Market overview:

The availability of abundant solar energy enables organisations to meet the energy challenge and provides an opportunity to offer new and cost effective solutions. In the solar photovoltaic sector, the photon chasing has moved from expensive silicon wafers (owing to paucity of polysilicon worldwide), to the growth of technologies such as thin film-based high concentration photovoltaics, concentrating solar power (CSP) and nanosolar.

The race is on to significantly cutback on material use, find alternative materials, reduce costs and increase conversion efficiency. This is possible with the emergence of new generation technologies, innovative manufacturing techniques and increasing volumes.

The cost of electricity generation from CSP is expected to drop to US$ 0.05-0.07 per kWh by 2020.

For solar thermal, the global installed collector capacity was a robust 111 GW at the end of 2005. Almost half of this capacity is installed in China, followed by Germany, Japan, Turkey and USA.