Photovoltaic Energy

Photovoltaic energy generation is going to play an increasing part in the source of electricity in France. In fact, in western Europe the production of electricity from solar sources has risen dramatically in the last few years. This region has seen the fastest growth compared to the rest of world and by 2004 had overtaken the United States in terms of mega watts of electricity generated. When we look at the percentage of photovoltaic installations in the world in 2009, the US had a 7.5% share of the market whilst Germany had 54.7%.

In all, Europe accounts for 70% of the installations in the world, which expressed another way equates to 14 giga watts. Of course this is still a small percentage of the amount of electricity consumed world-wide, which in 2008 was 20 169 tera watt hours (a tera watt is one million million watts).

The potential of energy from the sun is not endless but in terms of the known reserves of gas, oil, coal and uranium, it could be thought of as being so. The energy radiated by the sun each year is 11 250 times greater than the needs of the world's population, so whilst predictions have been made of how many years there are before we have consumed the accessible fossil fuels, no such estimate exists for solar. Despite the overwhelming availability of solar energy in 2008, it represented only 1.3% of the world-wide production of electricty from renewable sources.

Although solar does have significant advantages in that it is free, abundant and very practical for generating electricity in remote locations, it is not the complete panaçea. First of all it does not work at night; it is expensive to build solar power stations and solar cells are expensive to produce compared to the amount of electricity they produce in their lifetime, although the cost of both is reducing as technology advances.