Solar Energy Perspectives - IEA

Chapter 3: Solar electricity
• Administrative bottlenecks may result from overlapping or conflicting official objectives
and requirements, such as from relevant municipalities, regional authorities and
government departments. One effective way to overcome such difficulties could be to
organise regular meetings of a group of sufficiently high-level staff from the various
relevant administrative authorities. Working together, they can overcome difficulties in
ways that respect their specific objectives. Such practices appear to have helped solar
projects survive administrative bottlenecks in California.
• Although solar electricity is on the verge of becoming cost-effective on grids in some
markets, its deployment currently requires significant support in most. These support
policies, the strengths and the weaknesses of the many forms they may take, and their
overall costs are considered in detail in Chapter 10.
• The effective deployment of solar electricity is inseparable from the deployment of
several other renewable electricity sources, notably wind power (especially under
temperate and cold climates) and hydro power (especially under hot and humid
climates). It is also inseparable from an important development of smart grids, i.e. grids
that are able to convey electricity in both directions, from generation to transmission to
distribution levels and vice-versa, while conveying market information as well as
electricity. Policies relevant to the deployment of smart grids are detailed in an IEA
technology roadmap (IEA, 2010e).
• Integrated thermal energy storage is a prominent feature of solar thermal electricity today,
as it allows CSP plants to match demand peaks. Its value ought to be recognised and
rewarded through market design and/or policy. By contrast, it appears that electric
storage for PV electricity does not need to be developed in the next two decades. Largescale
electricity storage to facilitate large-scale penetration of solar PV electricity would
need to be deployed only in the longer term, especially in temperate countries, where its
deployment may in fact be primarily driven by the need to offset the variability of wind
power, as shown in Chapter 11.
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