by Edward Milford
17. September 2009 07:18
I was very interested to read a recent report in the New York Times about a plan for First Solar to build a 2 GW PV plant in the Mongolian desert. This would complete a remarkable transition for the PV industry, and one that a series of books we have published may have contributed to in a small way.
Back in 2003 we published the first book of what is now a series of three on Energy from the Desert. These are the output of an International Energy Agency task, coordinated by Professor Kurokawa from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan. We launched it at the World Photovolatic Conference in Osaka in May that year. The largest PV systems then were of the order of 1 MW, and, like many other observers, I thought that to scale up plants by three orders of magnitude would probably take three decades at least.
Fast forward to the end of 2006 when the second book in the Energy from the Desert series was published, and ground-mounted systems in Germany and Spain were approaching the 100 MW mark and the first two orders of magnitude had been passed. Now we are launching the third Energy from the Desert book at the European PV Conference in Hamburg next week, and what seemed like a pipe-dream just six years ago is potentially nearing reality.
One key reason, of course, is modularity. Scaling up PV plants does not require significant new engineering solutions, simply putting more panels together in the array. The books that are the output of the task have shown clearly how such plants could theoretically be put together, and it is exciting to see concrete plans being discussed to achieve this. Clean energy on this scale will be vital if we are to have a chance of long-term climate stability.
If you are visiting the European PV conference, make sure you visit the Renewable Energy World bookshop on stand B4U 50 to get your copy of the latest Energy from the Desert book.
