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Prospects Darken For Solar Energy Companies
Hugh Pickens writes "Although global demand for solar power is still growing — about 8% more solar panels will be installed this year compared with 2010 — bankruptcies, plummeting stock prices and crushing debt loads are calling into question the viability of the solar energy industry that since the 1970s has been counted on to advance the world into a new energy age. Only a handful of manufacturers are now profitable in the face of too much capacity, which has contributed to a plunge in prices as government subsidies have been curbed. Prices for solar panels started 2011 near $1.60 per watt, but a buildup of inventory forced manufacturers into a fire sale toward the end of the second quarter that has pushed prices to near $1 per watt now. 'The prices that we're seeing today are likely not covering manufacturing costs in many cases,' says Ralph Romero. With at least seven solar-panel manufacturers filing for bankruptcy or insolvency in the last several months and six of the 10 largest publicly traded companies making solar components reporting losses in the third quarter, public-market investors are punishing the solar sector, sending shares down nearly 57% this year. Although winners are expected to emerge eventually, the question is how much more carnage there will be before that happens. 'The fact of the matter is, nobody really knows which solar companies will be pushed out of business or be forced to merge,' writes industry analyst Rodolfo Avalos. 'Nobody also knows how long it will take for the solar industry to improve even when the forecasted solar global demand for the next 5-10 years is quite promising.'"
The summary does not mention the actual need for prices on solar panels to drop to make them more viable, only on the economic repercusions of the shift in the market.
I thought to myself one day that this was one of the necessary evils or events in a free market economy, prices must shift and therefore allow more efficient companies and technologies to emerge. Any real change requires chaos.
You wanted change? Here you've got it.
What keeps the solar power industry from taking off is not the market. It's the subsidies that keep fossil fuels artificially cheap.
Subsidies like spending a trillion dollars to keep military control of producing countries, like fucking up the planet for the future generations, and so on.
Only if we allow it to. Right now it can not, because the prices are being manipulated by government subsidy. Not just the solar energy prices, but those of coal, nuclear, and wind as well.
It is a lesson we continually fail to learn: Industries built on government subsidy suffer when those subsidies begin to go away, even if the product itself is sound.
How is this a long term bad thing? Either the industry will come up with an idea that will allow a marketable solar power system sans subsidies and thus thrive, or it will die and we can move on to the next idea instead of wasting engineering hours on a failed/NRFPT energy source. In either case we win.
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
Companies going bankrupt is the invisible hand of the free market, they overproduced and stockpiled, based of forecasted growth, the real shame here is the closing line of the summery showing how we never really want to learn, saying demand is looking good for the next 5-10 years, their are no certain bets.
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
That's exactly what's happening. There are too many vendors trying to sell solar panels and not enough customers to keep them in business, so they're going belly-up. Profit and loss is how you know whether people want you to keep doing what you're doing.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Well, it says that the projected increase is 8% for next year... wouldn't that be a sign of people wanting these thingamalings?
Recall the workstation industry in the late 80s and early 90s?
Many companies, many failures, a few survivors.
Couple that with the suck economy, and anyone who guessed wrong on the timing of the recovery, is in a tricky place.
Yesterday Iran threatened to stop the flow of oil in response to new sanctions being floated by the US. Who wants to predict how that would affect solar? Also, what effect is the explosion of shale oil operations in the US having on technologies like solar?
------ Tim O'Brien
The enemy of solar power is not oil but gas and coal. A very small percentage of electricity fed into the grid is from oil. Mostly from peaking plants
This is why you subsidize research, not production.
Its important to remember that photovoltaic technology is not the the sum total of solar energy. In many ways concentrated solar much more applicable to the industry when discussing competition between solar, natural gas, coal, and nuclear. These power plants exist and are being built in the western US as we speak, although some subsidies are still required to make it competitive with coal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power (wiki)
China flooding the market, specifically to destroy the competition IMHO, is just half the story. How are people supposed to buy solar panels for the house when they are not even able to make the house payments. Small business owners aren't going to throw up panels any time soon. They rent. Renters aren't going to put up solar panels, their customers are going out of business left and right. Manufacturers with large plants are too busy deciding if they are going to relocate. China needs to learn to let other people make money. A customer base requires someone has an income.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Don't worry, I'm sure the invisible hand of the free market will step in and all will be OK.
