Michael Kanellos

A portrait of the solar market in numbers May 8, 2008 at 9:21 PM

 I watch PowerPoint presentations so you don’t have to. Here are some numerical gems from the solar sessions at the CLEO QELS conference, a diode/laser academic shindig that took place this week in San Jose.  (The letters stand for Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Quantum Electronics and Laser Science, but you probably knew that.)

18: That’s the number of proposals floating in California right now to build 100 megawatt power plants with solar panels, according to Hal LaFlash, director of emerging clean technology policy at Pacific Gas & Electric. There are over ten proposals for erecting 100 megawatt to 500 megawatt plants, he added.  

To date, large solar power plants like this have been the purview of solar thermal companies.  (The largest existing PV plants, like the ones owned by Sharp, Applied Materials and Google, generate between 5 and 1.5 megawatts.) Solar thermal plants, however, only work well in desert areas. Photovoltaic plants can be erected in a wider variety of environments.  OptiSolar, for instance, hopes to build a 550-megawatt facility with PV panels in San Luis Obispo County, north of Los Angeles and not nearly as sunny as the Mojave.

87.1 megawatts: the amount of solar panels, in terms of potential power generation, in California. Approximately 21,000 PG&E customers have solar panels while 1,000 commercial customers do.

60 percent: that’s, roughly, the percentage of people working on solar projects that attended a recent meeting held by PG&E for companies bidding on alternative energy projects for the utility. Five years ago, solar represented only a fraction of the attendees. 

$1.44: That’s the estimated cost per watt for silicon photovoltaic panels in 2013, according to LaFlash. In 2000, it was at $3.89.  In 2010, it is supposed to hit $1.89.

3.25 Euros: that’s the price of putting in cadmium telluride solar panels from First Solar, according to Benny Buller, director of device improvement from First Solar, the cadmium telluride kings.  Installation is about half of the cost of a solar panel system. In terms of U.S. dollars (the new lira) that’s $5 a watt.

$1.12 per watt: the amount First Solar was making panels for during the fourth quarter not including installation. Thus, the company is a bit ahead of the general curve.

19 percent: the amount silicon solar panels decline in price with each doubling of manufacturing capacity.

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