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I came across this article in The Economist. Its sub-headline caught my attention (Solar Power is Reshaping Energy Production in the Developing World) because The Economist is such a venerated (Founded in 1843) magazine and usually has a slightly conservative tone. However looking back I found a number of articles reported by the Economist, dated from this year, discussing the rapid rise of Solar Power projects across the globe. Here are a couple:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/06/daily-chart-2
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21696935-see-how-bright-future-solar-energy-look-developing-world-new-sunbathers
Here is the article that caught my attention:
Follow the sun
Solar power is reshaping energy production in the developing world
RAED KHADER, a Jordanian driver, has an alarming habit of thumbing his mobile phone while at the wheel—albeit on a straight road cutting across the desert. But after scrolling back through almost two years of photos, he finds a picture that tickles him: of camels against a sandy backdrop. Today that same spot
outside Ma’an, a poverty-stricken city in south Jordan, is crawling with workers in the final stages of installing five square kilometres (almost two square miles) of solar panels. He is enraptured by the photovoltaic (PV) modules that shimmer in the desert sunshine. “It’s amazing. I love it. It’s good to see my country develop its own source of energy,” he says. “We have such good sun here. It’s free. Why don’t we use more of it?” In his enthusiasm, he has convinced his daughter to become one of the first Jordanian women to study for a solar-energy engineering degree.
The 160-megawatt (MW) solar park, which is scheduled to open this summer, will mark the launch of
Jordan’s effort to reduce its fossil-fuel imports, which generated 96% of its energy last year and cost about 10% of GDP. In a restive neighbourhood, it has good reason to become more self-reliant. Its liking for solar intensified after Egypt temporarily cut natural-gas supplies during the Arab spring in 2011. The small steps sanctioned by Jordan’s cautious bureaucracy pale in comparison with the growth of solar energy in some other countries. But they illustrate the allure of the technology, as well as some of its teething problems. Across the developing world, solar power is hitting its stride. Rather than the rooftop panels popular in Germany, countries where solar irradiance is much stronger than northern Europe are creating vast parks with tens of thousands of flexible PV panels supplying power to their national grids. Some countries, such as China, provide generous subsidies (though these are sometimes years overdue). But in other countries solar PV is becoming competitive even without financial support.
In 2015 China surged past Germany to become the biggest producer of solar energy, benefiting from its dominance of solar-panel manufacturing and policies to reduce dependence on dirtier fuels, such as coal. Solar power accounts for just 3% of the electricity mix, but China is now building its biggest plant, in the Gobi desert. Analysts expect the country to install 12 gigawatts (GW) of solar in the first half of this year. That would be one-third more than the record amount America plans to build for the full year. Coal, meanwhile, is in growing trouble (see article). India is determined to keep up. Its government is targeting a 20-fold increase in solar-power capacity by 2022, to 100GW. Though this might be over-ambitious, KPMG, a consultancy, expects solar’s share of India’s energy mix to rise to 12.5% by 2025, from less than 1% today. It thinks solar in India will be cheaper than coal by 2020. (Even Coal India, a mostly state-owned entity, plans to contract 1GW of solar power to cut energy bills.) Such is the frenzy that officials in sunny Punjab are urging farmers to lease their land to solar developers rather than till it. Led by big projects in these two countries, global solar-energy capacity rose by 26% last year. More remarkable is the decline in its cost. Studies of the “levelised cost” of electricity, which estimate the net present value of the costs of a generating system divided by the expected output over its lifetime, show solar getting close to gas and coal as an attractively cheap source of power. Auctions of long-term contracts to purchase solar power in developing countries such as South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Peru and Mexico provide real-world evidence that such assumptions may even prove to be conservative (see chart). In sunny places solar power is now “shoulder to shoulder” with gas, coal and wind, says Cédric Philibert of the International Energy Agency, a prominent forecaster. He notes that since November 2014, when Dubai awarded a project to build 200MW of solar power at less than $60 a megawatt hour (MWh), auctions have become increasingly competitive.
Article Continues on The Economist
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Re: Solar Power 80% Cheaper Since 2010 - Large Projects Planned Across the Globe
