Commercial perovskite solar modules at SNEC 2024 trade show
pv-magazine.com
pv-magazine.com
How does that compare to traditional solar cells?
Last data has that at about $0.25/W, although there's currently a bit of a glut so you may be able to find lower on the open market. Don't forget to add taxes, because the West is not keen enough on the renewable transition to allow China to subsidize it.
Trending flat as of late with single digit percentage reductions in price to be expected year over year.
At these prices the actual panels for most houses would be below $1,000 wholesale. The vast majority of the cost is elsewhere.
It is great that it keeps getting cheaper but at this point the returns are diminishing. If you're thinking of buying something there is no new tech or anything on the horizon worth waiting for just go ahead.
Welll... Tandem perovskite cells have been tested up to 35% effective while your traditional ones are 20-25%. So for same labour cost you'll get 50% more returns...
I think if they get perovskite degradation under control, tandem cells with 30%+ efficiency are on the horizon.
Also, future cells still can get a whole lot thinner and lighter, which decreases material costs and overall requirements on mounting hardware (only a little, you still need to deal with wind loads).
But I agree, especially for home owners there's no reason to wait. Still, if you're in the business of building a gigawatt scale powerplants, there's still a lot of things to look forward to. Also, ground installation of panels still has a lot of untapped automation potential.
As I keep pointing out, if the Chinese government want to subsidize the US renewables transition we should let them. The ridiculous alternative is to then put tariffs on goods which make them more expensive and subsidies to make them affordable again. In America, it's only a "free market" when corporate political donors are winning it.
Article doesn't talk about efficiencies but it seems production perovskite modules are slightly lower than their silicon counterparts, which will affect downstream costs like land or mounting hardware a bit.
The value proposition of perovskite cells is combining them with regular panels to form more efficient tandem cells.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-solar-industry...
the usa has been pushing this overcapacity/dumping nonsense for 12 years now, when solar panels cost 80¢ a watt. now they cost 8¢ a watt, down by half since last year's prices, prices which had been held steady for several years only by a price-fixing cartel. this is precisely what you would expect in a niche technology as it becomes mainstream: the costs drop dramatically as you climb down the learning curve. one mechanism in that process is that the less efficient producers are driven out of the market because they can only sell at a loss
by contrast, if this were actually a question of dumping and overcapacity, you'd see the prices drop to the dumping level, eventually driving out of the market the vendors who required a profit, after which the remaining vendors would raise their prices to a level higher than before. you'd have to believe that someone in china is spending something like 72¢ a watt to subsidize the buildout of solar farms in the entire rest of the world over more than a decade with the objective of monopolizing a market that's entirely built on the assumption of solar panels being cheap. this strategy would have cost about 500 billion dollars to pull off, since the total world solar generation capacity built out by this 'dumping' is about a terawatt now, and the payoff would be that when you tried to raise prices back to a dollar a watt, nobody would buy your product
of course that's wildly implausible, so nobody actually claims that. the supposed 'subsidies' that the us department of commerce accuses china is applying get smaller and smaller over time, so they're implicitly admitting that the supposed 'dumping' a year or two previously wasn't actually dumping at all, and the supposed 'overcapacity' was actually just manufacturing capacity brought online a year or two before washington thinks it should be
if you read the filings, they're really ridiculous: the supposed 'subsidies' are things like 'provision of electricity for less than adequate remuneration', 'preferential loans and directed credits', 'provision of land-use rights for less than adequate remuneration', etc. they're literally arguing over whether the price of electricity and commercial real estate is too low in china or not. if you want to read this bullshit you can start at https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/07/11/2023-14... but be warned that you may turn into a rabid ayn rand fan
imagine 19th-century bloomery ironmasters and their blacksmiths campaigning against blast furnace operators because they can't believe anyone could use so much steel or make it so cheaply; that's what you've seen
Sorry, this is most likely not true and an unbased claim.
