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Targeting 10% Solar By 2025 – A Perspective from CleanEdge & Co-op America Foundation

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

CleanEdge & Co-op America Foundation have just published the following report – “The Utility Solar Assessment Study”, with an eye toward reaching 10% solar by 2025. For those paying attention to smart grid stuff, and solar, and wanting to get a primer on what it’s going to take to get to 10% solar by 2025, as well as the who-what-and how much, you’ll appreciate the read. It’s a well written report. Quoting from the report, I noticed this sentence: “Within a decade, solar power will be cost-competitive in most regions of the U.S. on a kilowatt-hour (Kwh) basis.” That shouldn’t really be too shocking considering the abundance of sunshine we enjoy pretty much globally, but what’s really interesting is how quickly that’s predicted to occur. 10 years is just going to fly by.

The report goes into detail to provide a roadmap for electric utilities, describing how they can accelerate the growth of solar energy. More than 30 industry players and experts were interviewed for the report. Findings from the report include projections that solar PV will reach cost parity with conventional retail electricity pricing on a straight kWh rate basis through most of the US by 2015. Solar will be able to offer to utilities a peak-power hedge, for those ramping up their solar businesses. Quite correctly, the report’s authors Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder note that it’s the perfect time for utilities to figure out how to jump to rapid scale-up of solar technologies as a “key grid-tied energy source”. One interesting little fact from the report was this: “In 2007, the use of silicon by the world’s solar companies exceed silicon use by the semiconductor industry for the first time”. And the report also notes that in ‘07, more than 70 MW of new concentrating solar power (CSP) was installed worldwide. That’s astounding. What an opportunity to implement solar as part of demand response systems, as much as it is an opportunity to build out the smart grid and metering systems.

Of course, there are some challenges. The report also highlights the barriers to large-scale development and deployment of solar by utilities: how our power grid is out of date, and that its state of disrepair makes it difficult to integrate solar, i.e. Solar generated from rooftops; how traditional utility management structures aren’t adapted to exploit or understand the value of solar; that cost is still an issue; that technical standards for the integration of solar are lacking. Perhaps most interesting, the report notes the following: “To get beyond the ten percent number for solar will require significant breakthroughs in both central and distributed storage options.”

Won’t it be interesting to see what a utility looks like in another 10-20 years? I think so.

To read the report in full, please see this link.

One Response to “Targeting 10% Solar By 2025 – A Perspective from CleanEdge & Co-op America Foundation”

  1. dagny73 Says:
    July 4th, 2008 at 11:50 am

    I always love hearing good news. The more solar power we are able to use, the better for the environment and eventually the better for mankind!

    Dagny
    http://www.onnotextiles.com
    organic apparel

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