That would be true if there weren't actors like China distorting prices in the market by dumping government-subsidized-manufacturing-produced solar panels on the market at below-cost rates in order to destroy foreign competition.
Free markets only work where there is a fair market. When governments step in to "tip the scales" in order to influence the market, there is no "free market". Same thing applies with Capitalism. As can be seen with the US, when the government steps in to prop up certain businesses and tear down others in an effort to engineer certain outcomes and societal directions, the result is not Capitalism, it's "Crony Capitalism", and that hasn't worked out so well for US citizens.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
The sad thing is that everytime I bring up this massive scandal of enormeous proportions, I only get a shrug or something like "it's always been that way" as a response.
But in fact, Richard Nixon was impeached for far less and while certainly there was corruption before it seems to have gotten out of hand with the Bush/Obama bailouts.
Using projections like that is what got solar power in trouble in the first place, they based their production or growth that did not happen, over produced slashed prices to recoup some costs, and finally collapsed. The only reason they didn't collapse sooner is because they were subsidized and were propped up by the tax payers.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
which has contributed to a plunge in prices as government subsidies have been curbed
Corn costs more to produce than we (or ethanol manufacturers) pay for it.
Coal power has higher costs than we see.
This is all because of government subsidsy. In the case of corn it keeps the price of corn artificially low and the farmer paid. The problem now is that many subsidies have outlived their usefulness but continue own because of the political clout of the companies/groups recieving them, and right now, the government has little or no money to subsidize other things. To me at least, it would make sense to subsideize a promising technolgy and give it a boost, instead we always cut the new guy, while the old belchers with the power, clout, and money (having extra saved from subsidies helps) get paid.
Silence is a state of mime.
Look, I WANT solar power on my home. I have a good location South facing, near full time sun during the day, am tech oriented, and I'm not dirt poor! I get HomePower magazine, I track the technology, I'm a buyer looking to do this.
So why don't I have it? Because my home like so many others is upside down and the cost of a solar install of decent size is looking like $30K or more which will be saving me something like $150 a month on my electric bill. How exactly does THAT make sense? Prices are down per watt? You could've fooled me! The price of raw cells on the wholesale market may have dropped some but the installed price is in the stratosphere IF you can even find a company local to you willing to do it.
There's a company near me advertising solar LEASING like crazy. They install and maintain the system and you pay them a monthly fee that's lower than your existing electric bill. Now this sounded possibly interesting despite my trepidation about anything that says "lease". I tried to sign up for an estimate - they don't service my area! Say what?! These guys are putting out printed ads and radio like mad here and then won't take my money? Kripes it's like trying to get high speed internet all over again! SolarCity -> asshats!
Now I know that my area isn't big on subsidies and it's also not someplace like Fla. where the sun roasts anything not moving but there's good potential in my site just no damned affordable way to do it no matter how much these guys claim to have reduced cost. Certainly installing solar makes huge sense in many ways but if the pricing is going to be $30K per house in a market where people are $40K upside down or more with a payoff measured in decades I think the reasons why few are buying are pretty damned clear! The local and federal Govt subsidies need to crank up, this is infrastructure we're talking about and it needs to be supported IMO. This is the technology that can take loads off our grid, why isn't there any incentive to go for it?
P.S. My neighbors just had to cut down all of their trees that used to shade the front of my home during parts of the day. It was awful but I now have no obstructions and full exposure but cannot take advantage of it. This sucks!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
the subject seems to imply that there's a panel manufacturing problem. In reality, there's a "new economic policy" problem: practically all the demand is government issued, and the private sector has been sucked up in the maelstrom. As in the original plan, I expect a full nationalization will ensue, on economic grounds
Here in Italy, solar has been heavily pushed via two mechanisms: one is that via tax rebates, building a solar plant is incentivized. the second is that ALL the energy produced is retired by the grid at a heavily increased price, and the increased price is then passed on to the consumers via the electricity bill. Private use is incentivised even more, since there's a counter at thee production level: a user/producer gets paid the higher price on all production, and pays his consumption at the lower general level. It goes without saying that this is a much bigger incentive than using a "net" mechanism, by which only the excess energy produced over consumption gets paid.
The necessary build of conventional energy plants to guarantee continous production is done by the general electric utilities, and spread on the bills accordingly. The construction boom has been huge.
