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Discuss this article (0 Comments)Solar power to go mainstream
by Safura Rahimi and Reuters on Wednesday, 23 May 2007
Solar power should become a mainstream energy choice in three or four years, according to a report by an environmental research group.
In the UAE, the use of commercial solar energy is slowly growing. According to a UAE Interact news report, renewable energy experts have been promoting the construction of solar housing in the Emirates. The houses would be fully powered by solar energy.
Abu Dhabi is also planning to build a $380 million (AED1.4 billion) 100MW solar power plant - the first of its kind in the Gulf - in a bid to move away from its reliance on hydrocarbon fuels. Elsewhere in the region, Iran's first solar power plant is set to be operational by 2010.
The technology will grow to become conventional as companies raise the output of a key ingredient used in solar panels.
"We are now seeing two major trends that will accelerate the growth of photovoltaics: the development of advanced technologies and the emergence of China as a low-cost producer," Janet Sawin, a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute and an author of the report, said in a statement.
Photovoltaics (PV) is a solar power technology that uses solar cells to convert light from the sun into electricity.
Investors have flocked to solar and other renewable energy sources amid worries about the high costs of oil and natural gas and greenhouse gas emissions.
Solar is the fastest growing energy source, but still provides less than 1% of the world's electricity, in part because its power can cost homeowners twice as much as power from the grid.
But costs could fall 40% in the next few years as polysilicon becomes more readily available, Sawin said.
More than a dozen companies in Europe, China, Japan, and the US will boost production over the next few years of purified polysilicon, which helps panels convert sunlight into electricity, and is the main ingredient in semiconductor computer chips, according to the report.
Polysilicon's feedstock is abundantly available sand. But a downturn in silicon refining after the high-tech bubble collapse in the late 1990s has constrained the panel market.
In some of the world's sunniest places, such as California, electricity from solar panels costs the same as power from the grid. A drop in solar panel prices could expand that to places that only get average sunlight, making solar more of a mainstream choice, Sawin said.
Last year, China overtook the US to become the world's third largest producer of solar panels, trailing only Germany and Japan.
"To say that Chinese PV producers plan to expand production rapidly in the year ahead would be an understatement," Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute, a Massachusetts-based group that promotes renewables, said in a release.
"They have raised billions from international IPOs to build capacity and increase scale with the goal of driving down costs," said Bradford, who helped write the report.
Many companies are producing thin-film solar technologies that cut the amount of silicon used in panels. Thin-film could grab a 20 percent share of the market by 2010, up from 7 percent of the market in 2006, the report said.
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