Thailand has had a steady but largely unremarkable interest in photovoltaics for over twenty years. However, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s government has turned that upside down with an ambitious programme which by the middle of next year will have seen PV use across the country increase by a factor of six in just thirty months.

The Solar Homes System (SHS) project announced in 2003 is providing 300 000 rural households each with a 120 W PV home electricity system, comprising module, inverter, battery and two fluorescent lights.

One of the primary purposes of powering the nation in this way is to enable rural families to access modern communications, particularly television. The systems should provide sufficient power for light and TV for 4 to 5 hours per day. Cynics might argue that the 7 600 million baht (180 million USD), 36 MW project is a rural vote-buyer, but Thailand’s broader energy strategy has a strong environmental focus and a view towards energy security through more effective use of domestic energy resources. Renewables are expected to constitute 8 % of the country’s final energy demand – the equivalent of 2400 MW installed capacity – in 2011, compared with just 1 % at the end of 2002.

One of the principal measures to achieve this is an obligation on power producers to source the equivalent of 4 % of their installed capacity from renewables. This is expected to include an additional 214 MW of PV, which will put the nationwide installed capacity at over 250 MW by 2011.

The positive policy environment is also seeing benefits in terms of local industry development. Buoyed by a seemingly strong market framework, manufacturers are actively investing in new module production facilities, notably Solartron’s 15 MW plant in the country’s North East.

This article is based on papers presented at PVSEC-14 in Bangkok in January, 2004, notably S. Silasuta of DEDE, fax +66 2 2249 280, and W. Khunchornyakong of Solartron, fax +66 2 3381 0936.

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