New Hampshire, USA For every revolutionary advance in solar, there are countless evolutionary dead-ends — technologies that were well worth exploring, but ones that ultimately failed to live up to the mantra of "cut costs or die."
These are the Solyndras of the world. Their science may have raised the bar, but ultimately they were judged by the market, which measures the bar on cost alone. From that perspective, it’s more like a limbo line — “How low can you go?”
For an industry struggling to get to price stability because of factors unrelated to technology, it can be a difficult exercise to envision which advancements will get to move on and which will be referred to only in the past tense.
In a new report titled “Searching for Game Changers in Photovoltaics Materials Innovations,” Lux Research details the emerging technologies that will thrive and those that will eventually sputter out. Along the way, the report gives us a couple new acronyms to squirrel away as we consider the ROI on our R&D.
The basis for much of the research is the volume of development funding we’re seeing right now, and the forecast that the industry will return to double digit margins by 2014. Conceivably, once those margins return, many of the innovations in the background today will be ready to step into the market. The formula to get there is based on solid economics — the technologies that succeed will offer both a low cost per watt and the ability to scale using existing PV infrastructure.
For an industry struggling to get to price stability because of factors unrelated to technology, it can be a difficult exercise to envision which advancements will get to move on and which will be referred to only in the past tense.
In a new report titled “Searching for Game Changers in Photovoltaics Materials Innovations,” Lux Research details the emerging technologies that will thrive and those that will eventually sputter out. Along the way, the report gives us a couple new acronyms to squirrel away as we consider the ROI on our R&D.
The basis for much of the research is the volume of development funding we’re seeing right now, and the forecast that the industry will return to double digit margins by 2014. Conceivably, once those margins return, many of the innovations in the background today will be ready to step into the market. The formula to get there is based on solid economics — the technologies that succeed will offer both a low cost per watt and the ability to scale using existing PV infrastructure.
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