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Dawn of Solar Age Declared as PV Beats All Other Forms of Power

posted by mrpg on Thursday October 05 2017, @07:33AM   
from the forecast-cloudy dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Solar power grew faster than any other source of fuel for the first time in 2016, the International Energy Agency said in a report suggesting the technology will dominate renewables in the years ahead.

The institution established after the first major oil crisis in 1973 said 165 gigawatts of renewables were completed last year, which was two-thirds of the net expansion in electricity supply. Solar powered by photovoltaics, or PVs, grew by 50 percent, with almost half of new plants built in China.

"What we are witnessing is the birth of a new era in solar PV," Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA, said in a statement accompanying the report published on Wednesday in Paris. "We expect that solar PV capacity growth will be higher than any other renewable technology through 2022."

Solar Grew Faster Than All Other Forms of Power for the First Time
International Energy Agency

Solar power will only work until the sun burns out, but dinosaurs are forever.

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Original Submission

• Re:Figures? (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 05 2017, @06:43PM

  by khallow (3766) on Thursday October 05 2017, @06:43PM (#577568) Journal

  And looking deeper, one of the things going on was that the IEA choose to use 2012 figures for the US and Japan (from here [nrel.gov]) and they apparently count subsidies as a reduction of cost. From the link:

  Based on our data and analysis, the weighted- average residential system price in Japan for 1H13 was $4.64/W ( Figure 9), compared with $4.92/W in the United States . Of these prices, soft costs constituted 44% in Japan versus 67% in the United States. However, the 2013 price declines in Japan may be even more significant: BNEF’s database of current installed Japanese residential systems indicates prices have declined to $3.45/W in October 2013 (Woodward 2013b) , whereas the most recent price figures for U.S. residential systems are in the $3.75–$4.25/W range (Shiao 2013).

  $3 per W doesn't sound out of line. Note also the high US portion that was "soft costs", that means costs not related to the cost of the physical systems themselves. Glancing at figure 29, it appears to be a nebulous category called "profit and overhead" (almost $2/W in the US). Perhaps that is due to the overall cheaper electricity costs in the US?

  Parent