7 ms·

Moore's law for Solar Energy?

58 points by fharper1961 15y ago

DennisP 15y ago
That's good news, but no matter how cheap it is, solar only works when the sun shines. The real impediment to a solar/wind economy is energy storage, which is still very expensive and hard to scale. A good post that runs the numbers and conveys the scale of the problem is here: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-bat... And another that takes a close look at wind is here: http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/10/29/gws-sg-es/ http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/10/29/gws-sg-es/ We can definitely use solar for about 20% of our energy, with fossil or nuclear plants backing it up. But until we fix the storage problem, the only route to a post-carbon economy is nuclear.
- divtxt 15y ago
  Existing storage technologies are insufficient to replace fossil fuels by multiple orders of magnitude. Here's a nice summary: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8405 http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8405 The bottom line: storage will need some serious R&D to find a secret sauce using fuel cells or nanotech or something.
- barranger 15y ago
  excuse my ignorance with these questions, but this is something I've been wondering every time I see an article like this (specifically the batteries needed for solar). 1) shouldn't we be concentrating our efforts on reducing the requirements from the grid to near zero for new housing builds? Newer builds will (hopefully) also incorporate the latest in conservation technologies (better performing insulation, etc) resulting in a lower energy requirement regardless of the source. One would also imagine that new home builders implementing solar solutions would see cost benefits from scale. 2) wouldn't the efforts of concentrating on new home builds have a two pronged benefit on everyone else? Not only would technology advances become available for retrofit projects, but the reduced strain on the grid could potentially reduce the costs grid wide? 3) what would be the benefit of having a centralized solar installation? Any solution that centers around having a mile square cube (from the linked article) seems a bit silly to me, wouldn't houses having their own battery solution make much more sense? Having individual batteries would allow for a market for these solutions and, one would hope, from the competition within this market, new and better solutions would emerge.
  - DennisP 15y ago
    Pretty sure he's not advocating actually making a mile square cube of battery. He's just illustrating the scale of the problem. It's the same amount of battery no matter how you divide it up. Efficiency is definitely some low-hanging fruit. It only gets us so far, though. Rooftops are probably the most effective place to deploy solar, but housing is only one piece of the puzzle.
- onemoreact 15y ago
  That post was written by someone with a vary superficial understanding of these issues. For example Hydro power already provides a lot of 'grid storage' and is totally missing from his analysis. Also, photovoltaics are far less impacted by clouds than you might assume with partially cloudy days offering similar power levels to sunny days. And even on days where it rains constantly you get some power and often see an increase in wind power output. Smart grids enable many applications like large scale cooling to shift of demand without building new storage infrastructure on the supply side. Not to mention simply shifting maintenance cycles can shift a lot of 'supply' to different parts of the year without building any infrastructure at all. Add it all up and Wind + Solar meet total energy demands and have near ideal capacity factors with ~2-4 new hours of total grid energy storage. VS. the 6 days which he assumes. PS: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/it-looks-like-time-to-build-an-atlantic-seaboard-wind-grid.ars http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/it-looks-like-ti...
  - DennisP 15y ago
    There's a limit to how far you can expand hydro. There aren't that many more places to build dams. You can expand a little more by putting reservoirs at higher elevations specifically for storage, but that's expensive. Even at 4 hours of storage, the scale we need is a bit mind-boggling. Your link is really interesting though. That's the kind of analysis we need. I see too many articles that just talk about rated capacity with no consideration of actual output or reliability. My second link does similar analysis for Australia, and there it doesn't work out so well. The wind drops low over wide areas for days at a time. In any case I have nothing against renewables, as long as they don't use up too much land...offshore wind is perfect. But I think we should be building GenIII and better nuclear reactors, too.
    - onemoreact 15y ago
