– Now, here’s some good news among all the doom and gloom.
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The long-awaited drop in prices for solar photovoltaics (PV) appears to be close at hand. Soaring demand for PV and high prices for silicon have kept PV prices up for the past several years, but had two beneficial impacts:
- Producers ramped up polysilicon production
- PV companies pursued designs with less silicon.
The result is that Business Green reports:
The price of solar panels could fall by as much as 40 per cent by the end of the year as huge increases in polysilicon supplies lead to a sizable fall in production costs for solar panel manufacturers.
Analysts have been predicting this price drop for a while [– I had heard this prediction at a climate solutions summit in January 2008].
If this drop does materialize, it is quite a big deal and will help keep demand on its staggering growth rate with PV becoming one of the largest job-creating industries of the century, projected to grow from a $20 billion two years ago to a $74 billion industry by 2017 (see “Sharp to boost thin film solar capacity 6-fold to 6000 MW by 2014, U.S. hits snooze button“).
More… ➡