Solar Panel Costs Close to $0.50/Watt
July 25th, 2012 by 
A fresh edition of GTM Research`s five-year report on the costs of solar photovoltaics has just been published (PV Technology, Production and Cost: 2012-2016 Outlook). To say that the reduction of costs in the last couple of years is surprising is an understatement.
“How wrong we were […] We didn’t really have an accurate, even semi-quantitative, understanding of the relationship between pricing, incentives, finance and demand.” Writes Shyam Mehta, one of the analysts at GTM Research.
The relationship with consumer demand, Chinese manufacturers, feed-in tariff schemes (FITs) and net metering, has largely been underestimated.
Prices will keep dropping
Mehta continues “That industry has sheer momentum behind it in terms of interested, well-capitalized parties, that technology innovation will happen at breathtaking speed, helping to push c-Si (silicon-based) module costs toward the $0.50/W mark at 17% module efficiencies over the next half-decade.”
The second figure in GTM Research`s new report, shows their cost-prognosis of the next coming years. According to the their prognosis, costs could be at 50c/Watt already in 2015/2016:
50c/Watt means that solar panel prices are on par with both oil and gas. Government officials from China and India has predicted that this will happen within 2020 and 2017, and now GTM Research pushes this threshold even further.
Whether or not GTM Research is right this time around can only be speculated in. “Truth be told, we are not a long way farther along in developing an understanding of the PV market than we were back in 2008,” Mehta writes.
Article by Mathias Aarre Maehlum who writes about solar panels and other renewable energy technologies at Energy informative.
photo: Living Off Grid.
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