Solar Modules Escape Toxic-Substance Ban In EU Decision

Good news for First Solar - Ministers from the European Union (EU) have voted to exempt PV modules from European law that bans certain toxic substances in electrical goods, Reuters reports.

The toxic-substances ban applies to six specified hazardous substances, including the cadmium used in thin-film modules manufactured by First Solar and other companies.

"In order to attain the EU's ambitious targets for renewable energy and energy efficiency, photovoltaic panels to produce energy from solar light do not have to comply with the restriction," the ministers stated.


Source:  Reuters

Italy Solar Tariff Cuts Not as Bad as Feared

The latest important European solar market to debut a plan for solar feed-in tariff cuts is Italy, and Italy's plan is different in important respects from other notable feed-in tariff decline policies.

Italy is proposing a cumulative feed-in tariff decline of 18% in 2011, but the FIT decline will be spread out across four-month periods, with 6% FIT declines in each one. Italy has been expected to implement a feed-in tariff decline at the beginning of 2011, and so, the fact that it's now moving ahead is no surprise to solar. The reduction in solar module pricing has dictated a cut in Italy's FIT scheme. There is little doubt that all the solar companies are racing to make Italy a huge market once Germany's FITs decline. Italy is already the second largest market in Europe.

The initial reaction to the Street about the Italian proposal was that even though the 18% decline in solar FITs was significant, it was less than the 25% decline that some expected Italy would propose. Italy has among the most favorable feed-in tariffs and much more sunlight than a market like Germany, and at the same time has been under the cloud of European sovereign debt pressure.

Earlier this year, in a conference call hosted by Credit Suisse, Italian solar company Kerself indicated that it expected FIT cuts of 15% to 28%.

Of course, it's important to remember that at this stage the Italian government is merely proposing the plan for an 18% feed-in tariff cut spread throughout the year. It's a long road to implementing the policy. Take Germany, where FIT reductions that have been debated throughout 2010 are supposed to go into effect in a week, and yet, the German upper and lower houses of parliament still have not come to agreement on the plan.

Source:   The Street

Milestone: 10 Gigawatts of PV in 2010

In 2010, we will cross the threshold of 10 gigawatts of photovoltaic solar installed globally in a single year -- a record-setting and once-inconceivable number.

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.

Source:  greentechsolar            Read full article here.

The Next 40 Years

 Technology Roadmap; Solar photovoltaic energy, from the International Energy Agency (IEA), complements the simultaneously released report on concentrating solar power (CSP) described in THE WAY TO BIG SUN.   

As the IEA sees the future - together, photovoltaic (PV) solar – which uses the sun’s light – and CSP – which uses the sun’s heat – can generate over 22% of the world’s electricity by the middle of this century. PV will provide half of that, generating 11% of world electricity by 2050.

Demonstrating the IEA’s fundamentally conservative bent, the PV and CSP  Roadmaps are part of a thorough scientific, economic and policy assessment of 19 New Energy options in pursuit of identifying the best path to the IEA’s (completely inadequate) goal of a 50% reduction in world CO2 emissions by 2050.

Unlike CSP, which requires a special high-saturation type of sun, PV requires no special Direct Normal Irradiance (DNI) of sunlight. It can be (and has been) put to work almost anywhere there is sunlight. World PV capacity has grown an average of 40% per year in this century and the world’s spending on PV research and development doubled in the 21st century’s first decade, from $250 million in 2000 to $500 million (in 2007). At current rates of growth and technological advancement, the IEA expects PV solar to be price competitive in the most sun-saturated parts of the world by 2020.
 

When solar PV achieves widespread cost competitiveness with other sources of grid supply, the “effective, long-term and balanced” policies that helped build manufacturing capacity and deployment will “evolve” into those that support self-sustaining PV markets. Financial incentives will phase out in favor of those that obtain and maintain grid access and integration, ongoing investment in R&D and international cooperation in building capacity for emerging economies.

Source:   Renewable Energy World    To read the full article click here.