What is it about?
Solar photovoltaic (PV) energy, a renewable and clean source of energy, can help mitigate climate change and the global energy crisis. In this study, researchers looked at the PV industry and examined if it could grow fast enough to meet global energy demands. The study found that the technology to achieve these goals exists. Moreover, new technologies that are in development will be able to be put into commercial use in the next few years. The PV industry will achieve the efficiency, economy, and energy and emission goals to meet global needs within a few years. But it still faces challenges from other areas, such as slow growth in the demand for solar cells. Moreover, the PV industry will experience a market down-turn in 2050 unless its growth increases above 25% by 2032.
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Why is it important?
Scientists are unsure if the PV industry can meet the global energy demand by 2050. This global energy demand is roughly 30 times current PV energy production. This paper proves that this demand can be easily met. But there are still a few challenges to meet the set target. These include a widespread lack of eagerness to adopt green energy. This lack of eagerness comes from the long time frame for climate change, which pushes short-term goals such as economics, politics, and power to the forefront of people’s priorities. This can be addressed by implementing governmental incentives to switch to PV energy. KEY TAKEAWAY: PV energy needs to be adopted as a much faster rate to meet global energy demands and keep the PV market sustainable. Governmental incentives are essential to achieving this.
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Future challenges for photovoltaic manufacturing at the terawatt level, Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, September 2020, American Institute of Physics,
DOI: 10.1063/5.0020380.
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