The rationale behind my saying that this will all end up in public hands is that most of the "industrial" establishment of solar plant has been funded by banks, with little money coming out of the equity investors' purse. An uncontrolled shrinkage of the incentive schemes would cause a big banking problem; helping the banks is not considered the thing now; and taxing Joe Public to give money to people who could convince banks to sink millions into a tax haven is a problem too, so nothing like a giant nationalization of the existing plants would work.
Would it help the First Solars of the world? nooooo, because as much as public servants love to spend other people's money, many other investments are more profitable even on a CO2 standpoint. in less than 10 years, the city where I live has become the first in district heating in Europe; the local utility built, in less than three years, a combined gas and steam plant that by selling surplus heat in winter reaches an efficiency of 85%.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
Subsidies distort the market and are, let's be honest, just a way for corrupt politicians to use our money to pay off their big supporters. Funny how so many of those companies going bankrupt were big Obama supporters... and got juicy loan guarantees.
I'll be straight with y'all: no political party or politician is smart enough to properly apply a subsidy even if they do it from the noblest of motives. We need to remove the ability of our government to do it in any fashion and we'll all be better off.
/// Not a super-genius . . . yet. ///
Well, it says that the projected increase is 8% for next year... wouldn't that be a sign of people wanting these thingamalings?
The company-killer is every player in the industry wearing very rose covered glasses thinking they individually will be the sole supplier for the entire markets growth.
The overall market is growing 10%? OK we'll borrow money to expand production by 10% of the world wide market. Later ... Oh sales only went up 10% yoy? Whoops, well I got my golden parachute, bye guys.
Assuming its not that bad, the finances kill them anyway. So, we need to expand production this year by 10% to keep up with demand and the other players. No problemo I'll ring up the bank... Bank says F-off because they make more money borrowing from the fed at 0% and issuing credit card debt at 29.99%. Well OK then we'll sell stock.... Whoops finance says forget that because the market is totally crooked and scheming so no one wants to buy a "real" investment, and due to SOX etc costs we actually cannot raise the money. Well then we'll self invest, raise our current prices so we clear enough additional profit to grow next year.. Whoops that killed our sales because the Chinese will govt finance at 0% and our higher prices killed our sales.
Fundamentally it comes down to
1) People are notoriously bad at making sensible investments during a strong growth phase
2) Corrupt and/or failing financial systems both here and abroad mean we can't get the dough to expand, no matter how much we want or how profitable it would be.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Wouldn't it be great if the Solar Panel industry was able to succeed or fail based on the merits and the value of thier products, not be tossed about by the whims of politicians who shovel money into anything that looks "green" wihen they are up for re-election? The politicians, desperate to curry favor with certain constituant groups tosses obscene amounts of money into companies with trivial advancements.
The Government builds up manufacturing capacity with grants and low-cost, gov't backed loans, then they subsidise the purchase of solar panels by end-users to create demand for the panels, then they force utilities to pay well above market rates for whatever power the solar panel owner pumps into the electric grid, without allowing the utility the ability to manage the flow of electricity onto their grid.
And what is the argument for investing ever more money into the solar panel industry? We have to keep up with "threat" of China's investments in their solar panel industry. Here's the problem - first off, solar panels are on their way to being a commodity, and China excells in that space (manufacturing commodity items), second, China has the money to invest in these projects we don't (we perversely are borrowing the money fo fuel our "green initiatives" from China!).
Solyndra was in the $3/watt solar panel business when the industry was going from $2.50 -> $1.60 -> as low as $1/watt solar panels now - Gov't shouldn't be in the business of investing in businesses it subsidies and regulates - it has the ability to create a false market, subject to the political needs of elected officials, not and real demand on the part of the consumer.
Ken
Except the Gov't didn't shovel money at the early car makers to build factories, then offer generous incentives to car buyers and then pay the drivers for actually using the cars. This is what the Gov't is doing with solar panel industry - paying companies to increase production, paying consumers to install them, then forcing utilities to buy the electricity they generate at above market costs.
Ken
Beware of the Percent (%) When I see the a Number with a % I worry about the message they are trying to portray.
Because with Percent increase for a small market we should expect a large percentage increase. for a large market smaller percentage increase expected.
8% increase for solar panels isn't a good sign that people are really jumping on this technology. Solar Panels are a small market. 8% increase is probably more closely to people who wanted it but now are in an economic position where they can get it now. Get above 15% then you have some demand.
