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Solar Companies Are Scrambling to Find a Critical Raw Material (bloomberg.com)
Solar manufacturers are being battered by higher costs and smaller margins, after an unexpected shortage of a critical raw material. From a report, shared by an anonymous reader: Prices of polysilicon, the main component of photovoltaic cells, spiked as much as 35 percent in the past four months after environmental regulators in China shut down several factories. That's driving up production costs as panel prices continue to decline, and dragging down earnings for manufacturers in China, the world's biggest supplier. "There's just not enough polysilicon in China," said Carter Driscoll, an analyst who covers solar companies for FBR & Co. "If prices don't come down, it will crush margins."
No reason it couldn't be done in Silicon Valley.
Only problem is California likes to shift its pollution to other countries and states so they can maintain the illusion of being green.
We just ignore the fact that it REALLY runs on coal powered electricity from Utah and solar cells from China.
Power companies are reluctant to allow you to sell power back to the grid because then you aren't paying the distribution costs (construction and maintenance of the wires, transformers, infrastructure like switching and monitoring equipment, etc. which lets you sell back power to the grid). In the areas where these costs are taken into account, the sell-back price is usually around half the retail price, which dramatically lowers the economic viability of solar. Ignorant solar proponents cry foul at this, demanding they be paid full retail price as if all that wiring, maintenance, and power regulation is free.
If you can use all the power generated by your PV solar installation, or store the excess in batteries for use during night or bad weather, and you can get the economics of solar to work, then good for you. But if you're trying to use the power grid as your battery, then you can't run your cost/benefit analysis using retail electricity prices. Also note that the maintenance costs per house are fixed. Whether you need to draw power from the grid just one day out of the year, or every day out of the year, you still need the same wiring to your house. So we're not talking about a discount per kWh here. We're talking about a fixed cost per household. (Actually the electrical utilities should just separate out their bill into generation and transportation costs like water and gas companies do.) We're running into the same problem with EVs - they wear out the roads just like ICE cars, but they don't pay the fuel taxes to maintain the roads. California just enacted a tax on EVs to help pay for this road maintenance.
All that said, FWIW, in the cost analyses I've done, the local price of electricity is a much bigger factor than utilization. In places with high electricity prices (e.g. Hawaii) and good weather, the payback time for a PV solar installation can be as low as 5-7 years with subsidies, about 10-12 years without. (I should mention that the most cost-efficient energy system I found was geothermal heating and cooling. Where you run your heating and air conditioning with a heat pump using the ground as a heat sink instead of the air. For the desert region of Southern California, the payback time I calculated for that was as short as 3 years, and that's without subsidies.)
Fossil fuels are only cheaper if you keep the waste products off the books. Put all the emissions in there, the costs of smog, PM5 pollution, carbon, increased medical spending of people living downwind from coal plants, increased asthma rates, etc. and solar starts to look pretty god damn good.
Talk about subsidy - the coal industry gets a pretty damn good subsidy in the form of medicare payments paying for the damage they cause through normal operation, which doesn't even touch on the effects of carbon / climate change (if you're into that kind of thing).