1/14/2015

Joel Jean's answer to What is the future of solar energy? - Quora

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What is the future of solar energy?

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Next 5-10 year? Will the costs come down? How much?

Joel Jean
Co-author of MIT Future of Solar

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Will the efficiency go up? How much?

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Joel Jean, Co-author of MIT Future of Sol... (more)

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The future of solar?

Let's start with the future of the world.
To properly frame any discussion about the future of any kind of energy, we
need to keep a few facts in mind:
(1) Climate change is a real and present threat to the future of human life and
all other life on Earth. Suppose we want to minimize our (childrens) risk of
encountering the very worst impacts of climate change. That translates to
reducing global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions ~80% by 2050. Since ~60%
of global emissions stem from energy use, we need to deploy low-carbon energy
technologies at massive scale, starting yesterday.
***Details: Below is a plot of typical ranges of lifecycle ("cradle to grave")
emissions (or carbon intensity) of different energy technologies (units: grams
of CO2-equivalent per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electric output). The green
dashed line is a projection of the average U.S. carbon intensity required to cut
emissions by 80% (from 1990 levels) by 2050 and keep global warming below
2C. [1]. Wind and concentrating solar power (CSP) are by far the lowest [2].
Geothermal and solar photovoltaics (PV) are comparable. Hydro and
nuclear are higher but in some cases still within range of the 2050 target [2].
Natural gas [3], coal [3], and even coal with carbon capture and storage
(CCS) [2] are far above the acceptable limit.

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(2) Solar is by far the largest energy resource available on Earthrenewable or

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Joel Jean's answer to What is the future of solar energy? - Quora

otherwise. All other energy sourcesaside from nuclear, geothermal, and tidal
come from sunlight. Fossil fuels are just solar power integrated over millions
of years using dinosaurs (and other carbon-based life forms) as batteries. Wind
and wave power is merely solar power absorbed unevenly across the Earths
surface, leading to thermal gradients and mass flow. Among low-carbon
energy sources, only solar, wind, and possibly nuclear can reach the terawatt
(TW)-scale deployment needed to satisfy ever-growing global energy demand
(currently ~17 TW average).

(3) Solar photovoltaics is growing fastfaster than any other energy

technology. Cumulative installed PV capacity worldwide has doubled every two
years (43% CAGR) since the year 2000, reaching ~200 gigawatts-peak (GWp)
in 2014. This Moores Law-like growth shows no sign of slowing, though slow it
must, as naive extrapolation leads us to some untenable conclusions: If PV
capacity were to keep growing at the current rate, solar panels would satisfy all
world electricity demand within a decade, cover the Earth by 2050, and form a
Dyson sphere around the sun just after 2100.
Just for fun, here's the naive extrapolation:

That said, solar PV accounted for only ~1% of our total electricity consumption
last year, so there's clearly a lot of headroom left.

OK. So now we know a few things: Climate change is happening, we

need lots of low-carbon energy to stop it, solar is one of our only
practical options, and solar PV is growing faster than anyone ever
imagined.

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Joel Jean's answer to What is the future of solar energy? - Quora

But how do we turn sunlight into useful energy? Whats the future of PV? And
are there other non-PV solar technologies in the R&D pipeline?
Lets talk about the technology.
Solar Photovoltaics (PV)
Solar photovoltaics (aka "solar cells") are by far the leading solar technology in
terms of total deployment*. PV is quite nice: It's truly modular (a single PV
module is no less efficient than a huge array), it operates silently and at low
temperatures, and it doesn't require much maintenance over its 25+ year
lifetime.
*Aside from solar heaters, which are used widely in China for heating
domestic water and in the U.S. for keeping swimming pools warm. Solar
heating cant be compared directly with PV since its output is heat [GWthermal] rather than electricity [GW-electric].

[Solar-Powered Camel Clinics Carry Medicine Across the Desert ]

We typically name PV technologies by the material (or material class) used to
absorb light: crystalline silicon (c-Si), gallium arsenide (GaAs), hydrogenated
amorphous silicon (a-Si:H), cadmium telluride (CdTe), copper indium gallium
diselenide (CIGS), copper zinc tin sulfide (CZTS), organics, perovskites, or
colloidal quantum dots (QDs), to name a few.
It's convenient to think about these technologies in terms of material
complexity, which corresponds roughly to the number of atoms in a unit cell,
molecule, or other repeating unit of a material [4,5]. Material complexity is
related to the degree of disorder at the nanoscale. For current PV technologies,
higher material complexity often translates to lower technological maturity,
materials use, processing temperatures, and processing complexity. These traits
often open up new applications by enabling novel technical attributes, such as
visible transparency, flexibility, and new form factors.

