Global Photovoltaic market to boom on clean energy prospects

LONDON (Scrap Monster): The dependence on fossil fuels and the associated volatility of their international prices, coupled with increasing concerns over the greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, has led to the evolution of the concept of renewable energy during the past few years.

In the wake of this, global photovoltaic industry has been witnessing tremendous momentum on the back of growing concern towards declining conventional energy resources and highly volatile oil prices across the globe.

The industry has qualified as the most feasible solutions and has been increasingly gaining considerable attention among industry players all around the world. With the growing demand for clean energy sources, the manufacturing and deployment of solar PV cells and photovoltaic arrays have dramatically expanded during the past few years, resulting in the augmented market competition and abolishment of monopoly.

With the growing demand for energy worldwide, the global PV market gets double in every two years, thus leading to reduction in price and increase in efficiency of modules. Moreover, increasing government support in the form of incentives will propel the growth of the annual installations in coming years, the annual photovoltaic installation globally is expected to reach around 71 GW by 2014. 

According to report “Global Photovoltaic Market Forecast to 2013” by RNCOS, Germany and Japan are the clear leaders in terms of PV cumulative installation and annual PV installation. However, the annual installations in Japan will hamper in future due to the recent natural disaster. Although EU members and the Asia Pacific countries are heavily investing in new PV technologies and production facilities, a lot of work still needs to be done especially at the financial and marketing fronts. 

Further, the report anticipates that, the future of PV market will largely depend on the government's enforcement of existing or new support mechanisms across the world. Besides, competition among the major manufacturers is expected to intensify, with new players entering the market as the potential for PV opens up. 

Growth in the global PV industry has been triggered by favorable government policies and investments worth billions of dollars made in European countries, followed by Japan, and the US. Thus, Europe captured nearly 70% of the total annual installed PV capacity in 2010, with Germany and Spain leading the front.

The solar cell manufacturing is gaining significant momentum on the back of surging demand for PV systems installations around the world. Besides developments in the developed countries, some fast growing Asian economies have shown notable improvements in the overall PV industry progress.

Traditionally high deployment cost of PV cells had been the major hurdle for the development of the global PV industry. However, with rapid technological developments in the PV industry and government initiatives, PV production cost has considerably declined. Now, the developing countries are also actively participating in the deployment of this technology and are considering it to reduce their dependency on fossil fuels.