The Solar Industry is Red Hot – Will it Get Hotter?

[kristopher]

The Solar Industry is Red Hot – Will it Get Hotter?
By ELIAS HINCKLEY on November 07, 2013 at 4:00 PM




After 2 paragraphs of overview the article picks up here:

...It is clear that the future is very bright for the industry. What is less clear is when growth will accelerate and how near-term challenges for the industry could create some rough patches for the industry before widespread adoption drives truly explosive industry growth.

The rapidly decreasing costs of solar cells and corresponding growth of the global solar industry have lead people to invoke Moore’s law and predict that the installed capacity of solar PV on homes and businesses will double every two years. The total installed capacity worldwide and in the U.S. doubled over the last two and a half years. While the steep decline in the cost of manufacturing solar panels appears to be flattening out, the associated balance of system costs, along with customer acquisition, transaction and capital costs will continue to drop, though this will likely happen inconsistently in fits and starts over coming years. Meanwhile, the per-unit cost of retail electricity delivered by utilities will begin to rise as costly infrastructure demands combine with stagnating or falling demand caused by the penetration of distributed power systems. These two merging dynamics – dropping solar costs and rising utility rates for electricity have caught the eye of more than a few investors and analysts.

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The opportunity is immense

Solar is still a relatively immature industry. About 0.2% of electricity in the U.S. comes from solar generation and solar has been installed on less than 250,000 homes in the U.S. If a building or structure receives direct sunlight and uses electricity solar could be used to generate some of that electricity. The residential market potential is immense: there are more than 90 million single family homes in the U.S. and as many as 50 million more households in multi-family structures and several million more commercial and other non-residential structures. While solar may not work on every structure in the U.S. just a small wedge of this market is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

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In some markets it is already cheaper for a household to invest in solar than to buy electricity, and the projection is that at a $3 per watt for the cost of installed solar, about 100 GW could be economically installed today without relying on any state or federal subsidy programs. As the market closes on that $3 per watt threshold, the rate of growth will almost certainly explode. Manufacturing capacity, capital and a skilled labor force will be the only constraints on growth.

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Some possible bumps ahead?

The future isn’t all sunshine and excitement – subsidy erosion, attacks from utilities...


The article continues by integrating potential negatives and offering a couple of graphs to help visualize the possible impact of the challenges.
http://breakingenergy.com/2013/11/07/the-solar-industry-is-red-hot-will-it-get-hotter/

[Bennyboy]

1. Here in CA, it is booming all over the place......

New companies opening up all the time. Civic centers, WalMart's all installing solar (WalMart is doing ALL of their stores). We have great subsidies etc and if you don't install solar now you are losing money.

I have solar on my RV!