The US has about 25 GW of solar PV installed capacity as we wind down on 2015.
25 GW – that’s considerable, but relatively a fairly insignificant amount considering that the total US electricity installed capacity (from all sources) is about 1 TW or 1000 GW!
Now, 25 out 1000 GW, and that too for a source with much lower CUFs than most other power sources in the mix, is hardly anything to talk about. Solar perhaps supplies about 1% of the total electricity in the US.
OK, 25 GW is too insignificant, we all agree.
What about 250 GW?
Now, that would make solar start counting for something in the US.
But getting to 250 GW is also not gonna be easy, a 10 fold jump from current status.
It took only 5 years for the US to have tenfold jump from 2.5 GW of solar to 25 GW, but surely a 10-fold jump from a much higher baseline number will be much more difficult and time consuming, perhaps a few decades?
But are there ways for the US to get to 250 GW faster? Say in the next 10 years?
Shayle Kann is the VP of research at Greentech Media, a leader in solar industry data.
Kann does a good analysis of what it will take for the US to get to 250 GW by 2025. Read more on this from here.
