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!
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
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