Solar Power World

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The International Energy Agency (IEA) released two Roadmaps on Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) and Photovoltaic (PV) electricity production during the Mediterranean Solar Plan Conference taking place in Valencia, Spain. In introducing the Roadmaps, IEA Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka underscored that solar energy could represent 20 to 25% of global electricity production by 2050.

These two Technology Roadmaps are part of a series that will cover a total of 19 energy technologies divided between supply and demand side applications. Their aim is to enable energy technology development to quickly gain momentum in order to confront global sustainability and energy security challenges. Each Roadmap addresses technical, legal, policy, economic and organizational aspects of advancing development of these respective technologies.

The Solar PV Roadmap emphasizes that this technology is already reliable and commercially viable and needs to be backed up with long-term policy support structures to ensure its broad implementation. If done right, the report finds that PV holds the potential to achieve competitive parity with other forms of electricity generation by 2020 and could provide 11% of global electricity production by 2050. As this occurs however, energy storage and management are foreseen to become more and more of a challenge for future research and development

www.iea.org