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Chapter 24 • Global Growth Trends and the Future of Solar Power  475



                 of those markets and the support policies around specific generation technologies still
                 have greater impact than the simple cost of producing energy.
                   Given that regulation is so important in energy, it is not surprising that when one con­
                 siders what comes next in solar, one must examine the known solar potential in a country
                 against the energy mix bias and the known regulatory environment. This makes the art
                 of predicting solar deployment quite difficult. Although one thing that can be said with
                 confidence, is that solar will continue to decrease in cost and that it is likely to be taken
                 up by more and more countries, due to international initiatives, such as the Paris Climate
                 Agreement and also through clean energy plans, such as the one currently being designed
                 in the European union [17]. SolarPower Europe has devised numerous forward­looking
                 assessments in its annual Global market outlook, and in the most recent 2017 edition, a
                 forecast has been made that perhaps 1 TW of solar will be installed by the end of 2021 [1].
                   Assessing the potential of the global solar market is a good place to begin an analy­
                 sis of where solar power deployment could be heading in the short term, as well as the
                 long term. This can then be used to locate where national markets could contribute to
                 the overall forecast of the global total. These predictions are shown in Fig. 24.4. To begin,
                 the forecast of SolarPower Europe is for 935.5 GW of solar to be installed globally by 2021,
                 under optimal conditions [1]. These conditions include continued price decreases and
                   political support for solar being kept at high levels. Taking these assumptions into account,
                 this growth would represent an almost tripling of global solar installations over the next
                 5 years; a rate that is perhaps a slowdown on the last 5 years, which has seen a sevenfold
































                 FIGURE 24.4  World total solar PV market scenarios 2017–21. SolarPower Europe, 2017, p.16.
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