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> the forward looking saudis will do what they have to do to be able to compete in the world

The Middle East and Africa are rapidly deploying solar panels ( http://www.solarbuzz.com/sites... ) They have an excellent climate for it, and they know the oil won't last forever. The Sun will.

From the mid 1990s by the Vice-provost of Caltech: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face."

More like that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science

Also:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/02/26/peer-review-as-censorship/

All reasoning is also based on emotion, which relate to perceptions, assumptions, priorities and preferences which are, to some extent, outside of pure rationality (which why "technocracy" has many issues).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error

But the biggest issue is that our socio-economic-political system is not well-adapted to handle "externalities" including systemic risks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Any reasonable projection over the next twenty years shows we will almost certainly have dirt-cheap PV given exponential growth of that industry and rapidly dropping costs. We may even have hot or cold fusion in that time (and other things). With alternatives on the way, there is not a very good case to be made for risking destroy our groundwater for just a bit more fossil fuels:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/
http://www.solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices
http://bigthink.com/think-tank/ray-kurzweil-solar-will-power-the-world-in-16-years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity#Solar_power
http://pesn.com/2012/07/19/9602138_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_July19/
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/414559/a-new-approach-to-fusion/
And so on...

Accounting for externalities (including US defense spending for long oil supply lines), renewables (and energy efficiency) have been *cheaper* than fossil fuels since the 1970s... Two resources on that from around 1980:

There are cheap solar panels, at least compared to what solar panels were a few years ago. That's why so many solar firms are going bankrupt. The retail price of a solar module fell from roughly $4.5 per watt in 2009 to $2.5 per watt in July 2011 and its still going down. Many manufacturers are pricing below $2 per watt, according the market research firm SolarBuzz. The thing is its still generally more expensive than burning natural gas, so there is still a tremendous economic incentive to develop natural gas infrastructure. Oil doesn't really compete with solar, as many would have you think, because it's primarily and transportation fuel. Those two markets won't be linked until we have vast numbers of electric / plug-in hybrid cars. That will take a long time.

What you are seeing in this article is the U.S. market responding to the much higher oil/NG prices in the U.S. over the past decade or so. That's made a whole lot of development within the U.S. more economical, especially combined with new technology that's come along. The article mentions billions of dollars of investment, which it's worth noting is peanuts when you talk about energy. One big power plant (coal or solar) can hit $1 billion.

Citation needed.

Here is a site that tracks the price of solar panels (rather than complete residential solar systems). As you can see from the graph, the price has been falling rapidly since the start of 2009. In that time, the average cost of solar panels has fallen from nearly $5/watt to only $2.29/watt, with the least expensive panels only $0.84/watt. That's a dramatic change in only three years.

The prices we're seeing today are based on discoveries/improvements made several years ago. Look at how module prices have (mostly) dropped over the years: http://solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices

Here is some current data on retail panel prices: http://solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices

Wholesale or buying for a utility scale power plant would be even lower, but you can see that average prices have fallen in half the last three years. That means the high cost producers are just out of luck and need to adapt or die.

"There could be a breakthrough that causes one of both to improve significantly, but there is no reason to expect either, only hope that it will happen."

Have you actually looked at the chart here?
http://www.solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices

How do you explain the price of PV/watt dropping in half over the last couple of years?

Also, when you account for externalities like pollution, risk, health, and defense, renewables (plus energy efficiency like passive solar) have been cheaper since the 1970s, so the current mix is what is "insane" from a capitalist perspective, but is profitable for some who can privatize gains but socialize costs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
"Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that U.S. domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy.[1] In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current. [2]"

You are making broad sweeping generalizations, but not providing details. For example, you say solar takes a lot of land but you don't cite how much land coal mining takes,

Why can't we just make hydrogen from wind farms and burn it in turbines when the wind is not blowing to even the load? Or store it in metal hydrides and use it in fuel cells? How much more expensive is it really in current dollars? And how much cheaper is it given you don't have all the health costs of coal burning? Example:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/02/17/cost-of-coal-500-billion-year-in-u-s-harvard-study-finds/
"This study lays out in detail the costs the coal industry is NOT PAYING and what everyone else IS PAYING! The paper details all the factors that are not quantifiable, like lost work time when a mother has to take her child to the doctor for an asthma attack or the cost to a family for the loss of a loved one or wage earner. ... Each stage in the life cycle of coalâ"extraction, transport, processing, and combustionâ"generates a waste stream and carries multiple hazards for health and the environment. These costs are external to the coal industry and thus are often considered as âoeexternalities.â We estimate that the life cycle effects of coal and the waste stream generated are costing the U.S. public a third to over one-half of a trillion dollars annually. Many of these so-called externalities are, moreover, cumulative. Accounting for the damages conservatively doubles to triples the price of electricity from coal per kWh generated, making wind, solar, and other forms of non fossil fuel power generation, along with investments in efficiency and electricity conservation methods, economically competitive. We focus on Appalachia, though coal is mined in other regions of the United States and is burned throughout the world."

