Looking to the sun

Bigger factories, the use of automation and more efficient production methods are brightening the prospects for the solar sector

The solar industry has spent decades slashing the cost of generating electricity direct from the sun. Now it’s focusing on making panels even more powerful. With savings in equipment manufacturing hitting a plateau and more recently pressured by rising prices of raw materials, producers are stepping up work on advances in technology – building better components and employing increasingly sophisticated designs to generate more electricity from the same-sized solar farms.

“The first 20 years in the 21st-century saw huge reductions in module prices, but the speed of the reduction started to level off noticeably in the past two years,” said Xiaojing Sun, global solar research leader at Wood Mackenzie. “Fortunately, new technologies will create further cost-of-electricity reductions.” A push for more powerful solar equipment underscores how further cost