But for a larger business an 8% increase is a good number because there are so many customers right now that 8% means a lot of extra people are jumping in.
The Percent really summarizes data down to a level that really isn't that useful unless you see it in full context. And you are comparing Apples to Apples, Actually it would be comparing Granny Smiths with Granny Smiths to really make them useful.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This is a company problem. The industry is healthier than ever, with fierce competition pushing technological advances at break necking speeds. There are many, many companies that were depending on subsidizes to survive, but now more and more geographic areas no longer need to be subsidized for solar to make sense. The winners at this point seem to be Chinese manufacturers and innovative firms like First Solar. All companies will temporarily take a hit until the losers disappear, but once that happens, the winners take all (at a non-subsidized price point).
Didn't we see something similar happen in the PC industry when it was just getting started?
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
This!
China seems to have a model they use to undercut us on manufacting. They start out cheap and with massive government assistance. Once our companies go under they move up a bit and make some profits. Plus their workers are often treated like fodder.
Spain messed up the solar industry quite badly as I recall - they had such obscenely generous subsidies that they made even the most expensive solar panels cost-effective, because the gov't subsidised the purchase and set the prices for solar electricity sold to the power companies that installing solar panels was like printing money. They drove demand for panels through the roof, creating a false demand that the industry tried to meet, but once Spain understood the true cost of their solar initiatives they ended them, causing demand to plummet and the industry to suffer with excess capacity.
Prices don't go down when demand increases, prices go down when you have more product than buyers.
Ken
It hasn't worked out well for a lot of citizens across the world. Take Africa for example. The US gives tons of aid and free food, and the local farmers can't compete with the free food, so they go out of business. The gov't needs to learn to stay the hell out of the way.
There are many ways to store heat from solar plants. Solar power is not just panels.
Fossil fuels generate pollution and green house gases. Who pays for that cost? Not the producers but the public. Economically speaking, that is a subsidy.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
People *want* solar, they just can't *afford* it. I'm FAR from some environmental hippie, but even I looked into getting solar panels for my roof. In the end, it was going to cost me something like $25,000-$30,000 and save me about 50%-75% on my electric bill. At that rate it would take decades to pay itself off, and that's assuming that said panels will even last that long and require no maintenance (and I don't buy that for a SECOND). There was just no way in hell I could afford the upfront costs. Aside from a relatively wealthy few and a few clever do-it-yourselfers, solar is simply out of reach for the vast majority of the population.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
No, the lesson we refuse to learn is not that "gubment subsidy baaad mmmkayy!" It is that government subsidy needs to be A) predictable over the next decade and B) taper off gradually.
To the extent that the nations have done so, the intended stimulation of the solar industry has worked. Where they have pulled the rug out fast and early, they've caused uncertainty in the investment market. Sometimes intentionally, I would conjecture, given the rhetoric many of those responsible for policy are spouting and the incestuous relationships with established energy sectors many of them have.
Note, though, that a bunch of companies going bankrupt when a sector transitions from its initial phase to the established industry phase is well recognized by economists to be normal, with or without government subsidies. There really is basically nothing unusual to see here, just some trade rag journalists trying to keep their readers subscribed through exaggeration.
Someone had to do it.
It is a lesson we continually fail to learn: Industries built on government subsidy suffer when those subsidies begin to go away, even if the product itself is sound.
The lesson "we" continually fail to learn is that not everything is a vindication of one's favorite economic-religious theory. Every time there is an increase in demand for something, investments pour into the relevant industries far in excess of that demand, and most of those ventures fail before a handful of them succeed and become the dominant players. There's nothing magical about either the market or subsidies. Subsidies are just market forces, like weather influencing crop prices or international trade policy influencing imports and exports. The theoretical free market in which prices are not "manipulated" does not and cannot exist in the real world because it is ultimately based on human beings, and humans manipulate everything they can. It doesn't matter whether the influx of cash comes from subsidies or sales: companies benefit while the cash flows in, and they suffer when it stops flowing. Money is money.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
The wind doesn't blow at any one place all day long, which means if you want 100 MW of reliable wind energy all day you need to install 300 or more MW in wind turbines all over the country so that at any given time at least some of them are receiving wind. That need for redundancy makes wind energy very expensive relative to natural gas and coal power.
The plain fact is that wind and solar both could get us off fossil fuels, but they would require even more government subsidies than they already receive to do it. Convincing voters to support more government spending when the US government already spent most of 2011 deadlocked over spending is effectively impossible. I would love to see it happen, but it won't.