The amount of land needed to go all solar in the USA is less than 1% -- compare it to, say, animal product production which is what about half the land area in the USA is used for (mostly for animal fodder) where eating too many animal products is overall shortening US life expectancies.
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.ht

Is GE greenwashing too? http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/
http://www.solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices
http://www.cleantechblog.com/2011/06/will-crystalline-solar-kill-thin-film-a-conversation-with-applied-materials-solar-head-charlie-gay.html

Anyway, that's why this article is silly. Solar will displace fossil fuels and nuclear through market forces alone at this point over the next decade. We are passing the tipping point, even though, if you account for externalities like pollution, risk management, and defense costs, renewables have been cheaper than fossil fuels since the 1970s or earlier.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/surface-area-required-to-power-the-whole-world-with-solar-power-wind.php

Thanks for the reply. I still think the situation is more complex than you outlined, and you are stuck in just viewing this through one lens of "regulation is bad". But what about managing "Externalities" through taxes, subsidies, and regulation?
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

See also (though it ignores the value of health and community):
    "Marxism of the Right"
    http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/
"If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism."

You think China and Japan and so on are less "socialistic" than the USA?

Neoliberal economics has kept real wages flat for thirty years in the USA, which is part of the reason for the current economic crisis. Related:
    http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-Jix4opZuY

Also, the US government would have plenty of money without two (or is it five?) recent needless wars and the Bush tax cuts for the wealth.

All sorts of technologies have been subsidized in the past. Railroads were heavily subsidized, for example.

If you look at solar panels, costs are now dropping for the same reasons your computer chip costs are dropping, a lot of R&D and investment in that area. There is now, according to one report I read, as much research going into PV solar in two years as the entire amount invested in research on it since it was invented. There is a chart of falling prices here:
    http://www.solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices

That price decrease has little to do with government subsidies (other than pump-priming, to offset all the subsidies to fossil fuels and nuclear, given externalities of those have been generally ignored and "socialized".)

The bottom line: the USA is falling apart because Republicans make the worst socialists -- they privatize gains while socializing costs. Real socialist countries don't do that. That is why Western Europe, in general, is a much happier place than the USA for most people, and most people live longer there. As is Canada. Unfortunately, people can not flow over borders as easily as capital, otherwise much of the USA might just move somewhere with access to health care, cheap college, and so on (those who don't watch Fox News. :-) Though with that said, and it is joking obviously, since cultural ties and family ties keep most people rooted where they are short of a shooting civil war or other broad physical disaster, there are still many good things about US culture, like freedom of speech, which can still be better than in some other countries. But it seems the list of things better about the USA than other countries is getting shorter and shorter.

However, on top of that, there are broad trends from the centralization of wealth due to the increasing value of capital in production relative to human labor, which indeed undermines the paid value of most human labor (and not just in the USA, but eventually everywhere, which is why we will eventually see a new economic system for the 21st century with stuff like a basic income, a gift economy, better planning, and more advanced local subsistence production):
    http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

Thanks for the perspective on the GIS study. Looking again, I also see I might have not read this carefully enough:
    http://money.cnn.com/2011/07/25/technology/solar-new-york/
"If every one of those roofs had solar panels, when the sun shines the brightest the city could get half its electricity from solar power."

So, that would only be for peak hours (so, four hours a day or so, which is more in agreement with what you said). But in any case, cities usually have resource regions, like Jane Jacobs talks about, so there is no reason NYC can't just have a big solar farm upstate, same as it has watersheds there.

I also live in upstate NY, in a partially passive-solar house (it was a cabin in the Adirondacks that someone expanded with passive-solar additions).

The house has electric heat to avoid combustion because that was before air-to-air heat exchangers were understood, and electric heat is expensive, though still less than I used to pay for oil heat in a drafty place a decade ago. We should improve it more though. We could benefit a lot from solar thermal for hot water. Our house is on a slab though, not a basement, so our options are a bit more limited for upgrades. A heat pump might be a great investment, too. Also related on what is possible with much better design:
    "No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in Innovative 'Passive Houses'"
    http://www.google.com/#q=no+furnace

I'm mostly a software developer (including some real-time embedded in the past) and also a writer, and I don't care for heights (even as my father would tell about scampering up a tall mast on a training ship as a young man to wave his hat to the queen of the Netherlands). So while I like all these changes, they end up being more hands-on than I am comfortable doing myself.

