World Energy Council 2017

A 186 page paper going into details is from Jakobson et.al., 100% Clean and Renewable Wind, Water, and Sunlight (WWS) AllSector Energy Roadmaps for 139 Countries of the World
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09.13

Lithium Ion drives the Future

The basic innovation LiIon battery, driven by the company Sony, has surprising, but that is common in innovation, enabled the development of electric cars. 

Previously there were only ugly batteries, some were extremely heavy, lead-acid battery, extremely toxic, nickel cadmium, or other drawbacks why they were not suitable for an energy storage device in a car. This has seduced the automotive industry to believe everything would stay the same and no special attention was given to the development of batteries. 

With the successful development of the Tesla S, an all electric car, everything has changed fundamentally, so I will report here about the importance of battery technology in the automotive industry.

The value Chain in the Car Industry (today)

Four things make the value of a car:
  1. the glider, a vehicle without power train and energy storage
  2. the engine with storage (tank or battery)
  3. the image of the brand (mostly through advertising)
  4. the amount of energy consumed by the car in his life
The glider is now a product of the OEM, headlights, bumper, seats or wheels and tires, almost everything visible to the driver is not produced in the car factory. Only the steel welding of the body remains in most car factories, with high automation done by robots.

The engine remains us to the 19th century. An internal combustion engine with a mean efficiency of about 20 percent, emitting significant amounts of particulate matter and other unhealthy substances, accelerates the car more or less rapidly to cruising speed and keeps on this pace. Thousands of engineers try to optimize this technology with legally or illegal means.

The image of cars of different brands developed by massive advertising budgets [1]. Through product placement in movies and elaborate sales centers, a high value of the car is suggested, although all the cars stuck in traffic driving at the same speed. For many people, the car is next to the house, the most expensive product that is purchased for own appreciation.

The fuel that a car burns in the course of its operational phase of approximately 200,000 miles, may sum up to $ 30,000 (depending on local tax) and is often more expensive as the whole car. In addition, no one knows at the time of car purchase how the gas price will develop. The money end up in the pockets of the oil companies and oil states, not in the automotive industry!

Summarized, the major car makers only have the ability to manufacture engines, the rest of the value chain is lost.

The electric car value chain

Electric cars have a significantly different distribution to the above points 1 to 4

The glider remains essentially the same, interestingly, the weight saving is less important than with previous cars, because by recuperation (recovery of braking energy). The energy to accelerate and the energy to go uphill is not used for heating the brake disk, as in conventional cars.

The use of non-rusting aluminum is useful because the life of an electric motor is considerably higher than that of an internal combustion engine. And who wants a rusty electric car that still has a good engine and a working battery.

The value of the electric motor is far below of an internal combustion engine, which consists of 6000 moving precision parts. Electric motors are simple, some copper wire winding and an aluminum cylinder which rotates. Rare earths are not necessary, which can only be found in hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius (46kg!).

There is no fuel in the electric car. But we need a battery and electric power to drive the car.The batteries are by far the most expensive part in an electric car and remarkably similar in price compared to the fuel costs of a conventional car.

Amazingly, this was not noticed neither by the big oil companies nor the major car companies. Exception: Tesla builds a Gigafactory, a battery factory which can supply batteries for about 500,000 electric cars a year, thus making the company independent from other suppliers.

Only the German company Volkswagen has announced that it is considering $ 11.000.000.000 to invest in the construction of a battery company (GAS2) Unfortunately, I have heard such announcements in the area of e-mobility by automotive companies several times. Actual, so far nothing was created.

The "fuel" power would actually be a clear claim for the utilities or oil companies. Here there is complete silence.

The problem of everyday usefulness

If you want to use an electric car just like your previous car, it must be reliable cover about 60 miles a day, but it has also to master the holiday trip or extended business trips.

For daily demand the socket in the garage is sufficient for overnight charging. resulting in a very limited contact to a gas station. Except perhaps refill the windshield wiper fluid and visit the car wash.

On longer trips every car must refuel new energy. At the gas station this is done within five minutes. To charge an electric car during the trip should not substantial extend the duration of the trip. So it is imperative that there is a network of fast-charging stations. 

At this point I'm amazed to read that the policy in Germany will subsidize 10,000 charging stations (per charging station $ 70.000 tax money). However they do not demand the fast charging ability.

