Solar power by country
Many countries and territories have installed significant solar power capacity into their electrical grids to supplement or provide an alternative to conventional energy sources.
[10] Most operational CSP stations are located in Spain and the United States, while large solar farms using photovoltaics are being constructed in an expanding list of geographic regions.
Many African countries receive on average a very high number of days per year of bright sunlight, especially the dry areas, which include the arid deserts (such as the Sahara) and the semi-desert steppes (such as the Sahel).
[15] This gives solar power the potential to bring energy to virtually any location in Africa without the need for expensive large-scale grid-level infrastructural developments.
[38] In July 2017, Indian Railways rolled out trains with rooftop solar to power the lights, fans and displays inside the coaches.
[39][40] Cochin International Airport, seventh busiest in India, is the first one in the world to run entirely on solar power,[41][42] handling more than 1,000 flights a week.
[43] Solar power features prominently in Modi government's US$2.5 billion SAUBHAGYA scheme launched in July 2015 to electrify every Indian household by 2019 — a huge task considering around 300 million people were without electricity.
[33] This scheme weans farmers away from diesel-powered pumps and generates extra income for them by allowing to sell surplus power to the grid.
It is one of the innovative ways that the government is empowering the rural population with the help of solar energy by addressing specific issues such as water availability.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi promoted solar energy during the plenary speech at World Economic Forum annual meet in Davos in 2018 and invited investments in the sector in India promising ease of doing business.
[49] Modi's ambitious plan when announced in the leading up to the Paris COP21 climate summit received much skepticism and the government's strategy to scale-up the renewable energy by relying on competitive bidding to reduce the cost was regarded as infeasible.
[51] In the month of May 2017 alone, plans for building coal power for nearly 14 GW – about the same as the total amount in the UK – were canceled on account of declining solar costs.
Pakistan has set up a solar power park, funded by the Chinese company TBEA, in the Cholistan desert near Yazman, about 30 kilometers from the eastern city of Bahawalpur.
[64] There is no oil on Israeli land and the country's tenuous relations with its oil-rich neighbors (see Arab–Israeli conflict) has made the search for a stable source of energy a national priority.
The high amount of sunshine received by the Negev Desert every year has spurred an internationally renowned solar research and development industry, with Arnold Goldman (founder of Luz, Luz II and BrightSource Energy), Harry Tabor and David Faiman of the National Solar Energy Center its more prominent members.
[65] At the end of 2008 a feed-in tariff scheme was approved, which immediately put in motion the building of many residential and commercial solar energy power station projects.
Luz and Bright Source R&D centers in Jerusalem pioneered industrial scale solar energy fields with initial installations in California's Mojave Desert.
This is mainly due to the strong decline of new installations in some major markets such as Germany and Italy, while the United Kingdom and some smaller European countries are still expected to break new records in 2014.
[79] In October 2009, the city of Antwerp announced that they wanted to install 2,500 m2 of solar panels on the roofs of public buildings, which would be worth 265,000 kWh per annum.
However, the boom period ended in 2012, and Germany's national PV market has since declined significantly, due to the amendments in the German Renewable Energy Act (EEG) that reduced feed-in tariffs and set constraints on utility-scaled installations, limiting their size to no more than 10 MW.
[101] Through a ministerial ruling in March 2004, the Spanish government removed economic barriers to the connection of renewable energy technologies to the electricity grid.
[102] In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the Spanish government drastically cut its subsidies for solar power and capped future increases in capacity at 500 MW per year leading to a stagnation in the new installations.
[106] Solar power use has increased very rapidly in recent years, albeit from a small base, as a result of reductions in the cost of photovoltaic (PV) panels, and the introduction of a Feed-in tariff (FIT) subsidy in April 2010.
Photovoltaic cells are increasingly used as standalone units, mostly as off-grid distributed electricity generation to power remote homes, telecommunications equipment, oil and pipeline monitoring stations and navigational devices.
It has a total installed capacity of 120 megawatts and it is estimated that it will produce 240,000 MWh per year, enough to supply the electricity consumption of more than 100,000 Dominican homes.
Girasol will avoid the emission into the atmosphere of 150,000 tons of CO2 annually and the import of 400,000 barrels of oil, which contributes to mitigate the effects of climate change and represents savings in foreign exchange, respectively.
By 2016, it was "effectively" closed and an effort to build a similar 40 MW solar boost at Kogan Creek coal power station was stopped.
[141] In April 2012, New Zealand's largest solar power plant was the 68.4 kW array installed to meet 70% of the electricity needs of South Auckland Forging Engineering Ltd, which is expected to pay for itself in eight to nine years.
The total installed solar power in Brazil was estimated at 21 GW at October 2022, generating approximately 2.48% of the country's electricity demand.
[145] In 2022, Brazil entered, for the first time, the list of the ten countries with the highest accumulated installed power from photovoltaic solar source.
