In 2010, we will cross the threshold of 10 gigawatts of photovoltaic solar installed globally in a single year -- a record-setting and once-inconceivable number.
Rewind to ten years ago: the total amount of photovoltaics installed in the year 2000 was 170 megawatts. Since then, the solar photovoltaic industry has grown at a 51 percent annual growth rate, and 170 megawatts is now the size of a healthy utility installation or a small solar factory. As Andrew Beebe mentions below, Suntech has a single building with a one-gigawatt capacity.
Photovoltaic module pricing has made radical progress, as well, moving from $300 per watt in 1956, to $50 per watt in the 1970s, to $10 per watt in the 1990s, to $2 per watt today. It's not exactly Moore's law, but it is that drop in pricing, chicken-or-egg with policy and technology, that is driving this industry. Pricing of $1 per watt is not that far off.
Ten gigawatts is a significant milestone for the PV industry, but it warrants some perspective:
- That's the total power that five or six nuclear power plants generate -- and there are about one hundred nuclear plants in the U.S alone.
- The wind industry installed 27 gigawatts in 2008,38 gigawatts in 2009and has a total installed base of more than 158 gigawatts compared to PV's installed base of about 20 gigawatts. 2010 will see more than 200 gigawatts of installed wind and the Global Wind Energy Council expects that to double to 400 gigawatts by the end of 2014