Only charging stations, where you can charge more than 200 miles range in 30 minutes (supercharger) lead to everyday practicality of electric cars.
No other company than Tesla operates or plans to operate a supercharger network. A network that could be owned by automaker or other organization. I think oil companies, motorway service areas or  power companies, should be interested to roll out a fast charging network,
Ending up in a monopoly situation, anyone who is interested in a everyday useful car can now only buy a car from Tesla, all other manufacturers have virtually no usable electric car on offer.

The fairytale "battery problem"

The common theme in the discussion about electric cars is the battery problem. It involves at least three subjects
  1. battery price
  2. lifespan
  3. raw materials
Prices of batteries are in free fall. On the picture you can see a slide that has been shown on the Menasol 2016 Energy Conference in Dubai. Compared to the drop in solar cell price, the price of LiIon batteries appear to move even more quickly down.
Development of battery prices, when the market doubles the volume, the price drops by 26%

If the price of batteries is at $ 250 per kWh and a car needs for the daily use about 80 kWh, the battery will cost $ 20,000. Counting the cost of electricity results in less than the fuel costs of a conventional car.

The service life for batteries depends on the charging cycles, and some other factors, such as temperature decreases. Thousand charging cycles required can be delivered by virtually all the batteries, even a lead battery. But this means 200,000 miles (1,000 times 200 miles per charge) is easy reachable by a battery and beyond the life span of the vehicles. Moreover, it seems to be that although there is a slight decrease in capacity, a second life of the battery is possible. For example to use the battery in a PV system for overnight storage.

The raw material lithium (60ppm [2]) is much more common than lead (18 ppm in the earth's crust [3]) to be found. Thus there is no problem of raw materials, even if it could lead to bottlenecks due to slow expansion of mining activity. Unlike oil, lithium is not consumed in the car but can be 100% reused. Lithium is also non-toxic, who spices his soup with sea salt, is eating lithium salt, which in large quantities is part of the sea(salt).

Old industry fails in innovation

Although the facts about electric cars are easy to understand, you wonder why the auto industry is doing almost nothing. The problem is more than a century grown structures. Virtually all automakers are over 100 years old, except for Volkswagen, a company which was established on 28 May 1937 by Hitler.
In these companies, there is extremely much knowledge about internal combustion engines. ignition and oxygen supply, exhaust and catalyst are investigated by expensive and complex means. The technological elite in the automotive industry understands the combustion engine, studied and graduated on that topic.

Battery technology, lithium ion and electrolytes they have heard about in the media. It is not their core competency. How to go about developing the technology? The natural reaction is waiting and building seven-speed transmission and hybrid engines or even worse hydrogen engines.

At the same time a startup, Tesla Motors, succeeded to be about five years ahead the pack. Installed thousands of supercharger stations and without expensive advertising build a brand image that fits to a clean environment with renewable energy.

It would not be new in the history of innovation that industry do not survive the change in technology. No sailing Shipyard has built steamboats, short before bankruptcy they tried with seven master sail and "hybrid" (Sail plus steam engine).
No mail order retailer could defeat amazon or ebay.
No telephone company, Siemens, Motorola nor Nokia, plays an important role in the smartphone league.

We will have to accept that some companies VW / BMW / Daimler are in ten years only a brand name but no longer large employers. 
Peter Schumpeter described this with the words
 "Creative destruction"
And he probably has once again right.

(I tried hard to translate this from my first German blog article "Lithium Ionen treiben die Zukunft an", should you find any flaws, tell me)

Further comments:

[1] Volkswagen spent more than $ 110 million in Germany for advertising in the months Jannuary till  April 2016, source: Nielsen / Statista.
[2] ppm stands for "parts per million", which means you take a ton of average rock, then 60 grams of lithium and 18 grams of lead are contained therein.
[3] The mass fraction concealed, that a kg of lead can only store about a factor of 50 less energy than a kg of lithium. Viewed from this condition, you need less lithium for all cars (if they are electric) than lead is used today for starter batteries in petrol and diesel cars. 
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11.55

The End of the Fire Era

About half a million years ago, mankind started to manage the energy of fire. The first use of open fire was for heat production and cooking. Since three thousand years fire could be kept in a stove to use the energy more efficient. During the 17 Century, the incredible story of mechanical energy production by the use of fire within steam engines and internal combustion machines began.
This glorious historical period will come to an end, very soon!


