Chairmen’s Message
The market growth for photovoltaic (PV) devices in the last five years has been phenomenal: In 2010 alone, the total globally installed capacity has almost doubled, to a total now of more than 35 Gigawatt of installed power, creating the annual electricity output of five nuclear power plants. The sector is currently valued at more than $ 50 billion per year. Rapid decrease in cost and increase in efficiency will further fuel this development towards the widespread, silent, harvesting of free sunshine for electricity production by semiconductor technology.
Germany has been a major driver of this development by offering preferential feed-in opportunities for PV power at guaranteed feed-in rates for uncapped quantities of electricity. In recent years, the US market has also begun to experience rapid growth. Recent extensions and revisions of the 30% Federal Investment Tax credit make investment into PV attractive for both investors and system owners. Additionally, more regions of the US are debating and passing legislation to broaden incentives at both the State and city levels and to create favorable investment conditions. The US Department of Energy¹s SunShot Initiative, announced in 2011 to bring down installed costs of PV to $1/Wp, represents an ambitious effort to accelerate installed PV price declines. We address both components of this Initiative in our program: the cost of modules and of the balance of systems.
These factors are enabling PV to become competitive and profitable, leading us towards a major PV deployment in America. The technology promises to significantly impact how electric power is generated in the United States, in addition to providing an important economic boost to the US manufacturing sector. A more critical aspect of wide PV deployment in the future under discussion will be US energy security.
The first PV Roll-out meeting, a European-American Solar Deployment Conference, took place in February 2011 in Boston. It was a great success: more than 100 delegates enjoyed the opportunity to discuss, with distinguished speakers from the US, Germany and other countries, technology issues of PV deployment, market support policies and market introduction obstacles. The satisfaction rate of the participants was greater than 90%. The second PV Rollout workshop will give an opportunity to update the discussion of technical, economic, and political hurdles to rapid and widespread PV deployment in the US. Conference speakers will address additionally new trends in module design and balance of system components in the PV supply chain.
We invite you to participate in our conference and to join in the growing excitement about PV. Hear from developers of new PV concepts and from system integrators who implement these concepts to drive innovation and cost reduction. Due to different levels of PV deployment between Europe and the US, this transatlantic conference will leverage the European experience to accelerate PV deployment here. Experts active in the European market will be presenting and will be available to network with guests interested in tapping into their experience. At the same time, this conference will consider the distinctive aspects of the North American markets to ensure that the correct solutions are found for different areas.
We are looking for you – the experts in the field of PV from both sides of the Atlantic!
