[Hplusroadmap] Fwd: [SpaceCities] Photovoltaic Moore's Law Will Make Solar Competitive by 2015

[Bryan Bishop]

So basically I'm not too interested in the ideals of making "solar 
competitive", it's really a matter of just making it work and getting 
some energy output, ignoring all of the silly economics of it. The big 
problem that I see is that we have a terribly large amount of volume 
and density and so on, but not a lot of surface area. I think that we 
can start getting serious now about proposals of methods to convert 
large volumes in space (like asteroids) into 2D surfaces for the 
space-based solar power satellite ideas. However, doing this might 
require the exponentially self-replicating machines because the growth 
rate of the surface area is going to have to be significant enough that 
we can mine enough materials and get enough photons as input in order 
to sustain the growth rates of demand on energy. Seeing as how we have 
barely demonstrated the ability to convert rocks in space into anything 
useful, except perhaps as spots for NASA to land probes on, I'm seeing 
some conceptual difficulties. Maybe Ben can cite the mirrors/lense 
focusing guys again, somethng from Anders' server IIRC. It was this 
massive space-based mirror system that could channel the star's output 
into a very specific spot and therefore burn materials (giant rocks) 
and then we have to come up with ways to utilize that. Another way to 
do it is typical drilling and other stuff like that. A third way is 
through the biological processes, i.e. biomining, but then you need 
water and some source of that (comet tails?). That's another problem. 
Any ideas?

- Bryan

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: [SpaceCities] Photovoltaic Moore's Law Will Make Solar 
Competitive by 2015
Date: Monday 26 May 2008
From: cygonaut <space.action at gmail.com>
To: Aero-E at yahoogroups.com, SpaceCities at yahoogroups.com

  Photovoltaic Moore's Law Will Make Solar Competitive by 2015

Photovoltaic specialists met last week, May 12-16, in San Diego under 
the auspices of the IEEE Electron Devices Society, for their 33rd 
annual meeting. For the first time the meeting included a two-day 
breakout session, "The PV Accelerator Forum," devoted to exploring how 
photovoltaics can be kick-started to achieve an earlier commercial 
breakthrough. There were some substantial surprises.

If you'd asked a solar expert ten or fifteen years ago what the game 
plan was for photovoltaics, the gist would have been this: develop 
silicon cells, relying on scraps and techniques from the semiconductor 
industry, without expectation of a commercial breakthrough; then turn 
to second-generation thin-film materials like CIGS and cad-tel, which 
would be much cheaper and more fit for mass production. By early this 
decade, however, it seemed clear that PV was not shaping up as planned. 
The second generation materials were not materializing on schedule, and 
the cost of solar electricity was still nowhere near competitive. 
Particularly disconcerting was the 2002 decision of British Petroleum, 
which was billing itself as the world's biggest solar company (among 
other things), to terminate U.S. production of cad-tel and amorphous 
silicon cells, as reported in the January 2003 issue of Spectrum 
magazine.

Now there are some new twists and turns—essentially, three very positive
developments that would not have been generally anticipated a decade 
ago. First, silicon-based solar technology has decoupled from the 
semiconductor industry and is achieving steady cost reductions, so that 
those following PV discern a kind of Moore's law at work. In 2005, 
production of silicon for solar cells already surpassed production of 
silicon for semiconductors.

Second, the industry has become so confident in that evolutionary path,
policymakers and planners have started to set dates when they expect
PV-generated electricity to be competitive with the major sources of
electricity sold on the grid now. And third, while the incremental path
promises a commercial breakthrough within ten years, it's suddenly 
looking like second generation technology may be arriving after all—in 
which case wide commercialization of PV could occur much sooner.

In recent years, global PV production has been increasing at a rate of 
50 percent per year, so that accumulated global capacity doubles about 
every 18 months. The PV Moore's law states that with every doubling of 
capacity, PV costs come down by 20 percent. In 2004, installing PV cost 
about $7 per watt, compared to $1/W for wind, which at that time was 
beginning to stand on its own feet commercially, Last, year, as 
recently noted in this blog 
<http://blogs.spectrum.ieee.org/tech_talk/2008/04/wind_energy_just_niche_disabus.html>,
average global solar costs had come down to between $4 and $5 per watt,
right in line with the PV Moore's law. Extrapolate those gains out six 
or seven years, and PV costs will be below $2/W, making photovolatics
competitive with 2004 wind.

Remember, wind electricity generally is generated in large farms, so 
that its price has to be competitive with electricity generated from 
other sources—that's the wholesale electricity cost that accounts for 
only about half of total electricity costs in a typical customer's 
bill. But solar, being distributed, competes with the retail price—if 
the PV generating cost is comparable to the total delivered cost of 
electricity, which can be as high as 20 cents per kilowatthour in the 
United States and upwards of 30 cents in Japan, that's good enough.

Planners and regulator are starting to believe in the PV Moore's law. 
The European Union's PV Tech Platform has set the year 2015 for 
achieving "grid parity"—the point where solar electricity can be sold 
competitively into the grid. As early as 2010, solar electricity prices 
in extreme southern Europe might go as low as 17 or 18 cents/kWh. 
California also expects to see grid parity within a decade, and 
Southern California Edison has a program to put subsidized PV roofs on 
large commercial buildings, predicated on the goal of obtaining PV 
capacity at a cost of $3.50/W within five years.

http://blogs.spectrum.ieee.org/tech_talk/2008/05/photovoltaic_moores_law_on_tra.html

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