Trends of the Solar Power Industry

An installer’s point of view on the solar power industry’s future. Feed-in tariffs will begin to replace the present widely used model for encouraging solar power installations which is giving rebates for installed watts.

Rebates don’t give incentives for producing more clean energy and the number of installed watts doesn’t always translate to produce watts due to installation issues and equipment efficiencies.

Feed-in tariffs rewards the solar power producer by paying them a rate for the electricity they feed back in to the grid at 3-4x the actual retail rate. So home owners could get a return on their investment by paying $0.11/kw-hr for power but selling power back to the grid for $.45/kw-hr that is produced by their solar panels.

The biggest advantage of feed-in tariffs is they actually encourage clean energy production and energy efficiency. Germany already used the feed-in tariffs successfully, and several other programs have been started in Florida, California, and Ontario. New Jersey, Michigan, and several other states also started similar initiatives.

The micro inverter was a discovery that improved solar power systems, by altering and conditioning the power directly as it comes out of the panel. Their price is under $200 so homeowners can install one panel, and expand as much as they like.

MIT and Stanford are among the universities working to solve a central issue of all renewable energy sources: storage. They dedicated tens of millions of dollars to research and development of battery technology, and their discoveries helped to make lighter more affordable and environmentally friendly batteries.