      Hydro is already used for peaking power, at most we would retrofit things it increase peak power output where it's reasonable to do so. Building 4 hours of storage is a rather extreme step that's also extremely unlikely. California already has a 40c/kwh cost differential between peak summer demand and the middle of winter, but nobody is building massive grid energy storage to smooth that out. Even over the course of a single day you could make 10c/kwh just from grid storage but nobody is building it. Rather we add peaking power plants because base load power + storage costs more than peaking power plants and that's likely to continue to be the case even in a world dominated by solar + wind power plants.
- 00joe 15y ago
  20%? Over 60% of our electricity is consumed when the sun shines. Currently we get less then 1% of our power from solar. Storage will not matter for a very long time.
- grayrest 15y ago
  Just heard about this the other week, but if the SMU study [1] from a week or so ago is true, I don't see why geothermal couldn't provide the base load. I've seen related articles claim that no new tech is required and there's an enhanced geothermal facility that just opened in Australia. Strikes me as...simple. [1] http://blog.smu.edu/research/2011/10/25/vast-coast-to-coast-clean-energy-source-confirmed-by-first-google-org-funded-geothermal-mapping-report/ http://blog.smu.edu/research/2011/10/25/vast-coast-to-coast-...
- ww520 15y ago
  I remember seeing some research into using nanotech to create multi-surface structures that can capture lots of hydrogen. Hopefully we'll get some break through in that area.
btilly 15y ago
Moore's Law is actually quite ubiquitous. In The Innovator's Dilemma a large number of examples are given of similar trends that lasted for decades, including such things as the volume that a hydraulic scoop could scoop, to the distance that a steam ship could travel without refueling, to the capacity of batteries. It is therefore no surprise that solar power would show a similar trend.
- gwern 15y ago
  > Moore's Law is actually quite ubiquitous. Well, s-curves (sigmoid curves) certainly are common, but Moore's law - so far - is not a sigmoid AFAIK.
nickpinkston 15y ago
This SciAm article has actual numbers / charts - worth looking at: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/16/smaller-cheaper-faster-does-moores-law-apply-to-solar-cells/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/16/sm...
maeon3 15y ago
When solar becomes cheaper than the alternatives, the propaganda machine can only slow the adoption, not stop it. The entities that consume large quantities of electricity are mostly unaffected by IQ lowering media transmissions.
- jerf 15y ago
  You don't really need to reach for "propaganda" as an explanation as to why people have not been in a big rush to buy more expensive (both up front and ongoing) and less reliable electricity, and when and if that ever changes it won't be "despite the mighty power of progaganda", it'll be because it's cheaper and better.
geogra4 15y ago
Solar is going to be a disruptive technology in the future. Something I'm pretty excited about.
barney54 15y ago
"At what cost?" That's the first question anyone should ask about solar (or any other type of energy). Even though prices have fallen, solar is still, by far, the most expensive source of on-grid electricity generation--5 time more expensive than natural gas for example. http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2009/05/12/levelized-cost-of-new-generating-technologies/ http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2009/05/12/leveliz...
- spenrose 15y ago
  You provide a link from 2009 (!) which states that the "levelized" capital cost of nuclear is higher than that of solar PV. Fail and fail. Current solar PV prices are much lower than they were expected to be in 2009 -- that's part of why Solyndra went bust. And if nuclear is cheaper, why does no one build it? Answer: it's not, as soon as you include the costs of waste disposal and disaster insurance, both of which are effectively infinite because no one has a solution. See http://www.ncwarn.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/NCW-SolarReport_final1.pdf http://www.ncwarn.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/NCW-SolarRe... among many others.
  - spenrose 15y ago
    More details: http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/11/07/362705/krugman-solar-power/ http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/11/07/362705/krugman-sola...
wavephorm 15y ago
Moore’s Law — in which the price of computing power falls roughly 50 percent every 18 months I stopped reading right there.
Symmetry 15y ago
We know that it produces toxic (and radioactive) wastewater that contaminates drinking water Yes, some of the runoff is almost five times as radioactive as a banana. I don't mean to say that we shouldn't be concerned about the chemical sin fraking fluids, clearly those are things we should worry about. But raising the specter of radiation here just seems like fear mongering.
- JoeAltmaier 15y ago
  Water evaporates, concentrating contaminates. Its much more important to have water safe to begin with.
wbracken 15y ago
I was not concerned with fraking until I read: "the heavy trucking required for fracking inflicts major damage on roads"
tryitnow 15y ago
