According to various online sources, the phrase "cheap as chips" comes from a time when wood chips were an inexpensive commodity. The burning of wood chips as a biofuel has long been common practice in heavy industry, but they've never been fully embraced as a viable way to heat and power the planet. Not so solar. As PV technology continues its onward march to ubiquity, perhaps one day we'll have to rethink our idioms to account for just how cheap solar power is becoming. This week saw its cost plummet even further than ever before during a tender held by the Abu Dhabi Electricity and Water Authority (ADWEA). A consortium of JinkoSolar and Marubeni submitted a bid of just US 2.42 cents per kWh, which is a drastically lower figure than any that has gone before. While the auction has not been won yet, a senior representative of Middle East Solar Industry Association (MESIA) confirmed with pv magazine that a consortium of JinkoSolar - acting as the developer - and Japanese company Marubeni entered a world record low price of 2.42 U.S. cents per kWh. The previous world record stood at 2.91 cents per kWh at an auction in Chile in August 2016. pv magazine understands that the bid put forth by Jinko and Marubeni is for a project that is considerably bigger than the 350 MW originally intended. Indeed, during the tender it was revealed that three of the bids submitted were lower than the previous world record, with Masdar (in conjunction with EDF and PAL) submitting a bid of US 3.08 cents/kWh, and Tenaga - in collaboration with Phelan Energy - bidding US 3.13 cents/kWh. pv magazine spoke with Massimiliano Vernaleone, who was the lead on the Phelan Tenaga Consortium bid, and he had this to say: "The key items that drive the LCOE levels are usually the EPC costs, the financing conditions and irradiation. In this particular Abu Dhabi case, module prices and highly competitive financing terms have played a crucial role. In the first case, the volume of the project has attracted the world leaders in the sector, all eager to win such a large order. The most competitive international banks competed to provide the best financing terms in the industry, with a limit to the number of consortium they could support that made the process even more selective, with only the big players left in the last phase of the bid. "Structures and inverters have also had a good impact on the ...Den vollständigen Artikel lesen ...
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