What everyone seems to be waiting for is a cost-per-watt that is low enough so that ordinary people will decide to start buying them in large quantities without government subsidization. Suppose you're having a new house built: if you could install a ten or fifteen kilowatt solar plant and inverter for ten grand, you might figure it's worth it to borrow a little more money from the bank.
A couple of things to keep in mind here:
The cost per watt is already low enough that it makes sense for a lot of people, like me, to buy photovoltaics. It depends on what latitude you live at, how much sunny weather you get, which way your roof faces, how much shade there is on your roof, what the local price of electricity is, and what you expect the local price of electricity to be over the 25-year life of a photovoltaic system.
When you talk about government subsidies, you should do an apples-to-apples comparison with the alternative, which is typically electricity that comes from burning fossil fuels. Fossil fuels enjoy massive government subsidies here in the U.S. We've fought three extremely expensive wars recently in the middle east, and I don't think we would have been involved in any of those wars if there hadn't been oil there; my grandkids will be paying for my generation's deficit-funded oil wars. There's also a huge amount of environmental damage done by burning fossil fuels, and that damage affects both this generation and future generations. If people paid the real costs of that environmental damage up front, then gas would be a lot more expensive. In places like Europe that don't subsidize fossil fuels as much, gas costs about twice what it does in the U.S.
1. The cost per watt is too high for the vast majority of people to buy photovoltaics. Most people don't live in those optimal places for solar power, their house wasn't designed for panels, and the local price of electricity is relatively low. Also, you can't factor in the "expected price" of electricity, unless you're a fortune teller.
2. Three wars? Are you including Afghanistan in the ME? Anyways, the US doesn't use oil to generate electricity in any significant amount. The largest percentage comes from coal... a domestic source. So even if the persian gulf war and the iraq war were about protecting oil, it would be a subsidy to our fossil fuel based transportation sector.
I agree with you about the environmental impacts, but I think that it is difficult to calculate the 'real costs' of using fossil fuels. How much should someone have to pay per gallon of gas in an environmental tax? How do you calculate that value?
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A couple of things to keep in mind here:
1. The cost per watt is too high for the vast majority of people to buy photovoltaics. Most people don't live in those optimal places for solar power, their house wasn't designed for panels, and the local price of electricity is relatively low. Also, you can't factor in the "expected price" of electricity, unless you're a fortune teller.
2. Three wars? Are you including Afghanistan in the ME? Anyways, the US doesn't use oil to generate electricity in any significant amount. The largest percentage comes from coal... a domestic source. So even if the persian gulf war and the iraq war were about protecting oil, it would be a subsidy to our fossil fuel based transportation sector.
I agree with you about the environmental impacts, but I think that it is difficult to calculate the 'real costs' of using fossil fuels. How much should someone have to pay per gallon of gas in an environmental tax? How do you calculate that value?