BRAINTRUST GOES AFTER SOLAR PRICE

Bay Area Photovoltaic Consortium announces $7.5 million in grants to lower the cost of large-scale solar power; The university-industry consortium led by Stanford and UC-Berkeley aims to make utility-scale solar energy cost-competitive by 2020.

Mark Shwartz, May 17, 2012 (Stanford University News)

“The Bay Area Photovoltaic Consortium (BAPVC) – an industry-supported program led by Stanford University and the University of California-Berkeley – has announced its first research grants aimed at making utility-scale solar power cost-competitive by the end of the decade.

“A total of $7.5 million will be given to 18 research teams at BAPVC partner institutions Stanford, UC-Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory…to develop new technologies that significantly reduce the cost of photovoltaic modules and make large-scale solar technology cheaper for electric utilities by 2020…More than two-dozen corporations participate in the consortium…including GE, DuPont, HelioVolt and Corning…”

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“The BAPVC is a key part of the DOE SunShot Initiative to reduce the installed price of large-scale photovoltaic systems from $3 per watt to $1 per watt by 2020 without government subsidies…Today, less than 1 percent of the electricity generated in the United States comes from solar power. But at $1 per watt, solar-generated electricity would be comparable in cost to electricity produced from coal-powered power plants. That would give utilities a strong economic incentive to begin installing photovoltaic systems across the country, which in turn would dramatically increase the percentage of solar-generated power in the United States, according to DOE projections.

“In a utility-scale photovoltaic system, about half of the installed cost goes into permits, power electronics, mounting hardware and other on-site construction costs. The solar module itself accounts for about half of the cost…To address the DOE's price-cutting challenge, the consortium has adopted a whole-module approach to its research effort…”

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