With PV technologies, it's really hard to predict what will be the long-term
winner.

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Crystalline silicon (c-Si) is king today, with ~90% of the global PV market, and
I believe it will continue to dominate for at least the next decade. Silicon PV is
abundant, efficient, reliable, and proven, but it absorbs light poorly. That
drawback results in thick, heavy, inflexible solar cells and modules with
relatively high manufacturing costs. For silicon, there's not much room to grow
in terms of cell efficiency (25% current lab record), although production
modules continue to improve: Typical modules are 16-21% efficient, with
multicrystalline (mc-Si) technologies at the low end and single-crystalline (scSi) technologies at the high end.
Today's commercial thin-film (TF) PV technologies, including CdTe, aSi:H, and CIGS, overcome some of the challenges of c-Sithey use much less
material and can be made at relatively low cost with high efficiency. CdTe
dominates the thin-film market with simple manufacturing and high efficiency
(21% cell record, production modules up to ~15%) but has major intrinsic
scaling issues: Tellurium is about 4x less abundant than gold in the Earth's
crust, and it's hard to extract from copper ores. Amorphous silicon is
abundant, cheap, and flexible, but its maximum efficiency (13.4% current cell
record) is likely too low to compete with crystalline silicon. CIGS is efficient
(21.7% cell record, modules up to ~15%) but tough to make reliably, and it also
runs into materials scaling issues with indium, gallium, and selenium.
In the PV R&D community, we pursue emerging thin-film PV technologies,
such as perovskites and quantum dots, for 2 primary reasons: (1) They may
someday be able to reach a lower cost per watt than silicon and current thin
films due to simpler manufacturing and reduced materials use, and (2) They
offer new functionality, including transparency, flexibility, and extremely light
weight, and may open up new applications for PV.

Examples of emerging thin films include CZTS, organic PV, dye-sensitized

solar cells (DSSCs), perovskiteswhich have largely swallowed the organic and
dye-sensitized PV R&D communitiesand colloidal quantum dot PV (QDPV).
Perovskites are extremely promising, with impressive material characteristics
and cell efficiencies improving at an unprecedented rate (up to over 20% in ~3
years). But we shouldn't get too excited yetthere's still a lot of work to be
done, in particular on lifetime, air and water stability, and new cell designs.
Although still relatively inefficient (~9% cell record), QD solar cells are also
improving fast and can be processed entirely at room temperature from
solution, which may someday lead the way to the fabled "solar paint" (which,
contrary to popular belief, does not yet exist in any practical form).
See the bottom of this post for several FAQs about solar PV.

Concentrating Solar Power (CSP), aka Solar Thermal

CSP uses mirrors or lenses to concentrate sunlight onto a tank of molten salt or
other working fluid, which is then used to boil water and drive a steam turbine.
CSP systems have been used for decades, but they only work effectively in
places with high direct radiation*such as the southwestern U.S., southern
Europe, northern Africa, and other locations near the equator.
*The MIT Future of Solar study recently analyzed the cost of CSP in
Worcester, Massachusetts, and... nope, not a chance.
CSP is not modular like PVhigh temperatures require many mirrors over

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large areas, and turbines are much more efficient at large scaleso
unfortunately you won't have a solar thermal generator on your roof anytime
soon. Here's a picture of the new Ivanpah CSP plant in the Mojave desert
(opened Feb. 2014), with over 340,000 mirrors:

[brightsourceenergy.com ]
Global CSP deployment today is lower than PV deployment by about 2 orders
of magnitude. As for the future, CSP will become more and more important as
penetration of solar and wind increases, because it can potentially overcome
the natural intermittency of those resources (discussed further below) using
built-in thermal energy storage (on the time scale of 4-8 hours).

Solar Fuels
Sunlight can catalyze chemical reactions that use water and CO2 to produce
liquid or gaseous fuels (e.g., hydrogen, methane, various alcohols and
hydrocarbons). These "solar fuels" have a unique role in a future low-carbon
energy economy, since they could help decarbonize transportationespecially
by air and sea, where electric-powered transport may be impractical. Solar
fuels could also become a key energy storage technology for counteracting solar
intermittency.
All that said, solar-to-fuels technology is far from provenmy MIT colleague
Bob Jaffe would say that there are many "tooth fairies'" worth of fanciful
technological advances that still need to be made to get solar fuels to market at
competitive cost.