Krugman's article is not very interesting (at least not by HN standards). It's clear he has his biases. But the HN comments here contain some pretty cool links, which is why I upvoted it. I worked in the renewables space for a little bit and my conclusion was that far too many companies were making political bets, not technological or business bets. Specifically, a lot of business models depended on an extension of Kyoto to the US, which did not happen and is unlikely to happen any time soon. Without that the business models were interesting,but not compelling. Personally, I do believe renewables can replace a significant fraction of fossil fuels, but they have to do it based on cost, not political correctness. I'm not saying that as a normative statement, but as an observation of American politics. There was a brief window of time when carbon could be priced the way environmentalists wanted it to, but that's not going to happen again any time soon.
patio11 15y ago
Clayton Christensen had a much more interesting take on solar power at the Business of Software conference: it won't compete with fossil fuels in the US anytime soon (except as a recipient of huge amounts of government largess), because for the most part our energy infrastructure works really, really well. It's ubiquitous, cheap, and mostly doesn't kill you. In much of the world, energy is 0 for 3! This makes e.g. small solar cells just good enough to run a cell phone charging station into revolutionary, disruptive devices in parts of Africa, because they're not competing against a well-developed multi-billion dollar infrastructure, they're competing against "no electricity at all." If they're expensive and fail to work in poor weather and available only spottily and... who cares, some electricity still beats no electricity. His thesis was that if solar ever becomes a big thing in the US it will be because it grew like wildfire on the global periphery until the tech gets mature enough to start peeling off bits around the edges of US consumption (and then implied it might go further than that, using the same disruption mechanic).
- roc 15y ago
  I'm not sure how solar can become cheap/effective enough for the developing world without commodification due western subsidies and demand.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    It can't be cheap/effective enough to provide power at western service levels, but it can within developing world budgets be cheap/effective enough to provide useful levels of power. The key point here is just a restatement of Christiansen's "Innovator's Dillemma": a new product incapable of meeting the needs of most users of an incumbent product, but capable of meeting the needs of some other related market.
    - roc 15y ago
      I suspect we're having a difference of definition. When Christiansen is paraphrased as saying solar won't become a big deal in the US, I took that to mean "not a big deal, in total", whereas everyone else seems to be reading it as "in comparison to fossil fuels".
flipbrad 15y ago
One fantastic presentation given at HomeCamp 4 last month was by Moxia. Their angle on this is retrofitting homes to use DC sockets rather than AC (via USB ports and convertible DC cables, so you don't have to carry the brick around with you). They install batteries, an AC/DC transforming battery charger (charging overnight, using off-peak, cheap electricity) and solar panels (presumably wind turbines and other generators can be used too). All with clever management and monitoring integration. The point of this (besides the convenience of having DC sources for everything, and LED lighting) is shifting your power consumption off-peak, and to an extent, offgrid.
orijing 15y ago
It's interesting that he started the discussion with a reminder of externalities, pointing out that the negative externalities from fracking were not properly internalized. I'm surprised he didn't mention the FITs in Europe, and the cheap loans in China. Was he making a singular point of the United States, or did he overlook places where solar is relatively advantaged relative to fossil fuels?
PaulHoule 15y ago
Moore's law is the wrong analogy. Computer chips become better every year because they get smaller, use less materials. We could make solar cells thinner, but we can't appreciably reduce the area that they take up. The solar cells need some backing material, brackets to hold them, infrastructure to move the electricity away, security mechanisms so that people can't steal them, and other forms of material that can't be rapidly dematerialized.
- nobody3141592 15y ago
  Moore's law is all about improvements in the fab process which drives down not only design rules but also defect rates to mean that putting more devices on a single wafer is more cost effective. As you reduce the process costs then there is no reason that the cost of solar panels doesn't approach coated window glass.
yummyfajitas 15y ago
Krugman, as is his custom, criticizes his political enemies without even knowing their position. From the article: Let’s face it: a large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives. If they are "actively hostile" to alternatives, why did they pass a law subsidizing alternatives? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005 Also, why are we submitting inflammatory and dishonest pundits to HN, rather than a source that might skip the politics and cover some actual science?

