Greg Burch writes:
> Driving along the freeway on many of these 106 degree (that's 50, for you
> progressives), cloudless days, I can't help but be struck by the obvious
> direction we should be going, which is solar energy in the most direct
> fashion. So how are we doing? Can someone point me to good resources to
> quickly get up to speed on the state of the art in direct photovoltaic
> technology and the rate of progress in that field? How close are we to
> practical industrial-scale photovoltaics?
A quick web search found an article with interesting claims.
http://whyfiles.org/041solar/main1.html is about the Sacramento Municipal
Utility District installing a large photovoltaic system:
SMUD predicts that the total cost of the first installations,
during 1998, will come to about $5 per watt, a dollar below
today's prices. But by 2002, when the new contract expires, the
price should be under $3 per watt. (Panels are rated by their
ability to produce a peak electric current, in watts. Electricity
is sold in kilowatt hours -- a thousand watts supplied for
one hour.)
To electric utilities, $3 per watt is the golden number, says
Robert Gibson of the Utility PhotoVoltaic Group, a non-profit
consultancy in Washington. "In very general terms, PV would be
break-even with power from most coal or gas plants at about $3
per watt installed." In just the past 10 years, Gibson adds,
the installed cost of PV has dropped from $20 to $6 per watt.
Since 1972, the price has fallen a hundred-fold.
I couldn't find a good authoritative resource. http://www.nrel.gov/ is
the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory and it has some data but it
is not organized very well.
One caution I've heard with regard to renewable energy, is that
sometimes the energy costs to produce the equipment (the PV cells and
such) are actually greater than the energy produced by the machinery
over its lifetime. If the initial manufacturing costs are supplied by
nonrenewable sources then the net effect is negative.
Hal
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