Forecast: Cost Of PV Panels To Drop To $0.36/Watt By 2017

[ScienceRocks]

Forecast: Cost Of PV Panels To Drop To $0.36/Watt By 2017


June 19, 2013 Nicholas Brown

The cost of photovoltaic solar panels is expected to drop another 36 cents per watt by 2017, according to new research by cleantech market research firm GTM Research.

While this drop in solar panel prices will help to make solar affordable to more people, which will increase the size of the solar market, this ongoing cost reduction means much more than that.

Currently, solar panels are backed up by natural gas and various other types of power plants on the electricity grid. However, solar panel costs of $0.36 per watt make it more feasible to install additional solar panels to back each other up instead of using any other type of power plant (for off-grid setups), reducing the need for batteries.

For example: If you need 1,000 watts of power, and your 1,000 watt solar panel generates only generates 50% of its capacity (500 watts) due to cloudy weather, that can be compensated for by using two of those 1,000 watt panels instead of one, so you could still draw 1,000 watts from that 2,000 watt (nameplate capacity) array.

As long as the solar panel array is generating more current than is being drawn from it, there is no power disruption or power fluctuation (provided that voltage regulation is used).

Read more at PV Module Costs To Decrease To $0.36/Watt By 2017

 

[Old Rocks]

Decreasing costs and increasing efficiency. The PV's are going to become far more common in the next decade. Combine that with grid scale batteries, and the alternative energies will take over from the fossil fuels on the basis of economics.