The falling cost of solar…
A couple of recent articles take a look at the increasingly better economics of solar technology. This News.com piece focuses on solar thermal technology and scenarios in which it could become cost competitive with coal for power production. This is an area that Vinod Khosla is closely following and putting his money behind. And this Technology Review piece looks at a new company called Soliant Energy that is using solar concentrator technology — that is, a system of mirrors and lenses that focus the light — to improve the efficiency and dramatically lower the cost of solar PV systems. There are many companies working on both thermal and concentrator concepts to solar power production, giving me great hope that we will indeed see cost-competitive solar on a large scale in the coming decade. Okay, so call me a dreamer…
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca
May 13th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
I’m glad the cost of solar is falling, it means it’ll be more cost effective and more available to more people since more can afford it. Solar may not the be end all be all of energy, but if photovoltaic cells get higher efficiencies and the costs keep falling, we may just be able to use solar power to light the world.
July 31st, 2007 at 11:39 am
In line with the economics of solar…I found a great artilce on http://www.getwithgreen.com that reviews all the solar energy calculators on the web. Great tool to get a ballpark on solar costs, and to not have to scower the web to find these calculators was a great thing!