Technologically, the future of solar energy looks bright.

So what's stopping solar from taking off? And what might limit it in the future?
Well, there are a few things that might be worth thinking about: cost,
intermittency, and scaling issues (i.e., materials and land use). Let's focus
on PV for now.
Cost
Solar PV is getting cheaper by the month. Average system costs in the U.S. are
now below $2/W for utility scale (>1 MW) systems and just over $3/W for
residential (usu. <10 kW) systems [4]. And that doesn't include subsidies (e.g.,
30% federal investment tax credit (ITC), accelerated depreciation, various state
renewable portfolio standards (RPSs), and net metering in some places), which
in a competitive market can reduce the effective price for consumers. In
regions with high direct sunlight, such as southern California, CSP is costcompetitive with PV [4].
So what's the problem?
System cost [$/W] isn't a complete metric. Solar energy technologies will only
take off if they can produce and deliver electricity more cheaply than
alternatives.

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The usual way of comparing the cost of generating electricity with different
technologies is the levelized cost of energy (LCOE), in units of $/kWh (usu.
cents per kilowatt-hour) or $/MWh.
The LCOE of a power plant includes upfront capital costs, operation and
maintenance costs (including fuel), subsidies, an assumed discount rate, and
the total electricity produced over the plant lifetime. Typical LCOEs are $0.060.08/kWh for coal, natural gas, and hydro and ~$0.10/kWh for nuclear.
Most LCOE estimates for unsubsidized solar PV today range from ~$0.10/kWh
to $0.40/kWh, depending on the location (i.e., amount of sunlight) and type
of system (large utility-scale systems are cheapest, small residential systems
most expensive). In places like Hawaii, where fuels are hard to come by and
hence expensive*, the LCOE of conventional fossil fuel generation is much
higher and more volatile, and solar is much more attractive. But LCOE alone
isnt the whole story either.
*Because it lacks local fossil fuel resources, Hawaii uses imported oil to
generate most of its electricity, unlike the rest of the U.S. As a result, electricity
prices in Hawaii are highly correlated with global oil prices.
Even in places where solar costs more than coal (and gas and nuclear)and
even when subsidies are includedyou can sometimes still save money by
putting solar panels on your roof. Why?
Well, your solar electrons arent competing directly with the grids electrons on
cost. Electrons from a coal plant (e.g.) are purchased by a utility and
transmitted to your house on the grid. The utility cant give you the electrons at
the same price they were bought for: It has to make a profit, and it has to
amortize the costs of building and maintaining the grid. So the actual retail
price of grid electricitywhat you see on your electricity billis substantially
higher than the underlying LCOE. Under current regulations (in many states),
your rooftop solar electrons can compete with grid electrons at the retail price,
and if your PV system makes more electrons than you use, you can sell them
back to the utility at the retail pricea practice called net metering. Its
basically a subsidy for solar and a great deal for you, although utilities dont
like it because youre not paying your share of the grid upkeep. Future policies
will likely close that loophole by forcing homeowners with PV systems to pay
some fixed cost for grid use.
Fortunately, it seems likely that the cost (LCOE) of solar will continue
decreasing steadily, which means that unsubsidized solar will eventually be
cheaper than fossil generation in many placesespecially if a price is placed on
greenhouse gas emissions to account for their negative environmental
externalities.
For solar PV in particular, it's important to note that the total system cost is no
longer dominated by the solar panel itself. Everything else that goes into a PV
systeminverters, transformers, wiring, racking, installation labor, customer
acquisition, permitting, taxes, financing, business overheadadd up to well
over half of the total cost of solar PV in the U.S. today. We refer to these nonmodule costs as balance-of-system (BOS) costs, and in many ways, they're
harder to reduce than module costs. To realize a solar-powered future, we
need to innovate and reduce BOS costs.

Intermittency
In most places on Earth, sunlight isn't always available. Some of the variations
in available solar energy are predictable or deterministic (e.g., diurnal and
seasonal cycles and local climate), while others are unpredictable or stochastic
(e.g., cloud cover and weather).
When solar is deployed at large scale (several percent of total electricity
generation) on a given grid, electricity markets will likely change significantly.
After a solar PV system is installed, it costs almost nothing to operate. Zerovariable-cost generation means that solar energy will be used whenever it's
available (i.e., when the sun is shining). PV will thus replace fossil-fueled
generators (i.e., coal and gas) with the highest variable costs, reducing
marginal electricity prices.