What is wrong with fire

There are at least three big problems when we use fire to generate useful energy.
  1. The fuel is expensive and not sustainable
  2. The conversion into useful energy is dirty and has high losses
  3. The atmosphere can't absorb infinite amounts of carbon
All these disadvantages are a good reason to extinguish the fire for ever. But is this possible and is this part of a long term trend?

Have a look into the flames. 

To ignite a fire without tools is one of the most demanding tasks man can solve and only very few of us did this ever complete. On the other side, it is the process that happen more often than any medium scale process we can think about. After some calculation* we find:

mankind ignites 7 Billion fires every second

With other words, for every person on the planet earth we ignite every second a fire and extinguish it within a fraction of a second again. And none of this fires is seen because it happens within the engines of our cars.
Other fires burn in large power plants and in the heating system of our home, we don't see them even. Fire has lost its visibility. And this might be a first signal, that fire is disappearing.
Another place where flames appeared was the ignition of cigarettes, even this type of fire seems to disappear, no smoking in restaurants, in office building, in airplanes and only some lost desperadoes at the entrance of some buildings remind us of the old days.

Why fire

All the little and large fires in our engines have only one reason, they should generate mechanical energy and this energy is sometimes converted to electrical energy. This is possible due to the thermodynamic law of physics. But this law tell us, that the efficiency is always low and needs always a cold reservoir like a river or fresh air. This is the reason, that most of the energy is lost in heat, leaving the car through the exhaust pipe or the radiator. The situation in large conventional power plants is similar.
The famous Durango Silverton narrow gauge steam train.
Since Benjamin Franklins work in the 19. Century, we are aware, that electricity is the ultimate useful medium for energy. We can convert electricity in just any service we can imagine. About 60% of the electrical energy ends up in an electric motor to move people, cool air, transport stuff and cut wood.
Not one of this tasks requests a fire, but we had no other solution till now, so we used a fire to solve the problem.

Fire is Unhealthy

There is just no single technology that produces as much unhealthy substances as fire. There exist people who inhale the smoke intentional, but most of us try hard to avoid the smoke. We have this smoke detectors on the ceiling and we have different filters in our cars and in coal power plants.
Smoke detector, we try to avoid smoke
When we look to China, a day in Peking is like smoking a packet of cigarettes. But even if we live in modern industrialized countries we have to inhale nano particles of all kind due to the burning of gas, oil and coal. To give an exact value of lost live due to fire is very difficult, but it surpasses nuclear power by many orders of magnitude.

No fire no harm

If we extinguish all the fires and even the nuclear type of fire that feeds less than three percent of our global energy demand, we can save the planet and the people.
World energy consumption
World energy consumption, only hydro and renewable
don't burn and generate smoke of different kinds. Source Wikimedia

Although it seems impossible to expand the small renewable branch in the picture above, it could get reality, because this branch is growing exponential:
growth of PV
The blue dots show the installed PV in the world, the dotted line is a 25% growth
Exponential means, the growth rate is constant and the growth rate of PV is about 25% per year. If this continues for another 15 years, the whole earth can be powered by solar energy. Today we have installed 5000 GW of fire powered power stations, within 20 years we have more than 10000 GW of PV on earth. Read this: Is 100% PV possible?

A second trend is, that electricity is stored in batteries. We are used to mobile phones which need every night a charging. Many of our appliances like screw driver and tooth brush use batteries.
The next big step is the electric car, the definite way to extinguish fire. The visionary Elon Musk buildt a car with batteries from the laptop. Today TESLA sells the model S on a ever growing rate.
More batteries will come. As far as I know no other factory type expands faster than the battery production plants with the Giga Factory on top. Read also: Storage Maters.
Largest production site ever for a small product! Source TESLA
More than 50 GWh of batteries should leave the Giga Factory every year. But this is not sufficient to meet the demand of 90 000 GWh of storage for a clean future. Complete new technologies like the Hydraulic Rock Storage are invented, which can store many GWh in one site with very low environmental impact.

Will fire stay  

We will never extinguish fire for ever, because people like fire.
We love fire

But hidden fire for old machinery invented in the 19. Century will go forever, even hydrogen. It was a funny time of smoking stem engines and high factory chimneys. A world of dark snow in the winter and dirty ash.

Have a clean time.

