The Rising Sun of Solar Energy

In the earliest days of solar as a source of large-scale energy production, the same set of criticisms were in circulation: “It costs more energy to make a panel than the panel will produce”, “It won’t financially pay itself off for over ten years”, “Sun? In the UK? Good one.”

Well, it’s been over 10 years since those arguments began their journey. Across the globe, solar panels have been paying themselves off, and at this very moment are producing energy just by sitting there, basking in the sun. Those old arguments are starting to lose their lustre to the growing international chin scratching of “Hmm, this is actually going somewhere”.

From early 1990’s to 2007, the cumulative global nameplate capacity of photovoltaic energy crawled up to around 9GW. Not particularly inspiring in itself, and in fact was a source of criticism and cause to be generally disregarded by the majority. Such tiny growth over 18 years did not look promising.

What did look promising however, was the curve. Each year, the installed capacity didn’t just increase. It increased by an amount proportionally greater than the year before. The trend became historically clear: PV capacity was exponential.

2008 brought with it an extremely sharp increase in PV, with a delta percentage of around 75. In other words, we almost doubled the capacity in just one year: approximately 16GW. This was perhaps in large part due to a big push into renewables on all levels: industrial, commercial, and residential. In just 2 more years, we more than doubled, surpassing 40GW in 2010. Another 2 years after that, in 2012, we blasted past 100GW. And in 2015, we were looking at around 230GW installed capacity. At this factor of growth, you could expect to see around 400GW in 2017. And we did: 405GW of PV capacity!

At the factor of growth over recent years, PV nameplate capacity doubles every three years on average.

Setting aside all other factors (of which there are admittedly many), and assuming that the same increasing attention is paid to solar development to maintain the exponential growth, we could be looking at over 800GW in 2020, 1600GW in 2023, 3200GW in 2026, 6400GW in 2029! For perspective, the total capacity of all renewable energy (including Hydropower) in 2017 was approximately 2,195GW. It’s entirely probable that renewable energy will fully replace fossil fuels within this century. And looking at the growth and potential of solar, it’s fairly convincing that solar will be crowned as the highest capacity long before 2100 comes around. In the scope of the UK alone, even the safest estimates from the National Grid put the year of that happening before 2050.

Of course, bringing those other factors back into play, like funding, material sourcing, energy storage, and further research, the situation becomes much more complicated than our dreamy mathematical extrapolation. More multivariate analyses result in wildly differing projections, depending on who you ask. But it’s very exciting to consider how surprisingly plausible it is.

Hydropower still stands as the biggest source of clean renewable energy, by a significant margin. But Solar stands alone with this remarkable factor of growth. Hydropower has crawled up linearly (only increasing by roughly the same amount year on year), and although Wind power also demonstrates strong growth and (for now) has a greater installed capacity than solar installations, Solar has a distinctive edge.

And as installations have been increasing in number, the cost of installations have plummeted. Not only are the costs of new solar installations falling, but we’ve barely scratched the surface in terms of full solar exploitation. Even with the efficiency of current technology, we would sooner run out of uses for electricity than space for solar panels.

There are still many difficult questions to be asked about solar technology, but if history can be a reliable indicator, it’s near-certain that we’ll be answering these questions with increasing speed.

If you’re interested in Renewables, and what to explore a career in this fast-moving industry, contact us at www.newtradescareer.co.uk and we’ll be happy to help.