Concentrating Solar to Reach 18 Gigawatts by 2020

Companies will spend between $80 billion and $200 billion on concentrating-solar installations in the next 12 years, according to a report released Tuesday by the Prometheus Institute and Greentech Media.

That includes more than $30 billion worth of plants that companies have announced in just the last six months, according the report.

"While the conventional sources of energy will have increasing difficulty in simply maintaining prices and production volumes in the face of fuel stock pressure and grid maintenance requirements, [concentrating solar power] technologies will get cheaper and better understood for a long time to come," the report states. "The dawn of large-scale concentrating solar power is here, and the forecasts shows very few clouds in the sky."

Still, the report forecasts that all those projects -- including about 12 gigawatts of concentrating solar-thermal capacity and about 6 gigawatts of concentrating photovoltaics -- will make up only about 6.2 percent of a 288-gigawatt solar market in 2020.

The report predicts that concentrating photovoltaics will have the smallest market in 12 years, becoming a "niche technology" that will do well in applications that need high efficiency in a limited space, for example.

For utility-scale applications, it will have trouble competing with solar-thermal, which has the advantage of thermal storage, while in commercial applications, standard PV will have lower costs, according to the report. However, concentrating PV will pick up some business in the 100-kilowatt to 100-megawatt markets, the report predicts.

"CPV technologies will suffer from slower ramping and scale, but should become competitive at the utility scale within the next decade," the report states.

Brad Hines, chief technology officer at Soliant Energy, which makes concentrating solar panels, disagrees that concentrating PV will be a niche technology in every market.

"I think CPV probably will be a niche in the utility space, but we’re going after commercial rooftops, and in that market, power density is highly prized," he said. "We believe we’ll compete strongly against flat-plate PV on commercial rooftops and distributed applications ... where we think power density is very important and delivers real dollar-per-watt savings."

And Robert Wilder, CEO of WilderShares, which manages several clean-energy indices, said the industry still has high hopes for concentrating PV.

"In the quiver of solar technologies, concentrating is an arrow that people are increasingly looking to," he said.

Nonetheless, he added, concentrating PV technologies today are prototypes, not commercial products. "They don’t seem to be getting there as quickly as I would like," he said.