Solar Energy Perspectives - IEA

Solar Energy Perspectives: Conclusions and recommendations
In any case, however, solar energy will play a major role in enhancing energy security,
protecting economic stability and ensuring environmental protection, especially mitigating
climate change. Developing all available options to draw on this unlimited resource is of
utmost importance, if only as an insurance against uncertainties in other technology fields.
Support policies must be broadened, consolidated, strengthened and expanded, whether for
a very-high solar future or simply to make full exploitation of solar possible in case other
options cannot deliver.
• Policies need to be broadened, to fill critical gaps in coverage. Research, development
and demonstration need support, especially for those technologies that are the farthest
away from market viability, such as solar fuels and solar-enhanced biofuels. Specific
incentives are needed to encourage innovation, which most countries have yet to
introduce. Solar process heat is very rarely supported or promoted by any government
policy, yet its potential is important and its economics often more favourable even than
solar space heating.
• Policies need to be consolidated, especially those raising cost concerns due to excessive
success, such as feed-in tariffs for decentralised on-grid PV deployment. While
governments must help the public to understand better what constitutes payment for
energy and what is subsidy in the incentives, those must also be adjusted to keep pace
with rapidly declining costs, and avoid excessive remuneration levels as markets mature.
• Policies need to be strengthened, especially those that have so far provided insufficient
incentives, or have defined objectives only vaguely.
• Policies need to be expanded, in particular to sunny countries. The renewable energy
industry, and especially the solar sector, is fundamentally different from fossil fuels in that
the basic energy resource is freely available to all, albeit in varying amounts, and is
inexhaustible. Moreover, sunlight cannot be stored without being transformed. If it is not
captured when it arrives, it is lost forever. This suggests that the development of equipment
to harvest solar energy efficiently and inexpensively should be thought of as a global
public good. Literally everyone on the planet stands to benefit if this is accomplished.
Like the fight against AIDS, governments should work together in the undertaking,
pooling their efforts (and resources) without particular regard to national borders. For
example, thought needs to be given to how best to encourage solar energy investment
where it would have the greatest impact, i.e. in sunny countries. Even very informal
discussions of objectives could provide mutual encouragement to governments, sub
national authorities and the larger public. International electricity trade, where possible,
and financial assistance, in particular in facilitating access to capital, would also help
support solar energy deployment in sunny countries.
• For less sunny countries, contributing to solar energy technologies in sunny countries
may not be the most direct route to solving their own energy issues. But, it would
contribute to making these technologies competitive by stretching limited funds for
investment farther, accelerating the learning process, and enabling mass production with
greater economies of scale, which would benefit all countries. Efforts to bring solar
energy technologies to competitiveness or, at least, affordability will also help increase
access to energy and reduce poverty in remote areas, increase global energy security by
keeping fossil fuel consumption lower than otherwise, and effectively mitigate climate
change.
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© OECD/IEA, 2011