L R AS Published on Saturday 2 September 2023 - n° 455 - Categories:evolution-stat
After rising in 2021, the cost of solar energy will fall again in 2022 and 2023
The average cost of producing solar energy (LCOE) worldwide has fallen by an average of 3% between 2021 and 2022, according to IRENA (the International Renewable Energy Agency). It has returned to
0.049/kWh. A large part of this fall is due to lower solar panel manufacturing and installation costs: the average installation cost for projects in 2022 was 4% lower than in 2021. This is despite the fact that the price of panels rose by between 4% and 6% between 2020 and 2021. The price of high-efficiency panels, which had risen by 6% between 2020 and 2021, rose by only 1% between 2021 and 2022.
Operating and maintenance costs in Europe would be $10/kW per year. In Germany, they reached $9/kW per year in 2017 (sic).
Lower operating costs make more solar projects financially viable. It encourages more investment in the sector. Taking Germany as an example, Irena notes that every time the country's photovoltaic capacity doubles, the cost of maintaining a solar project falls by between 15.7% and 18.2%. This suggests that the more projects there are in operation, the cheaper it is to manage them. This could encourage more investment in the future.
IRENA qualifies these assertions :
considerable regional variation exists within this trend between 2021 and 2022. In particular, much of the decline in installation costs has occurred in the Americas and the Middle East, while Asian and European companies have seen the cost of solar installations rise: In Greece, for example, the increase was 51% over the same period; in Denmark, the rise was 36%; in France and Germany, it was 34%. In China, the price of adding new large-scale photovoltaic panels has risen by 6% between 2021 and 2022.
The world needs to add an average of 1,000 GW of renewable energy per year until 2030 if the 1.5°C temperature rise limit is to be respected, i.e. three times the installations in 2022.
https://www.pv-tech.org/irena-global-solar-lcoe-fell-3-between-2021-and-2022/
PV Tech of 30 August 2023
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The development of other renewable energies :
The LCOE for onshore wind has decreased by 5% from $0.035/kWh to $0.033/kWh between 2021 and 2022. The LCOE for new offshore wind projects has increased by 2% in 2022, from $0.079/kWh to $0.081/kWh.
Photovoltaic energy has become 29% cheaper than electricity obtained from the cheapest fossil fuels.
PV Magasine of 31 August 2023
Editor's note Irena emphasises the rise in panel and installation prices between 2020 and 2021, which had gone unnoticed.
The document was written before the fall in panel prices in 2023 and before the normalisation of supply costs. We can therefore deduce that the fall in purchase and installation costs will continue in 2023 and 2024. This will encourage more installations.
As for tripling the number of installations, this is probably conceivable in absolute terms, but the idea comes up against the practicalities: having access to land, administrative authorisations and qualified installation staff, plus the growing difficulties with the grid. Then there's the question of how to deal with intermittent power supply, which isn't really an issue at the moment.
