Asia to overtake Europe as global solar power grows - EPIA

[jpak]

http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/sns-rt-us-solar-energybre8460q6-20120507,0,3698724.story

VERONA, Italy (Reuters) - The world's solar power generating capacity will grow by between 200 and 400 percent over the next five years, with Asia and other emerging markets overtaking leadership from Europe, a European industry association said on Monday.

"Europe has dominated the global PV (photovoltaic) market for years but the rest of the world clearly has the biggest potential for growth," the European Photovoltaic Industry Association (EPIA) said in its market outlook until 2016.

The fastest PV capacity growth is expected in China and India, followed by the southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa in the next five years, said the report distributed at a PV conference in northern Italy.

Global installed PV capacity, which turns sunlight into power, is expected to have risen to between 207.9 gigawatts and 342.8 GW in 2016, depending on the level of political support, from 69.7 GW in 2011, the report said.

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[kristopher]

1. I think they are seriously underestimating growth in Asia.

India and China are both poised for far greater growth than we are accustomed to think of as "reasonable". Solar in a high population developing economy secures for a lot of people who would not otherwise have it a basic energy supply that requires little dependency on outside infrastructure once it is place. I don't know what the actual market size is when you have almost 2.5B people as your target population, but I'm sure that economic models based on an entrenched grid connected centralized economy are not adequate to the task of making projections.
I'm going to try and find something recent from the World Bank or the Sustainable Development people at te UN...