Graph of the Day: Cost of Solar Cells
February 15, 2011
If today’s computer chips were the same size and cost as they were in 1975,
Apple’s iPod would cost $1 billion and be the size of a building.
From the American Energy Innovation Council.
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February 16, 2011 at 7:15 am
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February 17, 2011 at 9:44 pm
If you have the source data could we see that Cost Reduction curve in linear instead of log? It looks like it would be pretty dramatic! 🙂
Regards,
Larry Oliver
@tweetingdonal
February 17, 2011 at 9:52 pm
[…] Regardless of the graphic technique being used, it’s very very clear that Solar has become THE affordable alternative energy source, especially for a distributed grid. If today’s computer chips were the same size and cost as they were in 1975, Apple’s iPod would cost $1 billion and be the size of a building. From the American Energy Innovation Council. … Read More […]
February 18, 2011 at 4:29 am
This graph is a great pick-me-up… I was feeling a bit crummy today.
February 20, 2011 at 7:32 am
@ tweetingdonal
There is a program you can get from sourceforge.net that can estimate the source data. It is called “Engauge Digitizer”, and it takes a bit of fiddling with to figure it out. Nevertheless, you can set up the axes (even log-log axes) and click on the data points in a picture file, and the program can export a set of data that gives the x/y coordinates you clicked on.
So, from my Excel sheet, I see that the data as plotted on a linear scale show that there was a large drop in price at first (up until the 90’s). Now the price drop has leveled off and decreasing asymptotically.
Now, that may sound a bit discouraging, but let’s say the graph continues its trend down to roughly $0.70 or $0.80 per Watt when the cumulative module production reaches 100,000 MW. Under these circumstances, I set up a few formulas to see what the payback period would be for a solar farm, and it can be a big money maker even with $0.08 per kW-hr and a 0.15 capacity factor. I played it conservatively by assigning a very high maintenance, management and overhead cost per year.
Hell, even with the 2010 photovoltaic price of around $1.40 per Watt, a home-sized installation could pay itself back in as little as five years with a 0.3 capacity factor and $0.10 per kW-hr of electricity saved.