Along with the development of renewable energies in the world and the initiatives for alternative energy implementation in Colombia, it is important to make a national revision regarding the implementation and use of solar photovoltaic energy in Non-Interconnected Zones (ZNI for its abbreviation in Spanish) and the National Interconnected System (SIN for its abbreviation in Spanish). The objective of this article is to identify the development that it has had and its future panorama as far as the solar photovoltaic energy is concerned. The study presents the projects that have been executed and the ones in execution during the last decade, and the capacity that has been installed up to the present day in both SIN and ZNI (Photovoltaic Inventory). On the other hand, the document describes its social and political development at a national level, as well as legal aspects of the advantages and disadvantages of the recent Law 1715 signed in 2014. This law aims to promote the development and use of unconventional sources of energy, integrating them into the national energy system, allowing a promising future for these alternative technologies such as electricity generation from photovoltaic solar energy. Finally, the article shows the different opportunities in the ZNIs where the radiation potential reaches up to 6 kW h/m2 day and the projects do not exceed the 2.25 MW of installed capacity in Colombia, contrasted with the national average that is around 4.5 kW h/m2 day, surpassing the world average of 3.9 kW h/m2 day. Likewise, it allows seeing the opportunities that the new law offers for the development of generation projects in the SIN at a mega and gigascale, and of smaller projects that enable self-consumption and sales to the network, as well as distributed generation projects and hybrid power generation projects.

Introduction

The world’s integration of alternative energies or renewable energies has been consolidated in the political, industrial and community fields in the last 20 years, with a significant increase in the supply of technologies at the photovoltaic (PV), wind, biomass, geothermal and marine energy levels. This provides a contribution of 23.7% in 2014, from which only 1.2% is per solar energy action equivalent to 175 GW [1,2]. Given the present scenario 2016, it is to indicate that the source of renewable energy with greater potential is solar energy [1]. For this reason, this market has grown rapidly, between the year 2000 and 2015 the growth of photovoltaic installations was 41% [3]. At the continent level, it is estimated that countries such as Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, France, England and Spain represent 98% of photovoltaic installations connected in the European Union. Germany exceeds its capacity with 41.22 GW installed, followed by Italy and France with 19.27 GW and 7.13 GW respectively. Spain as a leading country has an installed capacity of 5.4 GW equivalent to 1.8% of the 294.16 GW installed in the world [4]. In the Asian context and in the first place, the Republic of China raised up to 28 GWp installed in 2014 [5–۷], which highlights the commitment of this power country with the alternative technological development of the energy sector and capacity for the production of this type of energy. Similarly, in 2015 they installed 15.2 GW, reaching a total of 78.07 GW installed by 2016. Japan ranks second with an accumulated installed capacity of 42.75 GW [4]. India as an emerging economy of the Asian continent has an average population of 1240 million and more than 600.000 villages, where 1/3 of the population does not have access to the electricity grid, which represents almost 600 million people. India presents high solar radiation that can be susceptible to generate electricity from solar energy; an example of this is the solar radiation in the zones of Kolkata and Madras with approximately 5000 kW h per year [7]. In 2010, India created the goal of installing 20.000 MW of photovoltaic energy by 2022 from approximately 1100 solar plants. Currently the installed capacity in photovoltaic energy in this country is 9.010 MW [8–۱۰].