Remark

* How we calculate the number of ignitions in combustion machines. There is only a rough approximation possible. The amount of fuel that goes every year into combustion machines is 2 Billion tonnes. Within a combustion machine about 10 Milligram of fuel is burned during a "standard" cycle within one cylinder. Dividing the two numbers results in 2*10E17 ignitions per year or about 7 Billions per second.


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04.02

The World powered by the Sun

Today, photovoltaic electricity is only a small fraction of the global electricity production. The volume seems to be one percent in the year 2015. If we do a very simple extrapolation and imagine, that all these PV modules were installed in 2014 and we continue this installation speed, than we need another 99 years, to have a 100% emission free PV world. But this is simply not the way the world goes round.
I will try to extrapolate the situation, based on data from the MIT report "The Future of Solar Energy" [1]

Analyse the past of Photovoltaic

If we wont to understand the future, it is very useful, to look into the past, not only to understand the development, but also to understand the error which occurred by predicting the future. 
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) predict since 10 years the global PV installations in a published outlook. The first outlook from 2006 predicted for the year 2030 a global installation of 100 GW. This volume was already matched in the year 2011, only five years after the report was published! Ok, one wrong shot can be excused.
In the year 2011, the EIA predicted 150 GW until 2020. Again a failure, already in 2014 we have reached 180 GW of solar. 
The MIT analysed all predictions and compiled them to a very nice picture:
Figure 1: Different predictions and the reality, source MIT [1] page 137
In the early time, the predictions of the IEA had an exponential growth, that is a good guess, because most of the time, new products grow in that type. The only problem was at that time, the growth factor was to small, for example see IEA 2008 prediction in figure 1. Today things have gone worse with the prediction from the IEA. Not only is the factor to small, the prediction includes a reduction of the production of PV itself. This seems hard to understand.(An in depth analysis was done by Christian Breyer, paper PDF)
Things go even more strange, when we look at the price predictions of PV. The EIA predicted the development of the PV price till the year 2030. It should be mentioned, that it is a very difficult task to predict a price of any product for more than 20 years. But this failure is very illuminating.
Figure 2: Price prediction by EIA IEO 2009 of PV and observed results. [1] page 137
The EIA IEO 2009 outlook predicted, that the capital cost of PV in the year 2030 will drop to 4$/W.
Actually, the price even for residential systems dropped to this value already in the year 2014. It should be noted, that the price for residential PV systems in Germany was at the same time at 2$/W.
The price for utility PV systems reached only two years after the report was published the predicted value for 2030, 4$/W. 
All this information should be available to the EIA today. It irritates me, why the EIA does not change the prediction about the deployment of PV although they can observe the rapid price drop obviously. (I am thankful for any helpful hint)

Is there enough material for a large roll out of PV 

One possible reason, to be pessimistic about the global roll out of PV might be the scare elements used in PV systems. Today almost all PV systems use Silicon to convert sunlight into electricity. The MIT analysed the production of different raw materials, essential for the production of SI-PV-modules. 
To set up a PV system we need concrete and steel to mount the panel in the direction of the sun. Glass, aluminium and plastic are necessary to protect the silicon cell, cooper and more plastic is necessary to transport the power away.
Figure 3: Commodity materials required for PV. [1] page 131
Today, all these commodity are produced in a volume, that no real bottle neck will occur. In figure 3, we can see, that the steel production of 9 days is sufficient, to mount all PV panels for 5% of the global electricity production, within half a year, the steel production is sufficient for a 100% conversion to PV.
The least available material in this consideration is glass. For a 100% PV world, we need the glass production of 20 years. But glass production is in no way a limiting factor. The necessary raw material is sand, an endless resource.
The solar cell itself consists of a silicon waver and some silver, are they rare?
Figure 4: The annual production and requirement for a solar future. [1] page 135
In figure 4 we see, that silver might get a little problem, because we need an amount of silver that is produced within 30 years. It should be mentioned that new technologies of production can reduce the necessary mass of silver very strong. Other elements, like Ga are only necessary if we would use GsAs cells in our PV systems what is not widely the case. 
We conclude, the raw material is no show stopper for a PV future.

