Residential solar installations have been growing at an average 51 percent rate annually for the last five years, according to Larry Sherwood, a consultant to the Interstate Renewable Energy Council, a nonprofit group that works on helping interested parties navigate various legal, technical and economic aspects of renewable energy. As of 2010, the total capacity of these systems was 677 megawatts, he said. (His most recent report can be found here.)
And Jared Blanton, a spokesman for the Solar Energy Industries Association, reports that in 2010, the residential market was 30 percent of the national solar PV market, above the utility market (28 percent) but behind commercial installations (42 percent).
A news release on Thursday from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said that over all, approximately 2,100 megawatts of grid-connected solar photovoltaic systems (residential and nonresidential) have been installed across the country, almost half of this total in California.
The growth in residential solar systems, of course, is taking place on a tiny base. About a tenth of a percent of all households have photovoltaic systems, and all solar systems combined — industrial and residential and everything else, as well as concentrated-solar plants in the California deserts — amount to about two-tenths of 1 percent of all renewable electricity in the country, according to the federal Energy Information Administration. Renewable electricity, in turn, makes up about 8 percent of the electricity used in this country.
But the backers of solar power might talk about thousand-mile journeys beginning with a single step.
Author: Zhejiang Haining Tiange Solar Energy Science Technology Co., Ltd.
Website:http://www.sunnyrainsolar.com/
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