I have one emergency solar panel tucked away I have never put up permanently, for example, that I bought in the run-up to the Iraq war when I was unsure what reprisals there would be, just to be able to keep a laptop going if worst came to worst. About eight years later, that panel can probably now be bought for about half the cost.
    http://solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices

The XPower 1500 portable battery/inverter device I bought to go with it for energy storage failed though and in a fairly short time, probably over a cheap charger that came with it failing and overcharging (causing the battery to vent sulfurous smelling gas so I did not trust it anymore), and so we paid to have it recycled (the shipping etc. costs to have it sent back to the factory for "repair" was pretty high).

But ultimately, we'd like a permanent system "just in case" and also to be more "green" (though that is debatable when you live near hydroelectric power). It looks like, even being on the grid, the costs are looking more and more attractive (with current subsidies, although if fossil fuels and nukes payed the true costs of pollution, health, defense, and risk up-front, renewables probably have been cheaper since the 1970s, so I don't feel bad about the subsidies).

I feel innovations in financing and the spread of trusted brands for doing these kind of improvements is going to have a big effect in getting more people to make changes. But we are not quite there yet. But we are very close. One of the reasons we've put off doing much about that is just the sense that costs keep dropping, so we wait for the next best thing.

Great to see NYPA is hiring -- something like "Lead Real Time Systems Engineer" is tempting for embedded software developers interested in energy issues, even ones with a fear of heights: :-)
    http://www.nypa.gov/careers/default.htm

Related on trends: http://solarbuzz.com/

"That is, no matter how terribly inefficient you are at producing A and B, it still makes sense to trade with you."

From the Wikipedia article on the subject: "Full employment - if one or other of the economies has less than full employment of factors of production, then this excess capacity must usually be used up before the comparative advantage reasoning can be applied."

With rising unemployment due to robotics and other automation, better design, accumulating infrastructure, eventually cheap solar and fusion energy that replaces labor, and voluntary social networks, in the face of limited demand, that key assumption of "comparative advantage" is invalid. So, then arguments can be made for tariffs, subsidies, and so on.

As for efficiency, note that even GE, makers of gas turbines and nuclear power plants, say solar may be cheaper than fossil fuels and nuclear by 2015. Look at the graphs for yourself:
http://solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-26/solar-may-be-cheaper-than-fossil-power-in-five-years-ge-says.html

Not on this planet, and particularly not in the UK and US.

http://solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices

Rgds

Damon

Solar panels cost more per watt now than 5 years ago, and their lowest cost per watt was about 6-7 years ago.

Not true. See, for example this data

I consider 0.20/kwh viable. right now.

http://www.solarbuzz.com/solarindices.htm

not everywhere. but we could start making a serious dent with smart meter tech and lots of PV, right now, in sunny climates.

that's not much more than "regular" electricity costs us if you account for *any* externialities not currently captured in the price of dirty or dangerous energy.

Solarbuzz publishes an updated graph of $:W-peak in its monthly reports of solar PV module prices. The data comes from its own proprietary market research (which it sells in detail).

You can see that solar module prices are falling steadily, as they were until the Bush Bubble pushed them back up and held them steady until the Bush Crash let them drop again. We finally got back in 2010 to the lows we'd left in 2004, but the drop is leveling off again. Also note that those numbers are the average market price, including all variable features. The lowest price is now $1.07:W for a 55W thin film module. Total installed price is about 2x the module price.

http://www.solarbuzz.com/Moduleprices.htm

Can anyone point me to a good cost/watt chart over time? I would love to be able to see how prices have dropped over the past two decades. I keep hearing that solar has to drop in price... but have no baseline to judge our progress.

It depends on what you want: space solar panels are the most expensive multi-junction technology, but achieve the highest efficiency.

If you're a huge company, you can get really great deals because you purchase whole manufacturing runs. This is also why it's hard for an individual to buy direct from any manufacturer: all their production capacity is probably already bought up by large companies, so you get the "seconds," the panels that those resellers decide they would like to sell to you (at a price mark up, of course).

Here are some panel price charts, though they're not perfect:

http://www.solarbuzz.com/Moduleprices.htm
http://futurist.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/08/solar-energy-co.html

But I should point out the bias on these sites: they're in the industry, not independent review sites. So they will be competing to drive your dollars to their products.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html and http://www.solarbuzz.com/StatsCosts.htm and the crucial test, this article fails on my personal, does it sound like bull meter.