My prediction of PV growth

Compiling all this information, I come to a quite different prediction than the IEA. My simple, but till today best guess is, that the exponential growth will continue, but at a lower rate. 
Figure 5: Long term trend of PV installation.
In figure 5 we see the global installation of PV shown as a black curve in this logarithmic plot. In the year 1992, we had only 100 MW of PV installed, ten years later, 2002 it was 1000 MW, Today it is about 200 000 MW!
Update to Figure 5 including the growing power demand, wind and the latest figures available 2016.
If the growth rate continues at 25%, as seen within the last three years, we will reach 100% PV not long after the year 2030. Remember, today we have a global power plant pool of 5300 000 MW, sufficient to power half the world. Even if we expect, that the future is fair to all people, we need "only" 10 000 000 MW to bring electricity in every home on this planet, long before 2050.  

One problem remains: Storage

Without an affordable storage system, PV can only bring electricity during sunny daytime. For a complete conversion, we need about 90 000 GWh of storage [2].
One solution for residential systems may be the power wall from Tesla, but I am not convinced, that this makes sense on a large scale. For large scale, I recommend the Gravity Storage!

References:

[1] The Future of Solar Energy, 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ISBN (978-0-928008-9-8)
[2] Elon Musk predicts (minute 18) during the presentation of the power wall 90 000 GWh of required storage. https://youtu.be/yKORsrlN-2k
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01.53

Massive Price Drop in PV Systems

The future will be solar, if the price of photostatic (PV) systems drops. There is a new research result about the future pf the PV price online, done by Fraunhofer ISE [1], that gives surprising insights. I will discuss the results in this blogpost.

Learning from past experience

The first silicon PV cell date back to 1950s and since the 1980s there is a global market and production worth mentioning. Since then, the price of PV cells was constantly dropping. The interesting thing is, there is a mathematical law, that describes this drop. To keep it short, this law tells us, that every time, the production of PV doubled, the price felt about 20%. 

The actual development is shown in the graphic:

Developement of PV module price since 1980 [1]

To understand this plot, be aware, the right axis is the accumulated produced capacity of PW measured in GW. It starts with 0.001 GW (=1 MW) and ends with 100.000 GW. To cover this very wide range, the scale is logarithmic. The first price tag dates back to 1980, were we had to pay more than 20 � per watt. The price is adjusted for inflation to the level of 2014, an exchange rate of  one Euro gives 1.25 $ is in use. The last price tag is for 2014 and is in the range of 0.5 � to 0.7 � for large scale PV power plants. 

Learning Curve

It is not surprising, that the actual price in different years is not always precise on the long term trend curve, that shows a drop of 20,9% per year, due to market effects. 

The big question is, how will this learning curve develop in the future? There are three scenarios, a very conservative one, that tells us, only 19% drop with another doubling of the installed PV base, a medium scenario with 20.9% drop and a progressive one with 23%. However, the result will always be a sharp drop of the PV panel price, if the installed base grows in the future. 

Below a price of 0.2 �/W, there seems to be another limitation by the pure raw material cost. To me�, this limitation seems a little bit artificial, because the price of this raw materials, like silicon or glass, could also drop if the production volume grows far beyond todays volume. 

It should be mentioned, that a capacity of 100.000 GW PV installation is equivalent to a surface of one million square kilometers, this is the size of a country like Egypt or Texas and California combined!

How expensive is electricity in the future?

The price of a PV panel is not the only part of the cost drivers in solar power. To break the price down to a kWh of electricity at the grid feed in, we have to include other cost drivers. 

Price of different elements for real world PV grid-scale sites. [1]

The first surprising thing is, that the PV-modules are no longer the main cost driver, as shown in the figure above. The cost of mounting, connecting and planning top already this cost. The paper from ISE does not cover "Red tape", this will hopefully drop in the future, but nobody knows.

Another significant part of the cost drivers are the inverter, they produce AC current from the DC current, generated by the PV cell. The price of this inverter follows a similar law of price drop by market volume as the PV panels.

Price per kWh

To calculate the price of a kWh of electricity itself, we have to take the solar radiation and the capital cost into account. There is a calculation method, the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE). It includes capital cost and maintenance of the PV power site. If you are a geek, you can do the math with the following formula:

Calculation of the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE). [1]

The interesting result is, that one of the main factors for electricity from PV is not only the sun, but the interest or discount rate. Today, we live in a world with very different interest rates. A strange effect is, if we look at the globe, the countries with high insolation have often very high interest rates. For example, Germany has a low insolation but also a low interest rate, Spain has a relative high insolation but a significant higher interest rate. The result is, the price of PV energy is much more similar as we first guess.