Not disagreeing, but would like to note that First Solar's fundamentals still look very strong. I think at this point the Chinese manufacturers are just clearing the industry of a lot of dead wood that was using old technologies.
Of course, Chinese dumping could reach a point that even innovative firms like First Solar will not be able to compete, but it does not look like we have reached that point yet. Meanwhile, price decreases should really start pushing the overall technology mainstream.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Not at all.
That is the big lie. Solar != oil at least in the US.
Solar makes electricity. One percent of the electricity in the US is from oil. Solar and Wind make up more than 3% of the US production. Solar at best competes with coal and natural gas. The thing is that for every kw of wind and solar the power companies build one kw of gas fired peaking plants to handle cloudy days and still days.
Oil is mostly used for transportation. You can not "practically" power ships, aircraft, and large long haul trucks with electricity. Electric cars are still very rare and even if they become popular it will take many years for them to grow to a large percentage of the market. Trains also use oil in the US but in theory at least some could be electrified but again that would be a multi year project and cost many billions of dollars.
The whole solar and wind can free us from oil is a marketing lie.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Something went seriously wrong in your figuring to come up with $500 million per person. It should be under $5000 per person or $34.5 billion total - if your run the numbers like I did below in Python (assuming these panels only produce for 8 hours per day, which is a number I just pulled out of the my hat).
Throw in extra for installation costs. It would be interesting to know what the total area is of NYC rooftops that have good sun exposure.
ny_area_sqmi = 302.6
ny_population = 8175133.0
ny_demand_watt_hours_per_year = 64500 * 10**9
panel_watt_hours_per_year = 230 * 8 * 365
panels_needed = ny_demand_watt_hours_per_year / panel_watt_hours_per_year
panel_cost = 360.0
panel_area_sqft = 17.6
total_cost = panels_needed * panel_cost
total_area_sqmi = (panels_needed * panel_area_sqft) / (5280**2)
print 'panels needed', panels_needed
print 'total cost $ %.2f' % total_cost
print 'cost per person $ %.2f' % (total_cost / ny_population)
print 'square miles %.2f' % total_area_sqmi
print 'percent area of nyc %.2f%%' % ((total_area_sqmi / ny_area_sqmi) * 100)
------
panels needed 96039309
total cost $ 34574151240.00
cost per person $ 4229.19
square miles 60.63
percent area of nyc 20.04%
All of them extremely expensive and short-term or extremely dilute and unsuitable for urban settings. Solar Millenium went bust because they kept making promises about the price of thermal storage (and the rest of their installations) they couldn't keep. Such as reducing the price of electricity to $0.04 per kWh - but practically solar-thermal stills need subsidized prices on the order of $0.40 per kWh to make the plants viable, despite having large-scale installations that should be more cost-efficient. Worse yet, new installations such as the Desertec "reference plant" to be build in Morocco are as expensive as the old ones (the "demonstration plant" in Spain, Andasol), indicating no progress.
Storing energy as heat is insanely inefficient if you want to generate electricity - and heating purposes are a whole 'nother can of worms that effectively competes with electricity generation via roof-top solar. (Even if you combine PV and thermal collectors, the high outlet temperatures are limiting PV efficiency and vice versa.) Storing heat in aquifers is not only depended on a conveniently located aquifer, but also limited in scale. Fine for rural settlements, but not for cities. And what the former safe in terms of heating, they much more than make up for due to increased transport and other energy use.
...but the US has been a net exporter of oil now for about 6-8 months, yes, net-exporter of oil
Ummm... no. You've confused crude oil with refined gasoline. The US is still a major net-importer of crude oil, but, yes, it's exporting quite a bit of refined gasoline now.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The article misses that Hon Hai, the parent of Foxconn, the company that really makes Apple's products, announced last week that they were going into the solar business. The reaction in the industry was that they will force prices down.
(Hon Hai is a very big company, with over 400,000 employees.)
The next two lines in TFA:
Granted, these raw totals obscure a few things (if you looked at dollars per unit of energy delivered, oil and coal subsidies would be smaller than wind and solar). But the overall disparity is stunning, given everything we know about the harm fossil fuels are doing.
