Chet's Comments

Ken: For a pure solar sci-fi world, I would look toward solar panels in space. Built from materials mined out of asteroids. Here you can transmit energy through free-space and don't have to worry about clouds, etc.

For on-earth sci-fi, solar will always work with wind and hydro. Solar and wind should complement each other well, with hydro to fill in the big problems.

Meanwhile, the world is increasingly battery-powered. Filling up our car batteries during the daytime in solar panel covered parking lots would work pretty well. In a petroleum constrained world, using solar power during the day time to manufacture hydro-carbon liquids for military use would still be cost effective.

@anonymous: The "man on the street" does care where there power is coming from. In Austin, TX, certified green power costs 10% more than brown power, and customers are willing to pay that extra cost.

The man on the street may like "clean coal" and "renewable nuclear", but that isn't what the are going to get on a hot sunny day. You're going to get hydro, or gas, or PV.

Arizona may be a bit screwed up. They like their coal power, and may have regressive electricity pricing structures. However, here in California, you cannot get electricity for 11c/kwh, especially during the day, especially on a hot day.

So, yeah, Ken's production assumptions are all screwed up: he isn't selling his electricity for anywhere near what it's worth.

Even though you can make money putting up large scale PV in the desert, that isn't where the real money is going to come from. Transmission lines have their least capacity on hot sunny summer days. And with BIPV, you essentially get the installation for free: instead of installing composite shingles, you install a different material that happens to produce electricity as a side effect.

The desert is a fragile environment, and building transmission lines across the desert is not attractive. The roof of my house is already a trashed ecology.

3GW of solar will not power 3 million households. A watt of solar is not the same as a watt of nuclear since the sun doesn't shine at night. 3GW of solar is roughly what you would put on 1 million households. In actual fact, the state intends that maybe half of the 3GW would go on residential rooftops and the other half on commercial or industrial rooftops.

This article is overly pessimisstic in a few ways. First, cell manufacturers will be able to maintain margins by passing silicon feedstock costs on to their customers. Second, it's not so much that you need new technology in order to improve grams of silicon used per watt. All you really need to do is shut down the least efficient production lines. Third, growth is not limited by polysilicon feedstock supplies for thin-film manufacturers.