That's an amazingly bad article for the New York Times. It's based on a single paper which reads like a sales brochure. The figures for power costs are after subsides. Solar power isn't charged with storage costs. (Although, in hot areas, the solar peak coincides with the air conditioning peak. Wind has much worse problems; output is totally unrelated to when power is needed.)

Their projections are even worse. Their projection graph has data points in the future, which they then fit with a line. What? The SolarBuzz solar power price index, which is from a solar advocacy group, is far higher than the numbers in that paper. SolarBuzz shows a decline from $0.22/KWh in 2000 to $0.19/Kwh in 2010 today for medium-industrial sized roof-top solar projects in US sunbelt states, including inverters and grid connection, but not land or power storage. That's only a 10% decline per decade, not the 40% decline shown in the paper.

Nobody has actually built and started up a big nuclear plant in the US in several decades, so there's no real cost basis available there. China has 22 reactors under construction right now.

Even thin film panels generally last >15 years (and they are still working, really, after that, just not putting out as much power.)

Mono-Si generally is in the 20-30 year range.

As far as replacement costs go, 15 years is a very long time now that the Si crunch is over, so the panels that replace the ones that are installed today should be considerably cheaper. Solarbuzz tracks Mono-Si retail prices here.

Seems like I keep hearing of breakthroughs, but nothing ever seems to fucking change!

Prices have changed. According to Solarbuzz per watt costs have dropped from about 5.40 euros or a little over that in US dollars in December 2001 to about 4.20 euros or a little less US dollars for June 2010. Further it says "there are now 488 solar module prices below $4.00 per watt (3.24 euros per watt)". Efficiency has also increased. In 2001 conversion efficiency pushed 12%, in 2009 SunPower sold panels with conversion efficiencies of 19.3%, the highest in the industry.

Falcon

The price of solar is about 4.12EU per watt. So 1GW of cells will cost about 4.12 billion euros. These prices are not for high efficiency modules (ie about 15%) but lets assume we can get 20% efficiency. That's about 150 watts per m^2 at *mid day*. This requires a square about 2.5km on each side for 1GW, and then it only does that when the sun is high. The average is much much lower. And the true size would be much larger (gaps between modules). So installing the 4 billon euros worth of cells over a block of land about 3km a side, with all the wiring required is going to cost a lot. A lot more that the cell price of 4 billion. And your average power output is *below* 500MW and you can't control *when* you get the power.

I all adds up to "do you want to pay 3-5x for electricity?".

20billion for a research reactor is cheap.

And meanwhile, consumer solar tech *does* continue to advance. Have you priced solar panels lately? Solarbuzz lists:

Lowest Mono-crystalline Module Price: $2.37/Wp
Lowest Multi-crystalline Module Price: $1.98/Wp
Lowest Thin Film Module price: $1.76/Wp

You always see this: in any field where there's lots of announcements about new tech, people berating them for that tech not showing up instantly on the consumer market... while meanwhile, the consumer market *does* continue to advance behind the scenes.

In this solar panel price survey, they won't list cheap Chinese panels and yet you can now find panels for under $1/Watt retail: http://www.ecobusinesslinks.com/solar_panels.htm So those cheap Chinese panels must be doing something positive. On the other hand, China has to contend with rapidly advancing US thin film production: http://www.solarbuzz.com/Marketbuzz2009-intro.htm so no wonder they want to make their panels cheap and match the US growth rate.

Please by all means invest in your solar panels that cost $10 a watt. let me know how the goes for you.

First, I don't know where you got your "$10 a watt" but PV modules can be bought today that are under $5 a watt, Next, people who build Off the Grid do that all the tyme. Of course before they build a solar power system, or use any other alternative energy, they first conserve energy by using energy efficient power users. They'll use CFLs, which only use about a quarter of the power incandescent lights do, or LEDs, which use a tenth of the power. The building will be super insulated to dramatically reduce if not eliminate the energy needed to heat and cool the building. Instead of using refrigs and freezers with the compressors on button, they get hot and heat rises, they may use appliances with them on top. They will also be super insulated.

Falcon

The current lowest price per PV watt is $3.89. Anything anywhere as cheap as $1:W would revolutionize the current photovoltaic solar industry, which is already just becoming a good priced alternative to getting power from the "city grid".

The cost of solar power generation is typically in the range of 12 (industrial scale in the middle of nowhere) to 30 (small scale in urban environment) cents per kilowatt-hour. But only if you believe the solar industry. Mind you, this is using the most current technology.

The cost of nuclear power generation is 1.8 cents per kilowatt hour. But only if you believe the Department of Energy. Mind you, this is using technology from the 1960s.

Nuclear's end cost ends up much higher, because the US has a peculiar set of laws that ban reprocessing, making waste storage very expensive, and necessitating much higher safety costs. Those laws are relatively easy to change.

Please note that I say nothing about what I wish were true, nor do I defend any technology. I merely state that economic considerations are more important to whether a technology is used than carbon emissions.

In essence, solar costs about $.30/kwh. http://www.solarbuzz.com/SolarPrices.htm Location is important. Costs more in Germany, less in California. http://www.solarbuzz.com/statsCosts.htm. This competes against under $.10/kwh in the US for other sources. But there are variations around the world and even within the US http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html

In essence, solar costs about $.30/kwh. http://www.solarbuzz.com/SolarPrices.htm Location is important. Costs more in Germany, less in California. http://www.solarbuzz.com/statsCosts.htm. This competes against under $.10/kwh in the US for other sources. But there are variations around the world and even within the US http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html

Lets have a look at actual data:

http://solarbuzz.com/

During the last decade there was only a very mediocre decline. Scaling up solar cell production in the last few years actually brought prices up again due to silicon shortage.

However the price of solar cells is expected to decline sharper during the next years

1) Many new solar grade silicon fabs are coming up, hopefully driving down the cost of solar grade silicon

2) Thin film solar cells which can be produced at lower cost (but at the expense of efficiency and reliability) are gaining more and more market share and are improving.

As many other people pointed out, the scaling of solar cells is inherently different from that of microelectronics. In integrated circuits you are actually able to reduce the size and increase the density of your circuits.

For solar cells the material consumption per watt is pretty simple:

Vol [cmÂ/W] = thickness [cm] / efficiency [W/cmÂ]

Efficiencies for mass products are currently stuck somewhere between 15% and 20%. There are limited ways to work around this (concentrator cells, multijunction). This figure of merit is not expected to scale.

Reducing the material thickness is obviously the only option. Since the material thickness depends on physical properties (direct/indirect band gap) there are hard limits as well.

It boils down to the fact there there is no technical scaling model or road map to improve solar cell similar to integrated circuits. The main lever is simply in manufacturing intelligence and cost.

Personally I think the most interesting ramifications of this are that we will see (short lived) phase where companies can survive based on superior manufacturing technologies. Over time these differentiators will becomes less significant and cost is only defined by environmental factors such as cost of energy, raw material and labour.

This is why the solar cell industry will not be a pleasant place to work in in ten years, as interesting as it looks now. Outsourcing and consolidation will be swift and brutal. Even today companies are looking into places such as Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia (!).

However, the greatest untapped energy source is, and always will be the sun. Things like using solar panels at your house and being more energy efficient will be our greatest step towards solving our energy problems. People themselves need to start taking their energy use into their own hands. Their are entire neighborhoods in the US who are self sufficient and actually give energy back. There is no reason why this idea cannot spread to more of the US. So rather than relying on 3rd party for all your needs, start thinking of how you can help at home.

World solar photovoltaic (PV) market installations reached a record high of 2,826 megawatts (MW) in 2007, representing growth of 62% over the previous year...The PV industry raised nearly $10 billion in 2007. 84 identified financial transactions accounted for $7.5 billion in 2007, Of this amount, $5.3 billion came in the form of equity financing, while $2.2 billion came from debt financing.

http://www.solarbuzz.com/index.asp

It went up significantly a few years ago and is now flat. It will probably drift downward in the future, but not nearly as much as one would hope.

with conventional solar pannels the cost per watt is around $3-$5. so the $1 per watt price isnt that impressive, what is impressive is the scale at which they can produce these new panels... they could sell self install kits at wal-mart and still have no problem with inventory..

conventional panels have always been restricted by the amount of pure silicon that can be produced, and with microprocessors using the same pure silicon its been tough for solar panel makers to have enough supply to meet demand. in fact the major tech companies have multi year contracts on 99% of the pure silicon being produced world wide.

