All right. We've talked about how photo text also called solar photo text, also called solar PV. All the same thing, is now at the point where it is cost competitive with natural gas and with wind they're all at about well very close. LCOEs level is cost of energy. That doesn't mean that solar PV is always going to be the cheapest. That's definitely not the case. It depends on local conditions on the cost of natural gas and LCOEs. It doesn't, there's some effects that doesn't issues. It doesn't capture such as carbon intensity or dispatch ability. But one cannot conclude from the data showed the part radio that PV is always the cheapest option. That's not the case at all. But it is competitive depending on the specifics. So that's the case now. Where's PV going now with PBS future? Because we don't know specifically where it's going. But there's a lot of interesting new technologies, concepts, approaches want to talk and present. So when you see or hear about this, you'll have a sense of what it is and you'll have a sense of the future possibilities for solar PV. One important trend in the sense it's already happening is combining PV with storage. So one of the challenges for solar PV is it's not dispatch mobile media. You can't just turn it on when you need it if the sun is not out, if it's night time, if it's cloudy, you just don't have that option. But if you combine PV with storage such as a battery, the combined output, those who can be dispatchable or controllable, because let's just say, your power plant, your combined power plant needs to produce by contract or the system operator says, hey, we need your electricity but it's cloudy. Well then the batteries kick in and later you contribute charge the batteries. And here's a schematic of how that can be structured. There's a lot of different ways to do this. But the idea is you combine PV and storage. You have a dispatchable power plant which can behave but not exactly like example natural gas plant. You want it, you need the electricity, you can turn it off, you don't need it, you need it, you turn it on, you don't need it, you can turn it off on a sunday day. Might mean it's going to be charging the batteries rather than producing electricity into the grid. But that's the concept of combining PV with storage and the latest data at least as of now, which is really 2021 is this is a growing trend to combine PV restores data. Global data on this are not so clear, but the US data shows that for example, of those large utility scale PV projects that are in the queue, which means they are expected to be built though not all will, but many of them will. In fact be built. About a quarter of them have storage. In other words, if you look at all the solar projects planned in the US. That are in line, waiting to get built and waiting to get access to the transmission system. About a quarter of them, a quarter of the total solar capacity has shown here is combined with storage. There's a lot of reasons for that in the US. It has a lot to do with the the policy. No words. There is a tax credit which can be applied to PV but also applied to storage if it's part of the PV. So it's a complex issue but making the point that this technology appears to be gaining a foothold of combining TV with storage. That's one interesting new approach that is moving along quickly. Another one which is farther along but intriguing is solar PV floating. In other words, putting a solar photovoltaic plant or system on top of water. And here's an example of a relatively small floating solar PV system. This slide shows in more details some of the challenges in some of the advantages. One of the drivers for doing something like this is, it doesn't consume land. Let's imagine you have a large, it could be a reservoir behind the dam that produces electricity. Well, you put PV on top of the water behind the dam, the lake, you get more electricity out of the combined hydro plus solar PV. Let's imagine you're in an area where you need and want solar PV, but there's just not a lot of rooftops, the area over water by definition is in some ways available or not otherwise being used at that point. So the land, there's no land requirement. If it's a body of water that is for example, used for drinking water, it can reduce evaporative losses because you're an effect shielding the water from the sun and instead of that sun causing a loss of water due to evaporation, that some provide something useful electricity. It's a complex issue. There are concerns, certainly, soiling by birds. There's been documented problems where this seems like a good idea and they've been existence have been put out pretty rapidly. The output goes down because the birds poop on the panels, then you have to go wash them. So, there are challenges anytime you have water and electricity, that's a concern. So you need to have particularly carefully designed connections. You'll need to run power lines to shore to get into the grid and not anytime again. Water and electricity don't mix well. Now we do this also with offshore wind. This isn't new, but it's an interesting idea. There are a handful of floating solar plants around the world will be interesting to watch and see if this takes off another new solar PV approach. A new idea is what's called building integrated solar PV, often abbreviated BIP V. The idea is your wall or even your roof of your building is in fact the PV panels, for example, your shingles, many roofs in many parts of world news shingles. Well, instead of shingles, you could use PV panels that could provide both roofing protection from the elements, particularly sun and rain, but also produce electricity. And here's an example where the facade, the external vertical surface of a building is electricity generator as well. These do cost more upfront, but for example, think about a shingle roof. Well, a shingle that's a solar PV costs more than regular shingle, but you don't need to buy the regular shingle so that the economics are not yet attracted to this technology, but they do have the advantage of, in some cases replacing something else, such as regular single. So that brings the increased first cost down to some degree. And and the other advantages this turns a passive area, a roof, a law into a power plant. That said, this an interesting technology, is a new approach, is not yet cost effective realistically, but it's likely to grow it's market, which is now currently quite small as the technology improves. Another interesting new approach for solar PV is called Agrivoltaics. The idea is combining solar PV and agriculture. Let's imagine you have a field where you're growing crops. At first, you might think, well, putting PV over the field means I can't grow crops, it's going to be one or the other and that seems to make sense. But there's a now the research, for example, that summarized here that shows it doesn't quite work that way. For example, if you take a field, one hectare and put crops on it and take another hectare and put on some electricity, you'll get one hectare is worth of wheat and one hectare is worth of solar electricity. But if you think about it differently and take one hectare and put some wheat and some electricity, yes, you'll lower your wheat output, but less than you might think there are certain crops that do well in part shading, putting PV on top also has the benefit of reducing evaporative losses that reduce your water consumption. So it's more complex than one or the other combining them. Such as shown here can have synergistic effects. For example, if you put this combined cysts on two hectares, you lose a little bit of your wheat production per hectare, but you gain in total, so up here we have 100% wheat, 100% solar electricity. Down here, we have about 160% wheat, 160 of electricity. So you can mix them. For example, the crop can use diffuse lighting, you might plant crops farther apart because of the PV. But again, if you look at it on this, some output perspective, you can come out way ahead where instead of just growing wheat, you're growing wheat and electricity. And here's a schematic of how this might work. From the operator's perspective, you plant wheat and and put a PV do both. It might provide own consumption, you might have a purchasing agreement with local electricity users, you might feed your excess power into the grid. So the idea is agrivoltaics becomes your essentially, if you are the farmer, you're growing two things, you're growing crops, cash crop and you're also growing or producing electricity. And the the net finances can be attractive of this. This is a newer idea. You don't find a lot of this, but there are a number of experimental pilot projects around the world. Another piece of PV going ahead to watch for are what we call the pure technical efficiencies. For example, if you go back to 19, well on the X axis, we have time, on the y axis, we have module efficiency. That's defined in the technical sense of how much electricity you get out relative to the electricity that goes in, sorry, relative to the solar PV that goes in. So typically of the electricity that hits a solar panel, 10 to 20% will come out as electricity, but that has generally improved over time and that will continue to improve over time due to fundamental R and D, new chemistries, new type of modules. New ways of approaching this. And you can see that there's a a trend of improvement and there are some modules in the laboratory that do much better. So I think what we'll see going forward is a steady improvement in module efficiency. Government stopped there and then come back to talk about a few more advanced PV concepts.