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But the impact on actual market prices depends strongly on the generation
mixi.e., how much coal, gas, nuclear, wind, etc. is deployed on the grid: Solar
tends to stop producing when the sun goes downand when the clouds come
outso other generators are forced to ramp up (cycle) more rapidly and more
often, increasing wear-and-tear and hence their operating costs.
In many places, adding solar PV without energy storage doesn't substantially
reduce the net load that must be supplied by other technologies (total demand
- solar generation). It simply shifts the time of peak load slightly later into the
evening, when the sun goes down and everyone goes home after work and
starts watching TV, cooking, reading Quora, coding, or otherwise consuming
electricity (this is the origin of the famous CAISO duck chart ).
A few complementary technologies would ease the pain of intermittency. In
decreasing order of current technological and economic feasibility: Enhanced
grid infrastructure (e.g., improved long-distance transmission, demand
response, and other smart grid concepts) could adjust demand to meet varying
solar supply, or allow geographical averaging to smooth out minute-to-minute
variations due to clouds. Grid-scale energy storage (e.g., pumped hydro,
compressed air, or big batteries) could store energy during the day and
discharge it at night. And solar fuels could someday make solar energy truly
dispatchable.

Scaling: Materials and land use

The land use issue is actually not that big a deal. To satisfy all U.S. electricity
demand with solar PV at average solar insolation levels, we would need on the
order of 50,000 square kilometers [4]which sounds like a lot, until you find
out that we currently dedicate ~100,000 square kilometers to producing corn
ethanol satisfying only ~10% of U.S. gasoline demand.
Materials use is a bigger concern: Covering thousands of square kilometers
with PV will require huge amounts of raw materials, from the elements used in
solar cells to supporting commodity materials, such as steel, glass, and concrete
[4,5].
Our analysis suggests that most commodities will not be major obstacles to
scaling, except perhaps the flat glass used to cover today's c-Si PV modules
[4,5]. For glass, aluminum, and copper, the amount of material required to
satisfy 100% of 2050 world electricity demand exceeds 6 years of current global
production, which indicates that PV might eventually become a major driver
for those commodity markets.
Critical elements will be limiting for some technologies:
For c-Si, silicon is not an issue, but silver conductors will need to be replaced
by copper.
For CdTe, Te is a huge obstacle to scaling: At current rates of global Te
production, we would need 1500 years to extract all the Te required to satisfy
100% of 2050 world electricity demand with CdTe PV [4,5].
Emerging thin films are generally more scalable than current commercial
technologies, since they mostly use small amounts of abundant, widelyproduced elements: For example, to satisfy 100% of 2050 demand with PbS
QDPV, we only need the equivalent of 23 days of global lead production and
7 hours of current sulfur production [4,5].

So what is the future of solar?

Yes.
The main takeaway is that there will be more solar than you think. To spare
future generations from the worst impacts of climate change, were going to
need a lot more solar (and wind and nuclear) generation capacity10-100
times whats currently deployed. Todays technologies (mostly crystalline silicon
PV) canand likely willscale up to multiple terawatts of capacity worldwide
by 2030 without any major technological advances.

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The main obstacle is cost: Global PV growth thus far has largely been driven by
federal and local subsidies. That said, PV is already cost-competitive with fossil
fuels in some places, and system costs (and prices) continue to decline. And
even though current technologies will likely plateau at some minimum
sustainable cost floor, its clear that there are many new and exciting solar
technologies in the pipeline, with many new and exciting applications to come.
I cant wait.

References
[1] J. E. Trancik and D. Cross-Call, Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47, 66736680.
[2] M. Z. Jacobson, Energy Environ. Sci., 2009, 2, 148-173.
[3] U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA), 2014.
[4] MIT Future of Solar Energy Study, 2015, in preparation.
[5] J. Jean et al., 2015, submitted.

*Just to be clear, the views expressed here are my own. My opinions are
informed by my involvement in the MIT Future of Solar Energy Study but
dont necessarily reflect the final conclusions of that study. I encourage you to
read the report when it's released later this year (and others) and come to
your own conclusions about the future of solar.
**Feel free to use the figures in this answer for educational purposes. Figures
without citations are my own, and proper attribution is appreciated.

