Talk:Solar power by country

Contradiction

These two statements appear mutually contradictory.

"The world's largest solar power plant is located in the Mojave Desert. Solel[11], an Israeli company, operates the plant, which consists of 1000 acres (4 km²) of solar reflectors."

"The 10 megawatt Bavaria Solarpark in Germany is the world's largest solar electric system, covering 25 hectares (62 acres) with 57,600 photovoltaic panels. [4]"

Perhaps the author can resolve this.

Ordinary Person 09:21, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

The second is a large photovoltaic plant. The first is a much much larger solar trough plant. Article sorted out. Rmhermen 17:32, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Serpa

2007.03.29 - Serpa is now fully functional

PV or Solar Power?

This article is not clear whether it talks about PV only, or Solar power as a whole. Jdpipe 00:34, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

"But as all industrialised nations share a need for electricity, it is clear that solar power will increasingly be used to supply a cheap, reliable electricity supply."

Solar pv use is certainly on the rise, but solar pv can hardly be called cheap. It is positively high priced, can only compete with grid electricity when doing so on a skewed playing field, ie with one or more of the following situations:

• grid connection not present
• govt or someone else pays for part of your system, and you only consider your part of the cost
• someone pays you to generate and use electricity - bizarre as this sounds, it is now standard practice in Britain.

The non-expert reader seeing the sentence quoted would think solar pv cheap, but its anything but. Tabby 12:59, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

I took out "cheap" and some other stuff, but put "economic". The conditions that make it economic can be discussed if you like, and if you have a good source, but obviously the solar power is economic for some reason, and not necessarily limited to the reasons you suggest. Even in the US where energy is subsidized by the government supporting the energy companies, and where many of the costs of fossil fuel are externalized, there is a new capital business investing in solar capacity because the economics makes sense.

Am I missing something? Isn't the title of the article Deployment of Solar Power to energy grids? To me this means all types of solar power, not just pv. 199.125.109.104 06:22, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

Feel free to add any other solar technology you know about that puts energy into the grid. I know there's a big solar thermal plant in southern california; are there more? Dicklyon 07:27, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

Summary table

I moved the summary table over from PV. It would be good to replace the off grid data by CSP data.

Also a global list of solar power stations should pulled from PV and the CSP and hybrid added in.--Oldboltonian 20:11, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

I would like to know the rationale for having a Total/capita column on the PV Capacity table. I also suggest putting a kWh output total on the table. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.229.196.79 (talk) 03:47, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Error in figure 1 and caption?

Something doesn't add up in figure 1 and its caption:

"Growth rate of photovoltaic installations, as a percentage of total 2004 energy use. By 2007 less than 0.011% of energy came from photovoltaics - at a 40% annual increase this would reach almost 30% by 2030, or by 2015 at a 200% annual increase."

Starting from a total PV energy production of 15 TW*0.011%=1.76 GW, a 40% annual increase would give a total PV energy production after 20 years of 1.76 GW*1.4^20=1.47 TW. This is 1.47/15=9.8% of the total consumption (assuming consumption doesn't increase), not 30% as claimed by the caption/figure. Or am I missing something/doing the calculation wrong??

O. Prytz (talk) 05:39, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Ok, I'm removing the figure as I consider it erroneous. O. Prytz (talk) 16:15, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Suggest move

I suggest we rename this article to Solar power by country since it's a very wordy and indirect title now. There is a lot of overlap in solar power articles and this title could collect information now scattered in other places. --Wtshymanski (talk) 17:47, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Follow the money

There's a reason that the world's (currently) largest solar PV plant is in gloomy southern Ontario and not in some sensible sunny place like Arizona or Spain - that is, a 42 cent a kilowatthour feed-in tariff. We've got people in Ontario cashing in their retirement savings to buy PV plants since the ROI is so good, and screaming that they can't get grid interconnections now. PV power is more about politics than physics. --Wtshymanski (talk) 18:25, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

It is too simplistic to be saying that investors in Ontario are greedy. Maybe they want to support PV for environmental or other reasons. Maybe they see PV as an ethical investment that will provide benefits for their children.

Moreover, PV is just one example of solar power. Do you also think that solar thermal power plants are being built in “gloomy” locations? Check out List of solar thermal power stations; most large solar thermal power plants have been built in Spain or sunny parts of the USA:

extremely large and broken table removed, see [1]

-- Johnfos (talk) 20:54, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Where were these heroes of environmentalism before the 42 cents a kwh? --Wtshymanski (talk) 21:01, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Ontario investors are not “heroes of environmentalism”. They are simply rational investors who take financial and non-financial considerations into account when making decisions.

There are many factors which affect the take-up of new technology and some of them are discussed in diffusion of innovations theory. It is a complex process. The private sector, public sector, investors, and consumers themselves all have a role to play. Johnfos (talk) 21:34, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Mexico

I see that there is no page for Mexico, and there is a pretty limited amount of details. The potential in Mexico is supposed to be significant.[2] This also talks about potential there. I think it would be nice to expand here or even create a new page for it, so I plan on taking a look around and seeing what I can do. Spangled53 (talk) 01:22, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Can we keep "Middle East" as region on its onw, plzzz?

Although I completely understand user: ‎Gidonb's intention to list all countries by their conventional classification, I'd rather prefer to keep the Middle East as an section on its own. The photovoltaic industry considers the MEA or MENA states (Middle East and {North} Africa) as a distinct region. In my view, the conventional classification (Middle East as a part of Asia) will cause troubles for all sorts of statistics and section-linking in the near future. Of course, I might be the only one who cares about that now. -- Rfassbind (talk) 16:44, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Hi Rfassbind, thanks for the reminder on my talk page! Obviously I care about regions and spatial integrity.

