The monster market for photovoltaics: Bringing electricity to where it is most needed

Some weeks ago I prepared a presentation on rural electrification by the means of solar cells, for a solar course I did as a part of my ph.d. work. I think there is some really interesting points in the stuff I dug up, so I'd like to present a little summary here.

Rural areas with a bad or non-existing electric grid is where the use of solar cells really makes sense. This market has been lagging behind the last years due to the good financial conditions that the grid-connected installations have had. But as the prices go down (in 2008, module prices went down 60%) this market is getting closer to the explosion.

There is nothing new about the use of solar cells for electrification of rural areas. Up till today, more than 2.4 million solar home systems have been installed in homes in developing countries [1]. Solar cells are also being installed for energy supply on technical installations at remote locations, a good example is the close to 2000 lighthouses situated along the Norwegian coast, most of them are today solar-powered. Even as far north as Norway, solar electricity can be a cost-competitive solution!


This lighthouse is located at Dingeneset, outside of where my family live in western Norway. It has been supplied with electricity from a small solar panel since the end of the 1980's.

The really big market lies in the vast amount of people living at remote locations in the developing world. Today, more than 1.6 billion people have no access to electricity. Access to electricy is becoming more and more important as technology develops, and is already crucial when it comes to education, well-beeing and health.

Solar cells constitute an easy and reliable way to supply electricity to far-away locations. It is fairly easy to install, requires a minimum of maintainance, there is no need for transport of fuel, you do not create a dependence for possibly future expensive fuel and it lowers the grid costs. The sunny weather you can find in many developing countries makes solar energy approximately half as expensive when compared to northern Europe. And let's not forget maybe the most important argument; It's clean and renewable!

One of the main arguments when it comes to solar electricity is usually the price. But for rural locations where an electric grid is not accessible, and with a low daily consumption of electricity, this is no longer the case. The price of electricity from solar cells for an installation that uses just a few or less kWh per day, is comparable to the price you get for diesel electricity, when you ignore all taxes, transportation and the very plausible repairments needed for a small diesel generator. The largest cost in a typical solar home system will actually normally be for the batteries that are needed for storing electricity over-night and for the days with less sun.

What needs to get in place, are the solutions for financing. This is where the NGO's and governments of the richer contries really can contribute. When you buy a system, you pay for 20 years of electricity at once. Even though these are quite small systems giving just a few tens of Wh per day, and the initial investments can be just a couple of hundreds of dollars, this can be difficult for families with an income that hardly covers the cost of the daily meals.

With proper microfinance solutions in place, we are therefore bound to see a second boom in the market for photovoltaics as prices go down [2]. And this means also bringing electricity at a reasonable price to the places it is most needed, without causing further climate change or environmental effects.

Further reading: TaqSolRE is a European research project working on rural electrification with solar cells, which has a lot of documentation and useful information on the subject.

[1] F. Niouwenhout et al., Reliability of PV stand-alone systems for rural electrification, EU FP5 Taqsolre report, 2004
[2] W. Hoffmann and L. Waldmann in V. Petrova-Koch et al., High-efficient low-cost photovoltaics, Springer, 2009

Familiar with research

It will soon be Christmas, and it's time to see the family again. There are many of my relatives that I see only once or twice a year, and it seems to get harder and harder to explain them what I am doing. Some of them are very interested in what I am doing, although they do not understand everything. I remember at the last party I were at in the little village where my family comes from, where one of the neighbours came to me and told me she was sooo happy that I would start my ph.d. ("doctor degree" in Norwegian) as she used to suffer with some health problems that she hoped I would be able to help her with. Well, although I have tried to coin the term Earth Doctor for those who work with renewable energy research, I'm afraid my skills in materials science will not help her much :-)

It's a challenge to explain what we do to people that are not working with research, but we should welcome this challenge as an opportunity for ourselves to understand more about our own work and why we are doing it.

What did you say? So what?

Today I have had the rare pleasure of attending two good talks here at the MRS Fall Meeting. One of them was actually given by one of my colleagues at the Institute for Energy Technology, Sabrina Sartori. Even though I had no prior knowledge to her research field, I was able to understand the basic message of her talk, which is quite extraordinary when it comes to oral presentations of scientific work.

Yesterday morning I attended a pre-breakfast session on how to communicate scientific work, which I found very interesting. The ability to communicate results is something that comes with practice, but the most important thing is to be aware of the challenge, and try to make the very best out of it. The practical rules of how to give a good presentation can be summarized as follows:

1. Stand still
When you are under pressure, you tend to run around a little bit. This can be confusing (or amusing) to the public, so if you have someting important to say, you should avoid it. It makes me think about a Japanese I once witnessed falling down from the stage during his presentation on a solar cell conference. Poor guy.

2. Face the audience and make eye contact
It is not very motivating to attend a lecture where the lecturer joins the public and stares at his own slides during the whole presentation.

3. Speak slowly
It is common to see that people who try to take the most advantage of their 12 minutes they have for presentation, speaks extremely fast. This could also be the result of nervousness. Remember to breathe, and talk as though you were trying to explain your results to your 90-year old grandfather.

4. Practice beforehand
And speak out loud when you practice!

5. Know your public

Most people should be somewhere on the "what?"-"so what?" curve. While a PhD supervisor is very interested in knowing what you have done and not so much in knowing why you are doing this, you might have to lay somewhat more emphasis on the so what when you are talking to a broader public as your collegues or friends. A good rule for a mixed public is to go a little bit more on the so what than what you really think is necessary. You should also follow the wine glass shape:

And last, but not least: Do not use a laser pointer!

What are these people on?

It's ten in the evening on the Materials Research Society Fall Meeting in Boston. 6000 researchers have been attending 300 oral presentations of research results since 0830 in the morning. One would think it's about time for heading to bed. But no! There is always more to learn. I myself just laughed when I saw that my poster presentation was scheduled from 2000 to 2300, and I thought no-one would be there. Well, my poster was not that popular, but there were really a lot of people sneaking around to watch the posters.

For those of you that do not know, a poster presentation is the compromise between letting all the researchers presenting something and not having a conference that lasts forever. Before scientific conferences (nearly) all the scientists that want to participate submit an abstract that tells about what they want to present at the conference. If the research results are good, interesting, or if you are a famous scientist, you will get an oral presentation. That means that you have to present your work in front of 50-300 other scientists that are more or less interested in what you have to say. If you are not famous and do not have extremely interesting things to present, you get to present it on a poster, where the other people at the conference can come and see and comment and ask you more questions if they are really interested.

My poster was on magnesium hydride for solar cells. We are the only and first group in the world that do this, so no-one were really interested in the poster. Of course researchers are most interested in what they do themselves, and we kind of fall between the chairs of the hydrogen storage people that work on metal hydrides and the solar cell people that work on, well, solar cells. However; here is my poster: