Slashdot Mirror
Solar Panels Reach $1 a Watt
ZosX writes "An article over at Popular Mechanics announces that, for the first time, solar cells have been manufactured for the much sought-after figure of $1/Watt. They also talk about a new study of the cost of the particular raw materials used in different manufacturing processes. The conclusion is that the company that just achieved the $1/W milestone, using cadmium telluride technology, may not prove to be the long-term winner capable of meeting demand when it rises into the terawatt range."
I'm sightly confused.
In germany 1 kW (note the lower case letter "k") solar power costs about 20 cent (Euro cent) ... that is the consumer price, not production cost.
So I don't really get what this article is about.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
World peace will happen. http://p5y.org/ [p5y.org] It's simple.
That has to be the silliest thing I've ever read. It makes the Communist Party look like hard-nosed pragmatists.
Advice: on VPS providers
Now the consumer electronics industry just needs to convert everything over to run on DC and I'm all set.
Not asking for much, are you? With a little hacking, you can probably adapt all your devices that already use wall-wart DC. But don't expect a basic change in your lifetime. Consolidated Edison just finished a changeover that went the other way, and it took them 79 years. The original plan, their final white flag in he Current Wars, was for 45 years. That turned out to be too optimistic!
And this was for just one city! And it was in a country where AC had long been the dominant current format. I can't see a similar national changeover in less than a century.
Besides, the original reason that AC triumphed over DC still applies. No matter how many people have solar cells on their roofs, most power will still be centrally generated, and you'll need to access it as a backup on cloudy days. As of now, AC is the only way to transmit power long distances efficiently. I've been hearing talk of "high energy DC" for this purpose, but that's decades in the future, if it's doable at all.
You'll just have to buy a rectifier. Inefficient, but that's the price of backward compatibility!