Joshua Rubin with Justin Sydnor (Dept. of Economics)

Projection of the Solar Tech Industry as Motivated by Underlying Principles

Within the United States, and elsewhere in the world, there is a growing concern over the limited resources that are useable as energy sources. Technologies such as mono-crystalline and poly-crystalline solar cells, well established low efficiency and high cost power sources, have begun to be replaced by a new generation of less efficient but significantly cheaper photovoltaic cells. New thin-thin film and photovoltaic collector arrays are just approaching parity in energy generation. This “grid parity”, the point at which it is economically identical between solar cells and “dirty” energy sources, is an important stage in the development of any electrical technology. By comparing the newer approaches to more traditional processes through the concept of the diffusion of innovations one should be able to project the role of these new technologies. Analysis of recent trends for these solar technologies might be able to predict the market structure of the solar industry well into the future. One might hope to observe recognizable technological adoption trends in data available from the EPA and other sources. This project will use baseline comparison of the adoption of thin film photovoltaics and collector photovoltaics, over regional and scale differences, to predict the future of this industry. Through statistical analysis techniques, run in a program such as Stata, this project will present time-series comparisons of the different technologies and their potential roles as components of the electrical grid.