Utility-Scale Solar 2013: An Empirical Analysis of Project Cost, Performance, and Pricing Trends in the United States.

摘要

Other than the SEGS I-IX parabolic trough projects built in the 1980s, virtually no large-scale or 'utility-scale' solar projects - defined here to include any ground-mounted photovoltaic ('PV'), concentrating photovoltaic ('CPV'), or concentrating solar power ('CSP' or solar thermal) project larger than 5 MWac - existed in the United States prior to 2007. By 2012 - just five years later - utility-scale had become the largest sector of the overall PV market in the United States, a distinction that was repeated in 2013 and that is expected to continue for at least the next few years.1 Over this same short period, CSP also experienced a renaissance in the United States, with a number of large new parabolic trough and power tower systems - some including storage - either achieving commercial operations or entering the commissioning phase. With this critical mass of new utility-scale projects now online and in some cases having operated for several years (generating empirical data in addition to electricity), the rapidly growing utility-scale sector is ripe for analysis. This report, the second in what is envisioned to be an ongoing annual series, meets this need through in-depth, annually updated, data-driven analysis of not just installed project costs or prices - i.e., the traditional realm of solar economics analyses - but also operating costs, capacity factors, and power purchase agreement ('PPA') prices from a large sample of utility-scale solar projects in the United States. Given its current dominance in the market, utility-scale PV also dominates much of this report, though more balanced coverage is expected in future editions as the new CSP projects that have recently or soon will come online start to generate usable data.