|
Indeed! However, generation companies bidding on PPAs are in a somewhat different situation from LED lighting customers; if they bid 2% higher than the competition, they lose the deal, and if they bid 2% lower than what they'll actually produce, they build the plant and lose money on the deal. So if the average panel efficiency over a 20-year PPA is 91.0% of the initial efficiency (as this article suggests), but they'd budgeted for 95.4%, that's potentially a huge deal for them; it's the difference between being 2.3% low and 2.3% high. By contrast, there are very few businesses that will be unprofitable if their LED lightbulbs burn out 2.3% faster than predicted. (LED lightbulbs burning out is a stupid market-for-lemons market failure, but that's a different topic.) Panels getting better is actually another potential risk for these projects—if, three years from now, low-cost PV modules cost €0.09 per peak watt instead of €0.17 like today, then PV plants built at that point will have dramatically lower costs than PV plants built today, and probably PPAs signed then will also have dramatically lower costs. When plants are built without a PPA, this could result in those plants being "stranded assets" that can't make enough money to pay the interest on the bank loan, like many coal plants today, but even when there is a PPA, the electric utilities and ratepayers (who in many cases are also taxpayers) have strong incentives to find ways to circumvent it, for example through inflation or bankruptcy. Now, €0.09/Wp sounds like a ridiculously low price; window glass, for example, costs substantially more than that. It's hard to see how PV panels could reduce their raw material use enough to get that low. So maybe it won't happen. Or maybe we'll find a way. (In Derctuo, for example, I suggested that new solar modules could use chicken wire instead of glass, though that might drop the efficiency of low-cost panels from 16% to 15%.) |