IEA-PVPS held its tenth anniversary conference in Osaka, Japan in May 2003.
![Inspirational location: The IEA-PVPS conference was held in Osaka in May. The prefecture is also home to the magnificent 20 kW PV Skylight at the Kansai Gaidai University. The design won the New Energy Foundation Chairman’s Award in 2002. [Photo: FUJISASH CO LTD]](../images/19_04.jpg)
The meeting was an opportunity to review the achievements of the first decade of international PV co-operation under the IEA’s umbrella, but more importantly it provided a forum for almost three hundred industry and government representatives to consider future development priorities and how PV and PVPS can best contribute to delivering a more sustainable global energy future.
For the first time, a number of non-member state representatives were invited to participate in the deliberations, reflecting the IEA’s, and in particular PVPS’s growing commitment to seeing sustainable energy development opportunities extended to less developed countries.
Following the welcome presentations from amongst others Ms. Sanae Takaichi, Vice Minister of Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and Ms. Marianne Haug, Director, of Energy Efficiency, Technology and R&D at the IEA, Rick Sellers, Head of the IEAs Renewable Energy Unit, presented the global energy context and imperative for key OECD economies to move beyond current policies to ones with a stronger focus on renewables in order to break the trend of continued growth in carbon emissions. If implemented, enhanced policies which are already under discussion could reduce 2030 CO2 emissions by over 2 000 million tones and see global emissions stabilizing by that time. In line with the subsequent conference structure, he also proposed that PV’s notable value, and therefore the best focus of PVPS activities in the immediate future, is for the rural development and distributed generation markets.
Grid-connect priorities
In terms of the priorities for grid-connected PV markets, the conference agreed that continuing cost reductions are clearly essential to demonstrate that public funding is delivering outcomes. But more work also needs to be devoted to developing and stimulating customers’ willingness to pay for PV’s premium values, to assessing and reporting the impact of different public and private approaches to PV deployment and the possible interrelationship between these components, and to forming good working relationships with new stakeholders, particularly from the building, planning and finance sectors.
Off-grid priorities
During the session discussing the off-grid market, representatives from China, India, Mongolia and Thailand provided an overview of respective experiences of the impediments to and relative successes of approaches for rural PV deployment. The experiences covered small single-dwelling solar home systems to battery charging stations and water pumping for villages and small communities. The general consensus that emerged was that diffusion efforts would be best assisted by further addressing the non-technical barriers, particularly system or service finance and education of users and project/programme implementers.
International institutional issues
This theme was further developed in the following session which reflected the needs and roles of the major international agencies supporting PV deployment worldwide.
It is clear that PV dissemination models need to be tailored to individual country or even local requirements if they are to deliver maximum benefit. At the same time, new inter-national opportunities such as the Clean Development Mechanism could provide a useful co-funding stream for PV in developing countries, though approaches for preparing numerous small PV projects for the CDM process must be significantly streamlined if this is to be successfully harnessed.
Industry's future visions
The final presentation session enabled regional industry representatives to present
their own visions, expectations and priorities for continuing market diffusion,
as well as how policy makers can assist in creating an enabling environment to
allow manufacturers to deliver these objectives. It is clear that long-term, stable
policies and the decoupling of political risk are critical to the process. The
meeting conclusions are being taken on board by the PVPS Executive Committee and
are helping to define the programme’s future priority activities, particularly
within Task 9 (Developing Countries)
and Task 10 (Urban PV). The
critical role of electricity utilities to the success of distributed PV has also
been highlighted and is the subject of a new special information activity of Task
1 (Information Dissemination). See for further details Utility
PV Forum.
The conference summary and key presentations are available for download from the publications' section.
[ Top ]
[ Previous article in PV Power
] [ Next article in PV Power
]