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If you look at China as a country, whose economy
is actually doing very well, they are commissioning
a new coal-fired power plant every five days.
So that's for the next eight years at least.
So you've got a strong growth in the kinds of energy consumption.
And you certainly will see that particularly in China.
The US, if you'll notice, is already a fairly high consumer
of power.
And last but not least we have some companies with modest
growth here, India for example.
So, we have things that need to be adjusted.
Well, how much will solar be a part of that solution?
Well, we are certainly growing.
If you look at production, you see an interesting curve here.
If you look at just Europe for a moment, you will see that those
growths are relatively phenomenal in terms
of the PV production.
Starting back in 1999 you've got growths over 30%.
It's no wonder that venture capitalists are now interested
in the photovoltaic industry.
They've had remarkable returns on their investment
for the last few years.
How long will this continue?
Well, now that's an interesting question.
Now I'm not prepared to answer that.
I don't really know how long the industry will continue to grow
and at what rate.
Well why did it do that?
And that is an interesting question.
Why did the industry grow so much?
And frankly politics did play a very strong roll in the growth
of the photovoltaic industry.
You had both a Japanese subsidy program, and you had
a German feed-in tariff program.
That was basically not to take tax payer money in the up-front
construction costs, but to pay back for the electricity
generated by a system at rather high costs in the beginning,
tapering down to lower costs in the future years.
I thought it was actually a very brilliant way to fund
the investment you have in photovoltaic energy.
You have photovoltaic systems that are insured.
Some people are insured for 20 years and some for 25.
These are the insured years of a photovoltaic system.
The one we have working at NASA Glenn has been there for 40,
almost 40 years, so, and it still works.
If you look at the change, and this is the year 2006.
This is 2007.
You will see that there has been a change in the hierarchy
of solar cells production.
There was a very definite lead in Japan and they lost it
to Germany with key cells.
The Japanese still have a very strong involvement in Sharp
and Kya Sera, but now you see Chinese companies playing
a very strong roll in photovoltaic production.
And you see the company First Solar, which is just
in Toledo, Ohio, now being the fifth largest supplier
of photovoltaic modules in the world.
The modules that they supply are not silicon at all.
They are cadmium telluride modules.
Now there was a reason for that, and we'll come back
to that story momentarily.
We also have now in 2008, having read some of the later advances
in PV production, sun power with crystalline silicon is now
number 10 on this list in 2008.
They haven't produced the whole list because we
haven't finished 2008.
The government actually tried to do something.
They had a program, which they called the
Solar American Initiative.
They had an interesting approach.
Their idea was to take the levelized cost of energy down
to the utility market prices.
So for residential that was 10 cents a kilowatt hour,
for commercial it was 8 cents and for utility it was 7 cents.
And what they really did was accelerate what they had planned
to do from the first conception, and that is they wanted this
to happen by 2015, not 2020.
Now, if you look at the cost of putting up
a photovoltaic system.
And we use the Japanese as an example because they provided
some very interesting statistics.
Look here, okay.
The module itself is 35% of the cost, but you have engineering
and installation and mounting systems.
This is all just getting the system up there, at about 25% of
the cost, and the inverter part if you're grid tied, at 30%.
So just making the modules cheaper won't get you the lower
cost for the system.
You've got to make all parts of the system better.
Let's look at that.
Silicon, right, that's the one primarily in place today.
If you look at where the research on silicon solar cells
have gone, you see you get three different types of it.
You get a single crystal array, you can have a polycrystalline
or multi-crystalline array, and you can have a silicon thin
film, or thick film as they call it there.
And these are some of the efficiencies.
What you see is you are up to about 24% for silicon.
The other thing that you see when you put all this together
is that when you start manufacturing something,
and this is a general rule, it doesn't just have to do
with photovoltaic modules.
It has to do with making widgets.
If your production doubles, the cost goes down by 20%.
And that's a rule of thumb kind of argument for what
has happened in photovoltaic modules.
The cost has gone down from 1976.
And if it continues, but you'll notice it's starting to deviate
there, so one might thus say well maybe it's going
to plateau folks, it's not going to go that much lower.
But if it were to do so, what kinds of things could we do
to help it along.
Well, we might use less silicon.
We might lower the silicon feed stock prices.
We might make thin films.
We could do a lot of manufacturing processing.
And we could improve the performance of the whole module.
Every time you improve the efficiency, remember, you make
a great gain in terms of the cost per kilowatt hour.
So if you did all of that you might imagine that you
might reduce it further.
The problem that arose was really quite simple.
If you look at, go back 10 years, roughly, you will see
that what the solar industry was doing was using the waste scraps
from the semi- conductor industry.
And there was waste aplenty.
So they would take all those bits and pieces of silicon
and they would then from that semi-conductor grade material
they would make a solar cell grade silicon to make
photovoltaic modules with.
Well, what happened was a couple of things.
First of all the semi-conductor industry got more efficient
at making its transistors and circuits and everything.
Remember they're getting smaller, right, they're getting
smaller with their circuits, and they were beginning to utilize
the silicon more efficiently.