South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) has unveiled a plan to help the PV industry further reduce the costs of solar module technology and to increase product efficiency.
The initiative is part of the Fourth Energy Technology Development Plan and Roadmap, submitted to Korean renewable energy industry representatives this week. The plan includes actions to raise electromobility rates, reduce coal-fired fine dusts by 90%, improve nuclear safety and increase the scale of wind power projects, among other measures.
Sixteen energy technology priorities identified by MOTIE in the roadmap include a reduction in solar module costs from around $0.23/W today to $0.10 by 2030, helped by unspecified research and development investment. As a way of rough comparison, the SunShot Initiative launched by the U.S. government in 2011 aims to reduce the price of the solar electricity generated by large scale projects to $0.03/kWh by 2030. In September 2017, the Department of Energy announced the $0.06/kWh benchmark of that ambition had been achieved three years early.
Module efficiency