Sunshot Is a Collaborative National Movement

On August 2, U. S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced a $50 million investment over two years for the SUNPATH program_ aimed at reclaiming the nation's competitive edge in solar manufacturing. SUNPATH, which stands for Scaling up Nascent PV At Home, represents the second solar Photovoltaic Manufacturing Initiative (PVMI) under the Department of Energy's SunShot Initiative. Sunshot is a collaborative national movement to make solar energy technologies cost-competitive with other forms of energy by reducing the cost of solar energy systems by about 75 percent before 2020. "This investment provides a necessary boost to domestic solar manufacturing businesses, encouraging them to keep jobs here and establish America's leadership in the world's growing clean energy economy, " said Secretary Chu. "In addition to invigorating clean-energy manufacturing, this program will help achieve the SunShot goal of making unsubsidized utility-scale solar cost-competitive with other forms of energy by the end of the decade. " As recently as 1995, the United States maintained a dominant global solar market share, manufacturing 43 percent of the world's PV panels, according to the DOE. In steady decline, U. S. market share shrank to 27 percent by 2000 and to 7 percent by 2010. A report released this year by Research and Markets_Worldwide Solar Cell Manufacturing Facilities and Production Capacity 2010-2015_found that China and Germany have emerged from the 2008-2009 financial crises as the global leaders in the solar sector. Easy financing from the Chinese government has helped many manufacturers to expand into the solar supply sector. What's more, overproduction in China has brought down the prices of solar cells worldwide_ and has made it difficult for other countries, including the United States, to compete effectively. Source: green. tmcnet. com