<blockquote>Face it, the government is providing subsidies in research that may turn the tables on the major providers. The utilities are running scared</blockquote> Thank you for the link, although I agree with Pekka that "[T]<i>he article of David Roberts seriously misrepresents the case</i>". It's also important to read the <a href="http://grist.org/climate-energy/how-can-we-boost-distributed-solar-and-save-utilities-at-the-same-time/" rel="nofollow">follow-on piece</a>, where he says: <blockquote>EEI’s concern is what it should be: how the industry and regulators can act quickly in the short term to protect utilities, to give them room to develop a long-term strategy for grappling with the rapid spread of distributed energy. However, it’s not clear why protecting utility shareholders ought to outrank other social goals. EEI’s recommendations should be taken with a grain of salt.</blockquote> As always, the situation's always less simple (simplistic) the more you dig into the details.
For me, however, the key takeaway, and the reason I'm grateful for the link, is this from the <a href="http://www.eei.org/ourissues/finance/Documents/disruptivechallenges.pdf" rel="nofollow">original report</a>: <blockquote>The decline in the price of PV panels from $3.80/watt in 2008 to $0.86/watt in mid-2012[1]</blockquote> Assuming their "2008" represents a mid-year point like their "mid-2012", this adds up to a price decline of 0.475 in two years, roughly equivalent to cutting the price in half in two years.
Now, many people are familiar with <a title="wiki" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law" rel="nofollow">Moore's"law"</a>, which can be paraphrased that "the price of computing power is cut in half every 18 months". Can we project a similar law (with perhaps a 2 year period) for PV? Off the top of my head I'd say yes. Of course, I haven't checked the ref in the paper, nor yet dug into the relevant technology in detail, but the primary cost of bulk semiconductor is ultra-pure silicon, and AFAIK that purity is achieved with zone-refining, which is certainly a technology that could respond to strong R&D, either from subsidies or market-driven investment.
Given such a "law", in 20 years we could expect the cost of PV to be around a dollar a kilowatt (in today's dollars). Is there really any need to <b>temporarily</b> raise the price/cost of energy if the problem's going to be solved in 20 years anyway?