btw this technology does not cheapen solar power to utility electric rates.. according to a website about solar energy Around 59% of world solar product sales installed the last five years were in applications that are tied to the electricity grid. Solar Energy prices in these applications are 5-20 times more expensive than the cheapest source of conventional electricity generation, although they may only be 3-5 times the electricity tariff that utility customers pay. By contrast, PV can be fully cost competitive on economic grounds in remote (off-grid) industrial and habitational applications.http://www.solarbuzz.com/StatsCosts.htm

so cutting the solar panel cost to 1/2 of what it was before makes solar a preffered method of off-grid electrical applications, and brings the total consumer cost down to levels (15cents/kwh) that they would actually pay for electricity. still not ideal, if they can bring the cost down further with economies of scale, then this will start a revolution for earth-friendly consumers who will be able to take out a loan to buy a $10k system that cuts their electric bill by 25% (to fully power a house with typical energy usage would run about $40k with these pannels, or $80k with normal solar pannels) which means the pannels would have to last at least 34 years to recoup the cost invested in installing a solar system. (theyd have to last for 68 years with normal solar panels) now if youre using a grid+solar setup you can probablly keep using those solar panels as long as theyll crank out energy, but of course they do degrade over the years, producing less energy... and widespead solar power adoption will cause winter energy spikes, but if they have to have coal fired plants that they only run 3 months a year, because of widespread solar adoption... well itll be an improvement.

$1 per watt is frankly about 10 times more expensive than we need to get solar energy for solar electric companies to adopt the technology without government subsudies/regulation.

this is why companies like excell energy are turing to wind turbines to meet the 20% renewable energy production mandate minnesota has put them under by 2020.. wind turbines are ALREADY produced around the COST per kwh of coal fired plants. (theyre sold for more obviously though)

wind energy is a natural byproduct of solar energy, and with the new tidal stream generators it is possible that the uk and scottland could see more than 10% of their total electrical consumption produced entirely from rapidly moving undersea currents.

tidal projects obviously have less problems with home owners that wind farms, and since areas with high tidal streams tend to be far from good scuba diving sites there should be little complaint about installing tidal stream generators.. in the handful of places where they are genuinely viable.

its nice to know that more californians will be able to afford a basic solar install, but this isnt something so revolutionary that were going to stop building coal fired plants because of it.

I looked around for your 6.5 billion per week figure and could not find it.

Actually I wrote 6.5B/month, not per week, and I obtained that number here.

It looks like 1kw is 22,000 (for a non battery backed up system) so that's $33,000 for a non battery backed up 1.5kw system.

No, that's outrageous. (You pulled that number out of some turkey's comments on that blog page instead of researching the actual cost.) Installed (grid-tied, i.e. not battery-backed) PV is well documented to be under $10/watt. The panels themselves are only ~$5/W. Here is some data to start with. Our 3300W system cost $24K, and at least 25% of that went to the installers, and that price is before any state subsidies or tax credits.

Battery-backed PV technology is stagnant, and totally impractical and uneconomical unless you have no hope of obtaining a grid connection. Battery wear-out costs drown any remote chance of saving money. Tying PV to the grid is better for everyone -- the grid is a fantastic virtual storage device.

Solar just converts current energy that was shining on the house anyway.

Absolutely!

It appears that coal has reached peak energy production http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/08/many-more-ghos ts.html in the US already though this might change if a lot of new power plants are built. The energy per unit mass mined will certainly continue to decline. The world coal energy production may peak around 2030. On the other hand, bringing new nuclear power on line has a long lead time and it may face a market where in cannot compete on price as soon as it starts producing or within just a few year there after. In this circumstance, offering federal loan guaranties seems the height of folly. The solution would look to be a greater than 45% growth rate in renewables and a transition of transportation to more efficient electric power. Since wind is expected to install 3 GW in the US this year: http://www.awea.org/newsroom/releases/AWEA_First_Q uarter_Market_Report_2007.html and solar PV installed 0.14 GW in the US last year http://www.solarbuzz.com/Marketbuzz2007-intro.htm (0.2 GW this year at 45% growth) we are seeing the equivilent of 2 or so nuclear plants a year while the NRC seems inclined to handle applications for new nuclear power one at a time. It is difficult to see then how new nuclear power finds a market unless coal plants are shut down. By the time any new nuclear plant comes on line, solar, at 45% growth, will be installing at a rate equivilent to the new nuclear capacity. In order to make and economic case for nuclear power then, one needs to show which coal plant it will shut down and that it can operate long enough displacing coal to make financial sense since all other new generation will likely be less expensive (wind already is). But, solar alone can cover current generation in 22 years so the longest operation period that a reactor can anticipate is about 16 years, much shorter than the design lifetime. That then raises the cost of new nuclear power by about a factor of three. Long lead times make for investment uncertainty when competing disruptive technologies are involved.
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Save money renting solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

The prices of solar power have been going up over the last few years. The article misstates information *and* its quite possible that it is intentional. Industry wide costs for every year since 2000!

How are costs going down when the industry says they are flat to increasing? I call BS.

