IEA: Solar power to generate quarter of global electricity by 2050

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has given one of the clearest signals to date that it expects renewable to dominate the global energy complex over the coming decades, with the release of new figures that predict solar energy could account for between 20 and 25 per cent of electricity production worldwide by 2050.

The agency today released two new road maps for the solar photovoltaic (PV) and concentrated solar power (CSP) sectors at the Mediterranean Solar Plan Conference in Valencia, predicting that both technologies will enjoy stellar growth over the next four decades.

Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the IEA, said that combined, the solar technologies had the potential to enhance global energy security while reducing energy-related CO2 emissions by almost six billion tonnes a year by 2050.

The two reports said that solar PV and CSP technologies had the potential to complement one another, with PV dominating the distributed energy market and CSP providing utility-scale solar power through large solar plants.

The IEA predicted that together they could generate 9,000 terawatt hours of energy in 2050, representing up to a quarter of anticipated electricity output.

However, Tanaka warned that solar's emergence as a mainstream energy source was dependent on the continued development of government-backed incentives and favourable regulatory environments. "This decade is crucial for effective policies to enable the development of solar electricity," he said. "Long-term oriented, predictable solar-specific incentives are needed to sustain early deployment and bring both technologies to competitiveness in the most suitable locations and times."

Significantly, the IEA said that if such incentives are maintained, PV installations on residential and commercial buildings will become price competitive with grid electricity retail prices in many regions by 2020. It also predicted that large utility-scale solar PV farms could compete with fossil fuels on price by 2030, with PV providing 11 per cent of global electricity by 2030.

Similarly, the road map for CSP predicted that it would be price competitive as a form of base load energy by about 2025, with the technology again providing about 11 per cent of global electricity supply by 2050.

Advocates of solar power have long maintained that improvements in the technology would allow it to compete on cost with grid power by the end of this decade, and the new reports highlight that the IEA is now close to endorsing that prediction.

The solar road maps are part of a series of reports from the IEA designed to provide guidance on the development of low-carbon technologies. Similar reports on biofuels, wind energy, electric vehicles, carbon capture and storage, and efficient industrial processes have already been released and further reports on low-carbon buildings, geothermal power, smart grids and nuclear power are in the pipeline.

Work on the road maps began in 2008 and is running parallel to research undertaken by the International Renewable Energy Agency, which was launched last year, partly in response to the perceived sidelining of the renewable energy sector by the IEA.