For some reason, they didn't look at subsidies in $/kwh. It's not like they're hard to find on the web. That source puts fossil fuel subsidies at 0.8 cents/kwh and "renewables" (non-nuclear, non-hydropower) at 5 cents/kwh.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Sorry, but there is no fucking way a company is going to lease me solar panels at anywhere near what I would save in electricity each month with no upfront cost.
Let's use a best case scenario here. You've got a $25,000 upfront cost for installation. I average about $120 a month on my electric bill. Now, with that $25,000 upfront, let's say they give me a VERY generous interest rate on that loan of 10% (not likely, but this is best case scenario). That's $2,500 a year just on the INTEREST--not even factoring in their maintenance costs, system depreciation, any payment on the principal, etc. So even if the system generated enough electricity to cover 100% of my electric bill (again, hardly likely, but we'll stick with the best case scenario), I would still only be paying them about $1,400 a year. That's $1,100 less than just the INTEREST on their upfront investment. There is no way any company in their right mind is going to do that. Unless the government is going to be subsidizing that upfront with a 0% interest rate loan, there is just no way to make those numbers work.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Now, it depends on how you count 'subsidies'. If you go whole greenpeace and count the entire US Military, not charging for carbon emissions, extraction leases for $X instead of $10X all as subsidies, yes, we subsidize oil quite a bit.
If you believe that we aren't actually spending all that much money on ensuring the oil supply - IE Afghanistan doesn't produce significant amounts of it, Iraq was Bush Jr 'finishing' Daddy's work, think a lease for $X is a lease for $X, and discount carbon emissions as a cost(perhaps because you have a different scheme in mind), it's a lot less.
On average though, fossil fuel producers tend to pay lots of tax, and solar companies depend heavily up the subsidies that the government allows - with subsidies often paying for between 50-90% of the cost of a solar install, the subsidization is critical to artificially lower cost to drive demand. Any drop in subsidies and their business plumments.
I don't read AC A human right
Because, really, virtually nobody here actually understands what is going on. So I will throw some light on the matter.
There are two big problems with solar energy in the U.S. right now.
The #1 problem is that the U.S. is in the middle of a natural gas bonanza that started about a decade ago but really only started ramping up around 2007ish... and kept ramping up right on through the crash and is still ramping up today, with no end in sight. This has caused domestic NG production to go through the roof and domestic NG prices to fall through the floor.
Power companies switching from coal are going right to natural gas, which has 30% (or better) lower emissions and low prices for at least the next decade. It will take that long for our LNG export infrastructure to ramp up enough for world markets to relieve the downward pressure on domestic natural gas prices. In anycase, just switching to NG allows power companies to meet EPA requirements for probably the next decade (or longer), and that's without any magic technology to make it even cleaner.
Natural gas used to only be used for peaking plants, except in California where they started to also be used for base load earlier than other parts of the country. Now natural gas is being used for base load across the board (along with nuclear). Nearly all of those coal plants undergoing decommissioning are being replaced with natural gas plants, not solar or anything else.
The #2 problem with solar energy is China's overproduction of solar panels. China has no problem destroying their environment with the chemical leavenings from the production of solar panels. Chinese companies are facing the same problems that U.S. companies are facing with prices plunging, but they have a much lower cost of production. The result is that non-chinese companies basically can't compete (under ANY circumstances).. because we aren't willing to destroy our environment like the Chinese are.
This has created a massive drop in price for the bulk panels that large businesses (like Google for example) can purchase. Consumers cannot get at these prices, we just don't buy enough panels, but even so prices are going down for us too.
This, in turn, has created a huge problem for solar thermal power companies, because the price of bulk panels has dropped below or near par to the cost of constructing a solar thermal (mirror based) energy plant. This makes the ongoing cost of a solar thermal plant, which requires significant maintainence and has parts with limited life spans due to thermal cycling, higher than the near zero running cost of an installed conventional solar panel closer to the buyer (typically on the roof of the business premises).
Numerous other factors are also creating issues. Germany was the single biggest purchaser of solar panels for the last decade due to massive government subsidies. Those subsidies are now winding down, which only makes the market glut worse.
And that's the problem in a nutshell. Even the most environmentally minded person has to realize by now that it is impossible to go from coal to solar in one step. Natural gas is the only thing we have in-country that is even remotely capable of replacing coal at the generation levels required. I will applaud government investment in solar energy but anyone who thinks that solar can actually replace fossil fuel is fooling themselves.
-Matt