Solar Power World

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The photovoltaic (PV) market now has an eye-popping, interactive bevy of maps and charts that can let anyone know where PV panels are being installed, how big they are, how much they cost and how fast the industry is booming.

Interested in where PV is installed in the U.S. and how it has grown over time? Go to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Web site, openpv.nrel.gov, and find a dynamic time map showing PV installation activity in the U.S. from 1998 to 2009.

Want to know how fast the cost per watt is plunging in Wisconsin or California? Push “Explore” on the Web site to open the PV Market Mapper application and call up any state in the nation to see graphs on the number of PV installations, cost and capacity over time.

Want to know if your old friends from Kalamazoo or Kokomo ever got around to installing PV on their roof? Zero in by zip code and neighborhood and you can probably find that out too.

NREL Geographers Conceived an Open PV Community

The Open PV database is the brainchild of geographers in the Data Analysis and Visualization Group within the Strategic Energy Analysis Center at NREL.

They’re building a community of users who are willing to share information about PV installations. The project is a living, breathing and dynamic database that people can use to explore the U.S. PV market in essentially real-time.

NREL is accepting data uploads from utility companies, local and state governments and the public.

So far, Open PV has catalogued more than 64,000 systems with a total capacity of about 733 megawatts.

They know there are more systems out there (there must be more than one system in Illinois, for example) but are confident the numbers will soar as the data-sharing phenomenon catches hold among installers, government officials and utility companies.

Solar Trade Groups Embracing OPEN PV

The two largest solar trade groups, the Solar Energy Industries Association and the Solar Electric Power Association, are fans of the Open PV project and are encouraging their members to use the maps and graphs as tools to grow their businesses.

Installers can use the data to examine their positions in the market and, when they share data, can benefit from the name-recognition that goes with it.

If people want to see the three or five top installers in their neighborhood, they’ll be able to zoom in and find that out. If they want to know the installers in their region, they’ll be able to find that too.

Users Can Explore National, Local Trends

Open PV’s Market Mapper launches the user into a kind of time-space continuum.

Users can click on their own state to see how it compares to other states or the nation as a whole in such variables as cost, number of installations and growth. They can do the same for counties or zip codes within each state.

People will soon be able to add comments and even upload photos of their systems.

Using the project’s new search tool, users can ask complex questions, such as: How many systems of 10 kilowatts or more are in the state of New Jersey and where are they? They can surf through data from several states and find they have questions of their own, such as how Massachusetts enjoyed such a steep plunge in cost-per-watt, from $15 in 2002 to about $7 in 2009.

Those who want to contribute data can create an account and visit the “Share Data” page.

An installer might upload the information that he has put PV on 200 homes, or perhaps a county energy commission will report the total installations for a three-month period.

Recently, the state of Massachusetts uploaded information on 1,500 PV installations without any solicitation from NREL.

Zeroing In on Systems, Data

California alone has more than 50,000 PV installations recorded in Open PV project, more than three-fourths of the nation’s total.

New Jersey is second with 3,192, then Massachusetts, New York, Arizona and Connecticut.

Open PV captures steep cost decline

Open PV’s graphs usually show the per-watt cost of a solar installation falling as the size of the project increases.

One of the graphs on the site uses bars to show the rather sharp decline in average cost per watt to install PV systems from 2000 to 2007.

President Obama has set a goal for solar energy to be competitive with fossil-fuel-based energy by 2015.

The Open PV project went on line last October.

www.nrel.gov