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The Energy Of Solar Energy

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19 Executive Summary This publication builds upon past analyses of solar energy deployment contained in the Word Energy Outlook, Energy Technology Perspectives and several IEA Technology Roadmaps. It aims at offering an updated picture of current technology trends and markets, as well as new analyses on how solar energy technologies for electricity, heat and fuels can be used in the various energy consuming sectors, now and in the future. If effective support policies are put in place in a wide number of countries during this decade, solar energy in its various forms – solar heat, solar photovoltaics, solar thermal electricity, solar fuels – can make considerable contributions to solving some of the most urgent problems the world now faces: climate change, energy security, and universal access to modern energy services. Solar energy offers a clean, climate-friendly, very abundant and inexhaustible energy resource to mankind, relatively well-spread over the globe. Its availability is greater in warm and sunny countries – those countries that will experience most of the world’s population and economic growth over the next decades. They will likely contain about 7 billion inhabitants by 2050 versus 2 billion in cold and temperate countries (including most of Europe, Russia, and parts of China and the United States of America). The costs of solar energy have been falling rapidly and are entering new areas of competitiveness. Solar thermal electricity (STE) and solar photovoltaic

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