The joke among economists is that in the long run, we’re all dead. So it may go with solar manufacturing once (and if) decarbonization goals are realized, according to an analysis led by researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
The researchers found that an “unprecedented ramp-up of production capacity” over the next two decades is needed to provide enough solar power to completely decarbonize the global electrical system.
The target is 63.4 terawatts of installed nameplate capacity of photovoltaics (PV) needed in the decade between 2050 and 2060. That represents a 60-fold increase in the amount of installed PV worldwide today.
But only a “relatively modest demand” in additional PV would be needed after global decarbonization is reached to keep up with module retirement and population growth. This would resulted in “an expected shock to the manufacturing industry” where “suddenly much less manufacturing capacity is needed after decarbonization is achieved,” the researchers said.
Solar manufacturing’s fall off a cliff remains in the dim future. And the likely contraction only follows hundreds of billions of dollars of expected investment to boost production capacity to make a decarbonized energy system possible.
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The findings were contained in the paper, “Photovoltaic Deployment Scenarios Toward Global Decarbonization: Role of Disruptive Technologies,” which appears in the journal Solar RRL. A scientist from the Colorado School of Mines also co-authored the paper.
The analysis was intended to show the scale and temporal dynamics of financing needed to build the manufacturing capacity to produce enough PV modules.
Among the assumptions the researchers made is that after the decarbonization goal is reached, manufacturers would be reluctant to build new factories because of the drop in demand for PV modules. Factories are assumed to have a 15-year lifetime, so new ones are expected only to be built if they are projected to sustain full output throughout their useful lifetime.
The analysis also assumed the lifespan of a PV module would increase. That would further exacerbate the shock to solar manufacturing because it will take longer before replacement is needed. Researchers have been experimenting with extending the module longevity rom an average of 30 years in 2020 to 50 years by 2040.
For now, anyway, to reach the decarbonization target, manufacturers are expected to need to scale up production capacity to reach 2.9–3.7 terawatts a year within 10–15 years, at a cost of $600 billion to $660 billion. The analysis suggested that these goals can be reached using existing technology. Further cost reductions could come from mature technologies that use silicon and cadmium telluride.
The analysis also suggested that “disruptive” solar technologies such as perovskites and tandem photovoltaics that combine existing solar technologies and disruptive ones in a single much-higher-efficiency package, could help drive down costs. Such technologies are forecast to be deployed at about a terawatt annually and could potentially be cheaper to manufacture than silicon PV on a per-watt basis. They remain to be proven in the marketplace, however.
The researchers said these disruptive technologies could result on cost savings for manufacturers amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars.
It said that disruptive technologies could have an overall manufacturing market opportunity between $1 trillion and $2 trillion even if the total amount of PV installed is substantially less than 63.4 terawatts.
NREL’s internal Laboratory Directed Research and Development program funded the research, which can be found here.