Solar PV FAQs
Does a solar panel produce more energy than it takes to manufacture it? In
other words, is the energy payback time (EPBT) shorter than the lifetime of
the panel?
YES! A typical silicon PV module today produces as much energy as it took to
manufacture it in less than 2 years (<1 year for CdTe), and continues to
operate with minimal efficiency loss for at least 25 years.
I hear solar cells can only convert 15% (or 20%) of incoming sunlight into
electricity. Why are solar cells so inefficient? I mean, my body can convert a
Big Mac into useful energy at 25% efficiency. Why cant you scientists do
better?
Physics is tough to beat. Thermodynamic limits (see Shockley-Queisser limit)
cap the ultimate efficiency of typical solar cells based on a single material at
~31%. Using multiple materialsas in multijunction or tandem cellsboosts
the theoretical maximum efficiency (e.g., to ~49% for 3 junctions). Some
exotic approaches (e.g., carrier multiplication, hot-carrier collection, and
intermediate band cells) can theoretically bypass the Shockley-Queisser limit,
but none has yet achieved practical efficiency gains.
But in the end, we dont really care about efficiency anyway; we care about the
cost of energy [$/kWh]. Photosynthesis is on the order of 1% efficient at
converting sunlight into chemical energy, yet the U.S. still tries to grow corn to
make ethanol. That said, its worthwhile to work on improving the efficiency of
solar cells because higher efficiencies can decrease module and system costs.
Why are production PV modules so much less efficient than record cells in the
lab?
Intrinsic scaling losses: Scaling from small cells (~1 square centimeter) to
large modules with multiple interconnected cells (~100 square centimeters)
incurs physical scaling losses. Electrons must travel farther, increasing resistive
losses. Shadowing from electrodes reduces the available light. Longer wires in

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modules dissipate more power, while spacing between cells reduces the module
active area. The output of a module is often limited by its worst-performing
cell.
Extrinsic manufacturing losses: While researchers typically target high
efficiencies without much regard to cost, manufacturers may sacrifice
efficiency to reduce cost, improve yield, and increase throughput. Fabrication
techniques that produce high efficiencies in the lab may not scale to large
areas. High-quality materials used in research labs may be too expensive for
high-volume manufacturing.
Do solar cells work when its cloudy?
Yep, although somewhat less efficiently. Clouds and atmospheric particulates
turn direct sunlight (what you see when you look right at the sun) into diffuse
light (what you see when you look anywhere else in the sky, or at the ground).
A solar cell doesnt really care where photons come fromwhether scattered
from a cloud or transmitted straight through the atmosphere. Once a photon
of a given color is inside a solar cell, its converted into an excited electron with
the same probability as any other photon of that color.
But a solar cell DOES care about how many photons are incident on itthat is,
the light intensity. Higher intensities generally give higher efficiencies. Because
some direct sunlight is scattered back into space by cloudsand because more
light is lost to reflection at the front surface of the panel at wide angles of
incidencethe light intensity that a solar cell sees is lower on overcast days
than on clear days, leading to lower efficiency and lower power output.
On a related note, concentrating solar technologies (CSP and CPV) dont work
at all when its cloudy: You cant concentrate light thats coming from all
directions.
Are solar cells toxic?
Yepbut only if you eat too many of them. In all seriousness, silicon solar cells
are about as benign as any other piece of technology that you probably
wouldnt eat. Cadmium telluride is a bit worsecadmium is toxicbut the
amount of Cd inside a typical solar cell is quite small. The CdTe layer used in
cells today is about 1/50th the thickness of a sheet of paper, or roughly 2 m,
and its sealed up tight between two thick glass sheets. As for emerging
technologies, youd have to eat a lot (!) of solar cells to get lead poisoning from
lead sulfide quantum dot PV or methylammonium lead halide perovskite PV.
When solar electricity becomes cheaper than current grid electricity (grid
parity), will it completely displace all other generation technologies?
Nope. Well probably still need other types of generationcertainly at night,
and likely during northern winters as well. Like any other free market,
electricity markets generally follow the laws of supply and demand. Increasing
supply of zero-marginal-cost electricity from solar PV depresses electricity
prices at exactly the hours when solar is available (i.e., when the sun is
shining). For any given electricity grid and cost of PV, there will likely be a
natural break-even point for solar penetrationabove that level of deployment,
additional solar generation will no longer be profitable, and further investment
in solar is unlikely. The story might change if grid-scale electricity storage gets
way, way cheaper or if CSP (with built-in thermal storage) is deployed widely.
Written 11d ago.

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