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Solar Power:
Sharp Sees Solar Power Costs Halving By 2010
BERLIN - Japan's Sharp Corp., the
world's biggest maker of solar cells, expects the cost of generating solar
power to halve by 2010 and to be comparable with that of nuclear power by
2030, Sharp's president said.
"By the year 2010 we'll be able to
halve generation costs," Katsuhiko Machida told Reuters in an interview on
Thursday. "By 2020 we expect a further reduction -- half of 2010 -- and by
2030 we expect half the 2020 level.
"By 2030 the cost will be comparable
to electricity produced by a nuclear power plant," said Machida, speaking
on the fringes of the IFA trade fair in Berlin, the world's biggest
consumer electronics fair.
Asked how the costs were likely to
compare with those for producing electricity from fossil fuels such as
coal, Machida replied: "Fossil fuel resources will be totally out by
then."
Solar electricity currently costs
about US$0.50 per kilowatt hour to produce, more than eight times as much
as that produced from fossil fuel.
The market is growing at a rate of
more than 30 percent per year but solar power still produces just a small
fraction of one percent of the world's energy.
The solar industry in general expects
the cost of producing solar power to fall by about 5 percent per year, on
average.
Machida said he expected that a
shortage of solar-grade silicon, the raw material from which solar panels
that harness the sun's energy are made, would ease by 2008 as silicon
makers step up production to catch up with soaring demand.
"In the first half of 2007, supply
capacity will be increased, so once we go into 2008, supply will be
catching up," he said.
Sharp has also been moving towards
producing more so-called thin-film solar panels, which use less silicon
but are less efficient than traditional solar panels.
Machida said the cost to produce
solar energy from thin film was still around one-and-a-half times as high
as making it from the normal, multicrystalline type.
"The mainstream will still be
multicrystalline," Machida said, but he added that demand for thin-film
would also continue to increase, for example, for specialist varieties
such as see-through panels for window glass.
Machida said the sun could send
enough energy to Earth in as little as an hour to provide for all the
world's energy needs for one year.
"We're wasting a lot of energy," he
said.
Source: Reuters News Service 2006
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