Magazine Archive 2020

Some 15 countries are likely to be able to lay claim to the status of being members of solar’s “gigawatt club” in 2019, according to conservative projections from BloombergNEF. Nonetheless, PV suppliers, developers and service providers are always on the lookout for new pockets of growth. To kick off 2020, pv magazine’s global team of correspondents and editors have highlighted 10 “fast-growing” solar markets to evaluate where the opportunities, and potential risks, lie.

The annual installed PV capacity for Japan is expected to be 7 GW (DC) in 2019, according to RTS Corp. Cumulative PV installed capacity now stands at 63 GW. In addition to the robust introduction of small-scale PV projects, the development of already approved large-scale PV projects under the FIT program was advanced by the end of the year, say RTS analysts Takashi Ohigashi and Izumi Kaizuka.

Supply-chain constraints related to China’s coronavirus outbreak could weigh on the performance of the U.S. solar market in 2020, writes SPV Market Research’s Paula Mints.

The PV industry’s rapid factory expansions and quick product rollouts lead to a constant balancing act between the streamlining of production and the introduction of new features to push the boundaries of power generation and achieve lower LCOE. Given these competing factors, CEA has brought together its data based on experience in providing third-party quality assurance oversight to produce its Supplier Benchmarking Program. Joseph Johnson, CEA’s lead analyst for solar and storage, digs into the data.

Self-consumption, the ability to isolate from the grid and provide power in the event of outages, and agricultural solar are key components in the 2020 revisions to Japan’s feed-in tariff program, reports RTS Corp.’s Izumi Kaizuka.

Despite a coronavirus-related bump in the road for the U.S. solar market, the future is still quite strong for all applications, from the residential segment to the utility scale, reports Paula Mints, chief analyst for SPV Market Research.

The solar sector is no stranger to breaking records. Perhaps the most impressive figure to emerge from SolarPower Europe’s new ‘Global Market Outlook’ is that the global solar sector will reach terawatt scale by 2022 – just four years after the 500 GW milestone was reached. Michael Schmela from SolarPower Europe sets out the reasoning behind this and other key findings in the report.

As a business prospect, producing hydrogen via sustainable means remains in its infancy. However, analysts appear increasingly certain that we are seeing the dawn of a vital new industry. In Europe, some countries (such as Germany and Portugal) have already adopted national strategies for the production and use of the fuel. And in July, the European Union also published a comprehensive hydrogen strategy as a central part of a climate-neutral Europe.

Energy markets are not exactly free markets, and the replacement of existing generation is not entirely tied to price. There are artificial regulatory constructs and financial structures built into energy markets which can favor certain parties (utilities) and fuels (legacy coal, gas, and nuclear).

Within this decade, the capacity of solar systems on rooftops in Australia will likely exceed the generating capacity of coal. It is now evident that solar in conjunction with other customer-side technologies of batteries and demand management will become the dominant factor in the evolution of Australia’s energy system, writes Tristan Edis, the director of analysis for Green Energy Markets. He adds one caveat, however: For this to occur, batteries must become cost competitive.