Other states are looking to do so as well.Like other Solar Subsidy Programs elsewhere in Czech,Germany,Spain,Australia too has seen solar energy costs fall much faster than subsidies.This has led to a boom in solar installations as the returns become very high.These costs are ultimately passed on the customer electricity bills drawing howls from the states.Large Wind Energy Producers like Origin Energy have also seen the prices of RECs decrease so that is not feasible to build new wind farm projects.On top of all this confusion,the Australian government can’t make up its mind on a Carbon Tax which will help it to meet the 2020 20% Green Energy Target.
India has been trying to build tidal power plants in order to take advantage of around 8 GW of potential tidal wave power capacity potential in India.Note Gujarat has been at the forefront of these efforts with most of the tidal power capacity Gulf of Cambay and Gulf of Kutch.While there have been reports of the go-ahead for these tidal energy plants,nothing concrete has come out of it .Note Tidal Energy is in a very immature stage compared to other forms of Renewable Energy like Solar,Wind and Biomass Energy.Tidal Energy like Wave Energy is still in the demo stage even in developed countries of the West where technology innovation is much higher.
Solar Farms or Giant Solar Power Projects consisting of thousand of solar panels installed on acres of land are increasing rapidly in the USA.While the European governments are discouraging the use of large installations of solar panels,the US is going the opposite way in installing these power plants.The US government recently approved of a number of Solar Thermal Power Projects worth several gigawatt recently.
France has had a rocky relationship with solar energy.Unlike other European countries France gets a huge amount of electricity from renewable sources namely nuclear energy.Its electricity prices are one of the lowest and it even exports electricity to neighbors.So the driver for increasing solar electricity is quite low in France compared to others like Spain and Italy.However France has seen a massive boom in solar installations in 2010 making it the 7th largest market in the world.France installed over 720 MW of solar in 2010 and faces a massive backlog of applications.The government got overwhelmed and called a sudden stop to all applications.The French government stupidly blamed Chinese solar panels for the solar deluge when it was its faulty solar Feed in Tariff Policy which was too generous.
Note China’s Solar Market is a highly competitive and protected one with outside solar companies hardly having any presence similar to Japan’s market.First Solar which signed a massive gigawatt contract to build a plant in Ordos has seen only delays as Chinese solar manufacturers opposed the plant.First Solar is still trying to build the plant signing a new JV with one of China’s 5 big utilities.eSolar another CSP company got a contract to build a plant with China but till date construction does not seem to have begun there also.The Chinese government seems mostly interested in high-tech technology (First Solar,eSolar) rather than run of the mill players.Even these technology companies have failed to make much headway.Remains to be seen whether SkyFuel Succeeds.
I have been consistently writing that Solar PV has leapfrogged far ahead of Solar Thermal Technology in the last couple of years.The entry of the low cost Chinese with huge scale and the fall in polysilicon costs have suddenly made the future survival of Solar Thermal Technology suspect.The Solar Thermal Advantages of energy storage is also overrated because it is cheaper to add energy storage to Solar PV as the following article shows.Note Solar PV has many other advantages of Solar Thermal anyway.The Rapidly Declining Costs of Solar PV in fact pose a massive threat to all other forms of Solar Technology including Thin Film which has recently seen a number of players gone bankrupt.The recent conversion of Solar Thermal Plants by Tessera,the losses being made by Solar Millenium due to delays are further evidence of the decline and possible obsolescence of Solar Thermal Technology.