Present Situation and Challenges Ahead

Wafer-based crystalline silicon has been the dominant technology since the birth of photovoltaics. It is abundant, reliable and scientifically well understood, as it has enjoyed the knowledge and technology originally developed for the microelectronics 

Amongst the largest areas of improvement, the thickness of silicon wafers has decreased from 400 pm in 1990 to 240 pm in 2005 and around 200 pm nowadays, cell surface area has increased from 100 to 240 cm and modules have improved in efficiency from about 10% in 1990 to an average of about 13-15% today, with the best performers up to above 17%. Further, manufacturing facilities have increased from the typical 1-5 MW per year size of1990 to several hundred megawatts per year today, with the expectation of gigawatt-sized factories to be seen soon. 

The challenge for the whole PV sector is to reduce manufacturing costs and increase volumes in order to provide electricity at prices comparable to conventional sources (and therefore being capable of getting rid of incentives) and to represent a much larger share in the energy mix compared with the negligible numbers of today (well below 0.1% of the electricity supply world-wide). 

The roadmap has been intentionally represented in terms of prices, because that is what is perceived by the public. This obviously means the expected costs are much lower. If this is the case, the period 2010-20 is when PV electricity will be competitive with retail prices from the grid (starting from the sunniest regions) and peak load generation. Later, the electricity can be competitive at the wholesale level, that is, with all conventional electricity production today. 

From what we know today, crystalline silicon-based technology has the capability to continue to follow the established price experience curve, with direct production costs expected to achieve significant reduction to around 1.00 in 2013 and 0.75 in 2020 and even lower in the long term. This is true for other technologies 

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