Everyone likes to think that solar is getting cheaper every year just like computers and disk drives, but it's not true. Look at this chart:

http://www.solarbuzz.com/

You will see that solar panel prices bottomed out back in 2003 and have been rising ever since. Demand is exceeding supply thanks to ever more generous subsidies, especially in Germany, which have driven up worldwide price. The truth is that solar costs more today than it has for several years, and costs are still rising slowly. It is a myth that solar prices are constantly coming down.

Have a look at the graph on this page. The retail price for solar panels has been essentially static for the past few years.

There were 1.7 GW installed in 2006: http://www.solarbuzz.com/Marketbuzz2007-intro.htm bringing the world up to about 6 GW. At a typical 5 hours per day equivilent peak generation that comes to 11 billion kWh per year. World net generation was 16,590.6 billion kWh per year in 2004: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb1116.html, so your fraction should be 0.07%, off by about 4 orders of magnitude. At 45% growth, how long would it take to replace world net generation? Somewhat less that 22 years since 1.45^22=3550 which would imply that more than half of the worlds net generation would be fabricated in the year 2028, with the rest fabricated prior to that year. Since panels last 25 years or longer there would have been little need to replace existing solar PV capacity by that time.
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Rent residential solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

"if you spend more energy creating a solar cell than you get out of it in its usefull life, that's a no-brainer. It sounds good but the net is not."

That may have once been true, but it isn't true now in many cases.

See for example:
    http://www.csudh.edu/oliver/smt310-handouts/solarp an/pvpayback.htm
"The above summary shows that energy payback times for modules incorporating thick silicon cells are, at worst, of the order of six to seven years and possibly less than three years. Since warranty periods of 20 years are routinely offered on such modules[ ] it is clear that the embodied energy should be easily recovered."

Things may be worse if the cells are not used efficiently, of course.

See also:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#Solar_cell s_and_energy_payback
"In the 1990s, when silicon cells were twice as thick, efficiencies 30% lower than today and lifetimes shorter, it may well have cost more energy to make a cell than it could generate in a lifetime. The energy payback time of a modern photovoltaic module is anywhere from 1 to 20 years (usually under five)[9] depending on the type and where it is used (see net energy gain). This means solar cells can be net energy producers, meaning they generate more energy over their lifetime than the energy expended in producing them.[10][11] .[12]"

This area of technology will only continue to improve (especially as several variants of solar cells use technologies similar to computer chip fabrication and printing). I use this site to track some of the progress:
    http://www.solarbuzz.com/

California's Access law is one of the better ones. They also exist in
Arizona (tested in court)
Colorado
Florida
Hawaii
Indiana (planning zoning=HOA?)
Maryland (after 1980)
Massachusetts (specifically including in the yard)
Nevada
and North Carolina (Chapel Hill only)
As can be checked here: http://www.dsireusa.org/summarytables/index.cfm?&C urrentPageID=7&EE=1&RE=1. They basically help with HOAs for the most part.

http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-use rs-selling-solar.html Senator Menendez (NJ) has introduced a bill in the Senate which has also be introduced in the House too (Cardoza CA and Ferguson NJ) that would do the same kind of thing http://www.solarbuzz.com/News/NewsNAGO325.htm nation wide.
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Save with Solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

The conclusion is that the cost of nuclear power falls in the range: "3 cents per kilowatt hour to nearly 14 cents per kilowatt hour".

Note the word "cost."

Solar power is about 3x the cost of the most expensive nuclear power.

Nope. Ontario is paying 42 cents per kWh. That does not mean that solar power generation costs 42 cents per kWh. Indeed, I highly doubt that the investors in this project would be interested if there is no room for profit.

According to this link, actual costs for solar power generation are currently 20 to 30 cents per kWh:

http://www.solarbuzz.com/StatsCosts.htm

Martin

Just curious, where did you get your figure? Joule is a measurement of energy, just like kw/h. Specifically, 1 joule = 2.7778 ×107 kw/h.

Most figures I've seen place nuclear power at around $1-2/watt for installed capacity. Solar is $10/watt peak capacity Because solar and wind are lucky to produce 50% of their rated power(most solar installs are lucky to get 25%), while nuclear is getting 90-95% of their rated power on average. This means you have to install at least two watts to match nuclear. Making solar ten times as expensive as nuclear, oh yeah, and it doesn't work at night.

The nuclear power industry, by law, pays a fee to the federal government per kw/h produced by nuclear sources in exchange for a promise from the feds that they'll dispose of the waste. And it's no where near infinite; current requirements* are incredibly overkill. For the latter half of the 10k years, the danger of the heavy metals would exceed that of the radioactivity of them, not to mention that we have ash piles from coal plants sitting around that are more radioactive than what the waste will be by that point.
Real world, they add some more on top of it for above-ground casks and such because the feds have, so far, failed to dispose of any waste.