Inserting the Middle East between the continents is a lot like adding sand into cake batter as it is bound to spoil any and all outcomes! Now obviously sand does belong in some mixture (concrete) and likewise it is good to keep in mind that the Middle East is not just another region, but a very special one: an intercontinental region (compare to Latin America). It combines parts of two continents (Latin America a complete continent and parts of another), and not just parts of Asia, as suggested above, so when you introduce the Middle East between the continents you are eliminating the spatial integrity of two entire continents (or a combination of these with the region).

To give an example: Egypt is in the Middle East and in Africa. After you inserted the Middle East between the continents, either Africa or the Middle East is incomplete or you are dealing with double listing. You also misled the reader to believe that the Middle East is an equivalent of Africa, or rather, since most readers are intelligent, caused the reader to respect Wikipedia less. The same would apply with Saudi Arabia, Asia and the Middle East or any other country in this region. gidonb (talk) 16:52, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

Another point you raised is that individual firms sometimes have a "MEA" or a "MENA" region as part of their operations (or they may have other parts of Europe, Asia and Africa combined). A few points:

1. We do not have to follow the lead of private businesses.
2. We need internal consistency with the regions that readers recognize and are used throughout Wikipedia, without compromising their spatial integrity.
3. These businesses typically differ among themselves, as you implied: once MEA, once MENA, but also with different boundaries, and different combinations exist as well.
4. The classical Middle East, as used in Wikipedia, includes only Egypt in North Africa, so dumping the Middle East among the continents doesn't really help you cover either MEA or MENA.
5. The companies that use these areas often have vast operations in the Gulf countries and less in North Africa, where Arabic is also spoken, so they bundle. Next they might have close to nothing going on in the rest of Africa so some discount that continent entirely and combine it as well. Africa is a vast continent and we at Wikipedia do not discount it or tear it in pieces.

What can be done, without compromising Africa and Asia, is introducing sub-regions for Europe and Asia as both continents have a large number of countries listed. This includes all current Middle East countries (no Egypt yet in the list). These will be in another group from that of other parts of Asia and your plead will be addressed to the best of the Wikipedian standards and spatial integrity, as well as -hopefully- to your satisfaction. It's a bit of work but I will introduce these regions right away! gidonb (talk) 16:54, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Well done! Keep up the good work. Cheers, -- Rfassbind (talk) 03:21, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

The Middle East showed up again. This time as a FAKE subcontinent. This is totally unacceptable! 13:37, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

Baseload vs Capacity???

By the end of 2014, cumulative photovoltaic capacity increased by more than 40 gigawatt (GW) and reached at least 178 GW, sufficient to supply 1 percent of the world's total electricity consumption of currently 18,400 TWh.

Is this correct??? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.15.190.123 (talk) 03:44, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

Yes it is correct as the reference at the end of the paragraph shows. Baseload or capacity has nothing to do with that sentence, though. Rmhermen (talk) 03:55, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

Global deployment figures

Column data for 2017 are way off.

I've looked at the sources link and I can't find any of those figures. You can see by the link provided here (Global Solar Market Installed 98.9 Gigawatts In 2017) citing data from SolarPower Europe, the US installed 10GW not 2.5GW. India installed 9.6GW not 9.0. This column should be removed until a proper data source is cited with the correct data in place. I had trouble trying to revert the table. — Preceding unsigned comment added by LostLucidity (talk • contribs) 00:17, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Thank for noticing. I replaced the table with an existing table that seems to be better referenced from Growth of photovoltaics with transclusion. From now on, we need to keep only one table up to date. --Ita140188 (talk) 04:04, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Unfortunately the table described as Photovoltaic Solar (now in both articles) is a copy of the Irena statistics [ref 21] for total solar energy which includes both photovoltaic and concentrated solar power. The difference only affects a few countries but in those cases it's quite significant. e.g. Morocco is marked as 734 but only 204 is PV; USA is 75,572 but only 73,814 is PV; Spain is 14,089 but only 11,785 is PV. The Irena source gives all 3 tables. Chris55 (talk) 21:40, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for noticing. This should be corrected in the original table for the few countries affected. I have no time right now, but if anybody wants to do this please go ahead. --Ita140188 (talk) 10:02, 23 November 2021 (UTC)

Main table

I plan to refurbish the main table to focus on the most recent year only. Having all those old years seems like data hoarding to me (WP:NOTDATABASE)).

The table would look like the version I recently updated Wind power by country with, or something similar. Please comment there or here with your thoughts. Wizmut (talk) 19:57, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Statistics by country correct?

Table says 0.65 for Finland. Finnish authority says the capacity is 1.00 at the end of year 2023. Increase 47%, These are capacity numbers, they don't exactly list actual production numbers as small producers use the energy before it's pushed to the grid. https://energiavirasto.fi/en/-/national-report-on-electricity-and-natural-gas-markets-in-2023-published https://energiavirasto.fi/-/aurinkosahkon-tuotantokapasiteetti-nousi-1000-megawattiin JuhaKnuutila (talk) 07:46, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

In the second link the title says 1000 MW but the chart says a bit less than that. Note that that is capacity, which the Ember source says is 0.90 GW. Perhaps the Ember source has adjusted their figure since then. It's been a year already since the table was updated. How time flies. Wizmut (talk) 08:20, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Right, I noticed as well that chart is about 930MW. JuhaKnuutila (talk) 08:21, 10 December 2024 (UTC)