Solar News

APRIL 22, 2012 BY ZACHARY SHAHAN 

We’ve published about 24 solar energy stories in the past week. In addition to those, here are some other top solar stories from around the interwebs (be sure to catch the picture at the bottom):

Solar Market Research

• McKinsey & Company projects that solar is entering a period of maturation in its new report “Solar power: Darkest before dawn.” The report “finds that underlying PV costs are likely to continue to drop as manufacturing capacity doubles over the next three to five years. Indeed, the cost of a typical commercial system could fall 40 percent by 2015 and an additional 30 percent by 2020, permitting companies to capture attractive margins while vigorously installing new capacity.” And this is all with big projected cuts to solar subsidies.
• Solar power is expected to explode in the coming 5 years, as solar becomes cheaper than grid electricity for consumers in more and more places. ”The awakening of the US solar market will be driven by grid parity within each region. Federal incentives provide a good foundation for the expansion of the solar industry but state-level incentives are still needed to truly make solar energy competitive in each regional market. Over the next five years we believe that solar power will reach grid parity in a large portion of the US market, thus opening up the opportunity for significant expansion of the industry in the years to come,” says renewable energy advisor Eric Graber-Lopez of BlueWave Capital.

Source: Clean Technica (http://s.tt/19Myd)