Or, to put it another way, $1 invested into a savings account at 5% will turn into $148 in a hundred years. Dump enough money into investments and you can afford to pay for 'continuing care'.

Over the long term, no matter what is determined to be, the cost will always be more than anything else because storage is per year, forever. In 10000 years, we will not even be using a comparable monetary currency anyway, so any attempt at calculation is ridiculous.

Assuming, of course, that we let it sit there for that long. I believe that we're far more likely to haul the stuff back out for reprocessing and additional fuel use within a couple centuries at most. The reactors now in service get ~1% of the possible energy out of the rods. Something like an IFR can use the current 'waste' as fuel, get 99.5% of the possible energy out of it, leaving radioactive remains that are highly radioactive; but will die down to ambient in around 300 years. With the differences in fuel usage, a storage pool** capable of holding 20 years of waste with today's light water reactor would be able to hold well over a thousand years worth of waste for the IFR plant. If/when the plant is shut down, move it to a combined facility or another plant. There'll be room. For the older stuff(>20 years), you can stick it in an aboveground casket for not much money, then pay only minimal attention to it.

*IE no more radioactive than ambient for the ore it was refined from. It's still generally composed of heavy metals, which are chemically toxic. But then, anybody playing that deep should know about that.
**Something like an olympic sized swimming pool, but about 10 times as deep.

No need to explain anything -- a google search of exxonsecrets.org ("How Exxon-Mobil funds the climate skeptics") reveals so much! Thanks! As mentioned before, clearly, the major execs of Shell and BP asking governments to regulate carbon emissions was actually a piece of machiavellian treachery to encourage governments *not* to regulate carbon emissions. Those crafty bastards! I bet that they're among the world's largest investors in solar and wind (example, world's four largest solar companies: Kyocera, BP, Sharp, and Shell) is *yet another* machiavellian trap to destroy renewables!

We MUST stop them before it's too late! Please, continue sounding the alarm: people MUST KNOW about this trap that they've laid!

P.S. - Hmm, I wonder where ExxonMobil's share of the pie is? Those fools -- they'll ruin the whole Machiavellian scheme if they don't join in!

I shouldn't post to Slashdot when I'm in a daze.

I pay around $.099/kWh and around $.128/kWh with the facility charges, etc. figured in. If you're still on the grid while using solar, you'll still pay those facility charges, but will save a little on sales tax. Consider the facility charges as payment for using the grid as a battery as long as they pay retail for your extra juice. Ignore my babbling in the original post.

http://solarbuzz.com/SolarPrices.htm shows residential solar power at $.37/kWh in a sunny climate and $.82/kWh in a cloudy climate.

National Renewable Energy Lab http://www.nrel.gov/

Sandia National Labs http://www.sandia.gov/pv

Solar energies association http://www.seia.org/

Solar Trade Association - Solar Energy, Energy for a Cleaner Environment http://www.greenenergy.org.uk/sta/solarenergy/cont ent.htm

PV-UK http://www.greenenergy.org.uk/pvuk2/

Solar design associates http://www.solardesign.com/experience.html

PV power resource site http://www.pvpower.com/

PV Materials Efficency http://www.iea-pvps.org/pv/materials.htm

Solar Cell Technologies http://www.solarbuzz.com/Technologies.htm

Install a gigantic solar system / battery storage.

I used the numbers from solarbuzz.com. http://solarbuzz.com/ Cost of a panel right now is $5.20 per peak Watt. For more facts, also see http://www.solarbuzz.com/Consumer/FastFacts.htm.

So I did some numbers. My electric bill is about $40/mo from PG&E. I use about 353KWh/month.

I figured that there are about 6 effective peak hours of generation per day. That is, I get about 12 hours, but if you average it all hour, it's like I get peak sun for 6 hours (Solarbuzz says 5.5) in my area.

Okay, so that means for each $5.20 I spend, I get 6 WH per day. Since I use 11.8KWH/day, that means I need about 2000 peak watts of generation. That means I'd have to spend about $10K on cells (not including tax, and solarbuzz says the PV array is only half the cost of the system). At $40/month, that means it will take me 20 years to get my money back (really, double this), hopefully my cost of new lead-acid batteries every 4 years or so won't turn that 20 years into never.

And that's in sunny California, if I chop down the trees that shade my house and keep it cool. Oh, and I don't even have A/C!

So, what did I do wrong? Where's the magic of solar power here? Sounds like I'd have to take a huge bath to go solar.

Were just referring to ROI on energy put in?