>this is precisely what you would expect in a niche technology as it becomes mainstream: the costs drop dramatically as you climb down the learning curve. one mechanism in that process is that the less efficient producers are driven out of the market because they can only sell at a loss
Yes, this is a common relationship in manufacturing known as wright's law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright%27s_Law
The cost/prices trends for PV are well documented, e.g. see slide 50 here: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
There was no recent transition into "mainstream". The scaling has been taking place for decades already and nothign was "held steady" for 12 years.
If you look at price development during the last months (https://www.pvxchange.com/Price-Index) you will notice that the prices drastically dropped by more than 50% during the last year. This is a clear sign of oversupply, regardless of discussions regarding tariffs etc.
To explain this kind of price drop based on the history scaling laws (24.4% per doubling) would require the total production capacity (and installation) to have more than quadrupled over the last year.
— cartelization —
> Sorry, [the price-fixing cartel] is most likely not true and an unbased claim.
the price rises for the next two years were pre-announced at davos in january 02019 by eric luo, president of gcl, a top-ten chinese solar-panel company; this is a sort of announcement that cannot happen in a competitive market https://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-solar-gcl-i...
after several years of record new low price ppas being announced every month or two, prices then held steady from 02018 levels until last year. you can see ppa prices in the usa at https://emp.lbl.gov/pv-ppa-prices and historical wholesale solar prices at https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... (this is the same pvxchange data you linked, but with data going back 7 years instead of one year, and i have archived their older data going back to 02009)
here you can clearly see that prices didn't improve from their 02018 level until the covid pandemic in 02020, but then recovered to the price-fixing level in mid-02021. they actually rose in 02023 and then returned to the price-fixing level in mid-02023, 4½ years after the cartel was announced at davos. the 02009–02018 trend was a fairly steady, continuous drop of 24% per year, faster than the longer-term average of 10%, largely because the doubling time of cumulative installed capacity had dropped significantly
if that 10% long-term average had continued from 02018 until today, five years, we would have expected a 44% drop in prices from 02018 to now. if the 25% average over 02009–02018 had instead continued, we would expect a 79% drop. the end-of-02018 price was €0.18 for low-cost panels; now it's €0.08, a 56% drop, which is an average yearly price drop of 14%. it's just that the cartel was able to delay the price drop for almost five years, and now it has more or less returned to the trend.
note that during the four-year period of artificially high prices the usa's shameless claims of overcapacity and dumping continued unabated and in fact dramatically escalated, culminating in trump's very punitive tariffs. that (plus reading the department of commerce's public filings) is why i don't consider yellen a credible source
— the experience curve —
> To explain this kind of price drop based on the history scaling laws (24.4% per doubling) would require the total production capacity (and installation) to have more than quadrupled over the last year.
not over the last year; rather, since the end of 02018
as it happens, cumulative pv installations in 02018 had reached almost 500 gigawatts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics#Growth... or the fraunhofer slides you linked, slide 15) and in 02023 1600 gigawatts (https://iea-pvps.org/snapshot-reports/snapshot-2024/ or the fraunhofer slides) with an expected 655 gigawatts installed this year (https://www.pv-tech.org/bnef-global-solar-additions-655gwdc-...), which would mean about 1900 gigawatts installed right now if we interpolate linearly, almost but not quite the quadrupling you were looking for
but that's not actually enough! to explain the 56% price drop with fraunhofer's learning rate of 24.4% per doubling, you'd need 2.9 doublings, an increase in cumulative product manufactured of a factor of about 7.5, which is indeed technically 'more than quadrupling' but actually a lot more than quadrupling. since we've only had 1.9 doublings instead of 2.9, we should only see a 42% price drop, so the real price should be €0.11 per watt rather than €0.08. if we instead use the 20.2% learning rate from this plot of swanson's law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law#/media/File:19... we should expect to see only a 36% price drop down to €0.12 per watt. so maybe there is some 'dumping of oversupply' going on, in the sense of selling off product at a loss