PV power price depends on cost of capital. [1]

Long term development

To look into the future beyond 2020 is very difficult, but the gathered information gives us some hints. The first thing is, PV electricity price will drop due to the learning effect resulting from the growing market. The market is growing, because PV electricity gets cheaper and is competitive to all other electric power sources. The long term price in the scenario of ISE is in the range of  2 ct/kWh. 
The share of the market will be beyond 30% in 2050. 

But there is a obstacle on the path to solar. The sun shines only at daytime and only if there are no clouds. This results in a strong request for energy storage. One solution is the new concept of Hydraulic Rock Storage (HRS) as developed by the Heindl Energy in Germany. 

Energy storage using the Hydraulic Rock Storage. [2]

Combining a cheap storage with a storage price of 3 ct/kWh and PV in the range of 2 ct/kWh gives a long term price for electricity over the whole day, only a fraction is stored, for less than 5 ct/kWh in most regions of the world.

Reference:


[1] Fraunhofer ISE (2015): Current and Future Cost of Photovoltaics. Long-term Scenarios for Market Development, System Prices and LCOE of Utility-Scale PV Systems. Study on behalf of Agora Energiewende. http://www.agora-energiewende.org/service/publications/
[2] Heindl Energy, Hydraulic Rock Storage, http://heindl-energy.com/ 
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05.53
Germany is the country with the largest relative (4%) and absolute (27 GW) share of solar energy in the grid. The reason is not the nice sunny weather in Germany, the reason is a strong subsidies policy called EEG (Renewable Energy Law). It gives the producer of photovoltaic (PV) electricity a good, fixed price over 20 years. Did this really have an impact on the growth of photovoltaic installations?
German was leading the growth rate, now the world has changed!
At the end of the 90s, the growth of PV installations grow with a rate of about 30%. This is quite a lot. With the start of the EEG in 2000, the growth rate in Germany leap jumped to more than 100%. At the same time the rest of the world has even seen a decrease in the growth rate, down to 20%. During the last two years things have changed again. The World, without Germany, has now 2011 a growth rate of 80% in PV installations, while Germany has fallen back to 40%, half of the global speed.

Why this Change?

The reason for this change lays in the price of PV-systems. During the last decade, the price declined from somewhere above 5000 $/kW down to 1000 $/kW due to the strong market in Germany. This low price makes PV economical within most of the sunny countries like Italy or India. Most countries have about double the sun radiation during the year than Germany receives.  
It seems so, that the growth of the solar installations is now market driven and therefore sustainable. But be aware, what 80% growth means, within 11 years, if the trend continues, the world may have changed to a complete solar energy driven world. Today, only 0,4% of the electricity is from solar, but in 2023 it could be near to 100%!



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02.13
The global volume of installed photovoltaic installation is growing fast, this is a well known fact. But not so widely known is the exact growth rate, so I will give some figures for a deep insight.
Different countries are different, so have a look into different countries.
A incredible dynamic in the growth of PV-installations
Fifteen years ago, the USA was the leader in PV-installations. In the year 1996, Japan became the leader but in 2005 another change at the top happened, Germany, supporting PV with high subsidies, took the leadership. But the PV-market has a very high dynamic and in 2011 Italy installed already more PV-panels than Germany. This race is interesting, but not the core of the global chance in the PV market. Lets have a look at the growth rate itself:
The growth rate is growing with 3% per year!
If we plot the growth rate between two years, we find an astonishing plot. Beginning in the mid ninety's, the growth rate was about 20% per year. And sometimes I have the feeling, many people have adapted this and believe in a moderate growth of PV. The last 15 year show a very different picture. The growth rate itself was growing. And a simple linear approximation results in a slope of 2.9 percent points (absolute!) per year, resulting in an approximated growth of the PV installation 2011 compared to 2010 of 67% (the actual value was even higher with 76%)

Reasons for the PV Growth

This mind-blowing effect is not widely anticipated. The reason for this effect is not longer the high subsidies of German PV-installation, the reason is, more and more countries start installing PV at a very high rate, as the first graph shows. And the reason behind this is, that many countries have much more sun as Germany combined with the hard drop of PV-prices. This results in an unprecedented dynamic, higher market volume results in higher production rate, higher production volume results in lower prices due to a learning curve.
The learning curve tells us, if we double the production, the price will fall about 20%. The dropping price opens more markets, if the price is below the power price at the consumer, he will install PV soon. 
Where will this growth end, this is not clear, but I will write about that topic soon.

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