Global Gathering Addresses PV Role in Energy Prosperity, Climate Change Mitigation

Scientists from the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), along with their counterparts from solar energy research institutes in Germany and Japan, gathered recently to discuss the future of photovoltaics (PV) and assess its contributions to increasing global prosperity, energy security and mitigation of climate change.
 
The Global Alliance of Solar Energy Research Institutes (GA-SERI) convened a worldwide gathering of 50 experts from Germany, Japan, the US and elsewhere to discuss the future of PV. Representatives from research institutes, industry and funding and financial organizations met in Freiburg, Germany, for the initial GA-SERI Terawatt Workshop. Discussions centered on the challenges that must be overcome to transform the energy system and enable PV to supply a major portion of the world’s energy in the coming decades.
 
“PV is on a pathway to low cost,” said Greg Wilson, director of NREL’s Materials Applications and Performance Center and co-director of the National Center for Photovoltaics. “When you add PV to inexpensive storage or another means of introducing flexibility into the grid, PV can be attractive as a primary energy source.”
 
Workshop participants expressed confidence that a substantial expansion of manufacturing capacity will be spurred on by demand for PV catching up to supply. This growth will carry PV to a new level of energy impact – to the terawatt (TW) scale, where 1 TW equals 1,000 gigawatts (GW). Annual global PV installations reached 60 GW in 2015, which is approaching global production capacity.
 
An increasingly flexible electricity grid, increased availability of low-cost energy storage and demand-side management also will play key roles in enabling accelerated PV deployment.
 
The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy (Germany), the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (Japan), and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (US) are the member institutes of GA-SERI, which was founded in 2012.