The solar industry has spent decades slashing the cost of generating electricity directly from the sun. Now it’s focusing on making panels even more powerful.
With savings in equipment manufacturing hitting a plateau, and pressured more recently by rising prices of raw materials, producers are stepping up work on advances in technology — building better components and employing increasingly sophisticated designs to generate more electricity from the same-sized solar farms.
"The first 20 years in the 21st century saw huge reductions in module prices, but the speed of the reduction started to level off noticeably in the past two years,” said Xiaojing Sun, global solar research leader at Wood Mackenzie Ltd. "Fortunately, new technologies will create further cost-of-electricity reductions.”