Thanking the Solar Early Adopters.

Which is a smarter economic decision- the person who buys the first ipod in the market as soon as it becomes available, or the person who waits for a year until better next generation of the product is available at a much lower price? While the person who bought the first ipod must have had compelling reasons to buy it then, one could argue that by waiting a little longer, the second person was able to get a much better product a lower price- all the person needed was a little time.

The same thing can be true in solar markets. The first generation users are the European countries including Germany, Italy, Spain, England, who starting around 2009 have aggressively pursued renewable energy. These early adopters have experimented with various financial models have achieved success and failures in a broad spectrum, all helpful in providing very insightful reasons what to do and what not to do while pursing solar. 

•   Solar Manufacturing: Their heavily subsidized market helped to activate the solar manufacturing industry, making the industries sustain while the manufacturing cost where high, while lessons were learned towards making various technological improvements and economics of scale. It basically helped to sustain solar through its initial tough times.
•     Identifying soft costs: While the manufactures were working on manufacturing challenges, people quickly realized that marketing, permitting, installation or “soft cost” consisted of a significant part of installation solar panels. This helped develop various innovative financial and  permitting techniques to minimize these soft costs help making solar panels more economical. 
•    Understanding effects of electric market: The effect of increasing solar PV on the traditional electric markets was not well understood. The traditional market include a single monopoly utility who is in charge of providing electricity usually from large generations, and are guaranteed recovery. Solar PV are small generators put in the distribution sector, and are owned by the multitude of owners. It was soon realized that the much feared “utility death spiral” where traditional utilities would slowly start to go out of business was true- unless they start to re-define their purpose in the market was soon realized. 
•     Technological challenges: This perhaps was the most important aspect of solar insurrection. While it is easy to wish and make goals for large renewable energy integration, it was unclear how much the grid would be able to handle renewable energy which are intermittent and are completely in different in nature from traditional power plants. Many were skeptic of the ability to the grid to handle solar in large capacity; many in US still do. However, we have seen industrialized countries such as Germany been able to get more than 17% of its total electricity through solar, and other countries such as Denmark where in certain instances have been able to feed all of its electric demand through renewable energy sources. This helped proved that solar and other renewable energy in fact can be integrated in the traditional grid.

How long should one wait?

Thanks to the first users, the solar industries we have been able to understand come up with ways to figure out much of the major challenges. One could argue that there is much to gain if you wait even longer time. Is the costs of solar doing to come down more in the future? Looking at historical record, and future projections, the answer is a definite yes. But how long should one wait?

The answer empirically is quite easy, one can simply analyze cost benefit of the investment and do it if there is more to gain. Cost of solar for most are the same- the material cost, and other soft cost; however benefits of solar range widely based on ideals of the individual. For many, the effect of increasing carbon is the greatest moral challenge human civilization has ever faced. For them, including the many early adopters including many European countries little extra cents in their electric bill is trivial. For the rest cost, the cost of solar panels are already at “grid parity” meaning that the cost of solar electricity is a same price as the grid. And the rest who are still skeptical, they could wait a little longer where the cost of solar PV get so low that it would be stupid not to switch to solar.

Just depending on the time frame, solar electricity will keep increasing. Technically, the world has always been powered by the Sun, yet soon enough I look forward to a time when it is fully powered by solar PV.