the learning rate required to explain a 56% price drop in only 1.9 doublings would be 35%, which seems implausibly high
the slide 50 you cite is apparently tracking a slightly different price than the low-cost solarserver numbers i've been tracking; it shows prices rising from 02020 to 02022, and the 02023 price as being about 50% below the trend line (roughly €0.20 rather than €0.30 per peak watt), much as the 02006–02010 prices are about 50% above it. so i can see how you'd come to a different conclusion from those divergent data
— the 12-year-long trade war —
> There was no recent transition into "mainstream". The scaling has been taking place for decades already and nothing was "held steady" for 12 years
what's happened for 12 years, and i'm sorry this wasn't clear from my previous comment, is that politicians in the usa have been making absurdly indefensible claims of 'overcapacity and dumping' to justify blatant protectionist policies that violate wto rules, prolong the energy crisis, promote global warming, strangle usa heavy industry, and undermine the usa's access to overseas markets, all in order to subsidize fossil-fuel production, the stranded assets of electrical utilities, and uncompetitive domestic solar panel production
(what i actually said was 'the usa has been pushing this overcapacity/dumping nonsense for 12 years now', and i am mystified as to how you could have misinterpreted that to mean that scaling has not been taking place for decades)
— crossing the chasm —
what i meant by the transition into the mainstream is that solar power is now a mainstream source of power rather than a form of environmental activism, an r&d expense, or a niche solution for remote cabins and communication satellites. this happened around 02018, but even today you'll find people arguing against it on the spurious basis that if it were net energy positive the power grid would already be running on it, so it's only sustained by subsidies
it's true that, if you look at log-log plots of solar growth over 40 years, it looks like a smooth exponential, with no obvious change of long-term growth regime. but that's exactly what it looks like for an innovation to successfully 'cross the chasm' into mainstream adoption. if you look at the log-log plots of adoption of innovations like desktop linux, segway, iridium, google glass, oculus, or nuclear power, they look exactly like that—until the point where they suddenly stop, without penetrating beyond rogers's 'early adopters' (worth noting: rogers doesn't believe there's a discontinuous 'chasm' but rather continuous risk of failure). but solar energy has now become firmly mainstream, so its growth has continued
From the article: "Solar panel prices tumbled around 30 percent last year after China, the world's largest producer, cut subsidies to shrink its bloated solar industry, pushing smaller manufacturers to the brink of collapse."
This is exactly the opposite of price fixing. They subsidized the market (consumption) and created a bloated industry. Removing the subsidies lead to overcapacity and hence a drop in prices below the rate of a healthy market.
This is exactly what is happening again this year. The difference is that we are seeing more than 50% price drop.
If you look at the fraunhofer PDF, you will notice that chinese companies own 95% of the market now. The way they were allowed to scale was by targeted chinese subsidies on PV projects that were not accessible to outside tenders.
drops in prices below profitability are, counterintuitively, something that happens in a healthy market. there is always some volatility, so some of the time prices are too high, and some of the time they are too low, and in a rapidly growing market, this can be pretty extreme
i don't see how it makes sense to describe the chinese solar industry in 02018 as 'bloated' if its production that year was 130 gigawatts (minus a few percent for foreign companies) and its production this year is 600 gigawatts. you must think it's super-mega-bloated now; do you think it's going to fall to 100 gigawatts? do you expect record low prices to suppress demand somehow?
it is certainly true that china's market is not open to foreign companies
but i think chinese companies own 95% of the market now mostly because of exports, not because of domestic chinese projects. they took over the market in the 02010s, and at that point the biggest projects were in spain and germany, not china
But these are translucent. They'll be put onto windows. So even if they're 50% more expensive, it's serving an adjacent use-case.
The more interesting figure is they're getting 160W/m^2. That's very large, and it'll be a big deal considering there is more vertical surface area than rooftop area on buildings. Standard solar panels get about 220W/m^2.