58 points by fharper1961 15y ago

That's good news, but no matter how cheap it is, solar only works when the sun shines. The real impediment to a solar/wind economy is energy storage, which is still very expensive and hard to scale. A good post that runs the numbers and conveys the scale of the problem is here: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-bat... And another that takes a close look at wind is here: http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/10/29/gws-sg-es/ http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/10/29/gws-sg-es/ We can definitely use solar for about 20% of our energy, with fossil or nuclear plants backing it up. But until we fix the storage problem, the only route to a post-carbon economy is nuclear.

divtxt 15y ago
Existing storage technologies are insufficient to replace fossil fuels by multiple orders of magnitude. Here's a nice summary: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8405 http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8405 The bottom line: storage will need some serious R&D to find a secret sauce using fuel cells or nanotech or something.
barranger 15y ago
excuse my ignorance with these questions, but this is something I've been wondering every time I see an article like this (specifically the batteries needed for solar). 1) shouldn't we be concentrating our efforts on reducing the requirements from the grid to near zero for new housing builds? Newer builds will (hopefully) also incorporate the latest in conservation technologies (better performing insulation, etc) resulting in a lower energy requirement regardless of the source. One would also imagine that new home builders implementing solar solutions would see cost benefits from scale. 2) wouldn't the efforts of concentrating on new home builds have a two pronged benefit on everyone else? Not only would technology advances become available for retrofit projects, but the reduced strain on the grid could potentially reduce the costs grid wide? 3) what would be the benefit of having a centralized solar installation? Any solution that centers around having a mile square cube (from the linked article) seems a bit silly to me, wouldn't houses having their own battery solution make much more sense? Having individual batteries would allow for a market for these solutions and, one would hope, from the competition within this market, new and better solutions would emerge.
- DennisP 15y ago
  Pretty sure he's not advocating actually making a mile square cube of battery. He's just illustrating the scale of the problem. It's the same amount of battery no matter how you divide it up. Efficiency is definitely some low-hanging fruit. It only gets us so far, though. Rooftops are probably the most effective place to deploy solar, but housing is only one piece of the puzzle.
onemoreact 15y ago
That post was written by someone with a vary superficial understanding of these issues. For example Hydro power already provides a lot of 'grid storage' and is totally missing from his analysis. Also, photovoltaics are far less impacted by clouds than you might assume with partially cloudy days offering similar power levels to sunny days. And even on days where it rains constantly you get some power and often see an increase in wind power output. Smart grids enable many applications like large scale cooling to shift of demand without building new storage infrastructure on the supply side. Not to mention simply shifting maintenance cycles can shift a lot of 'supply' to different parts of the year without building any infrastructure at all. Add it all up and Wind + Solar meet total energy demands and have near ideal capacity factors with ~2-4 new hours of total grid energy storage. VS. the 6 days which he assumes. PS: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/it-looks-like-time-to-build-an-atlantic-seaboard-wind-grid.ars http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/it-looks-like-ti...
- DennisP 15y ago
  There's a limit to how far you can expand hydro. There aren't that many more places to build dams. You can expand a little more by putting reservoirs at higher elevations specifically for storage, but that's expensive. Even at 4 hours of storage, the scale we need is a bit mind-boggling. Your link is really interesting though. That's the kind of analysis we need. I see too many articles that just talk about rated capacity with no consideration of actual output or reliability. My second link does similar analysis for Australia, and there it doesn't work out so well. The wind drops low over wide areas for days at a time. In any case I have nothing against renewables, as long as they don't use up too much land...offshore wind is perfect. But I think we should be building GenIII and better nuclear reactors, too.
  - onemoreact 15y ago
    Hydro is already used for peaking power, at most we would retrofit things it increase peak power output where it's reasonable to do so. Building 4 hours of storage is a rather extreme step that's also extremely unlikely. California already has a 40c/kwh cost differential between peak summer demand and the middle of winter, but nobody is building massive grid energy storage to smooth that out. Even over the course of a single day you could make 10c/kwh just from grid storage but nobody is building it. Rather we add peaking power plants because base load power + storage costs more than peaking power plants and that's likely to continue to be the case even in a world dominated by solar + wind power plants.
00joe 15y ago
20%? Over 60% of our electricity is consumed when the sun shines. Currently we get less then 1% of our power from solar. Storage will not matter for a very long time.
grayrest 15y ago
Just heard about this the other week, but if the SMU study [1] from a week or so ago is true, I don't see why geothermal couldn't provide the base load. I've seen related articles claim that no new tech is required and there's an enhanced geothermal facility that just opened in Australia. Strikes me as...simple. [1] http://blog.smu.edu/research/2011/10/25/vast-coast-to-coast-clean-energy-source-confirmed-by-first-google-org-funded-geothermal-mapping-report/ http://blog.smu.edu/research/2011/10/25/vast-coast-to-coast-...
ww520 15y ago
I remember seeing some research into using nanotech to create multi-surface structures that can capture lots of hydrogen. Hopefully we'll get some break through in that area.

btilly 15y ago

Moore's Law is actually quite ubiquitous. In The Innovator's Dilemma a large number of examples are given of similar trends that lasted for decades, including such things as the volume that a hydraulic scoop could scoop, to the distance that a steam ship could travel without refueling, to the capacity of batteries. It is therefore no surprise that solar power would show a similar trend.

gwern 15y ago
> Moore's Law is actually quite ubiquitous. Well, s-curves (sigmoid curves) certainly are common, but Moore's law - so far - is not a sigmoid AFAIK.

nickpinkston 15y ago

This SciAm article has actual numbers / charts - worth looking at: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/16/smaller-cheaper-faster-does-moores-law-apply-to-solar-cells/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/16/sm...

maeon3 15y ago

When solar becomes cheaper than the alternatives, the propaganda machine can only slow the adoption, not stop it. The entities that consume large quantities of electricity are mostly unaffected by IQ lowering media transmissions.

jerf 15y ago
You don't really need to reach for "propaganda" as an explanation as to why people have not been in a big rush to buy more expensive (both up front and ongoing) and less reliable electricity, and when and if that ever changes it won't be "despite the mighty power of progaganda", it'll be because it's cheaper and better.

geogra4 15y ago

Solar is going to be a disruptive technology in the future. Something I'm pretty excited about.

barney54 15y ago

"At what cost?" That's the first question anyone should ask about solar (or any other type of energy). Even though prices have fallen, solar is still, by far, the most expensive source of on-grid electricity generation--5 time more expensive than natural gas for example. http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2009/05/12/levelized-cost-of-new-generating-technologies/ http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2009/05/12/leveliz...

spenrose 15y ago
You provide a link from 2009 (!) which states that the "levelized" capital cost of nuclear is higher than that of solar PV. Fail and fail. Current solar PV prices are much lower than they were expected to be in 2009 -- that's part of why Solyndra went bust. And if nuclear is cheaper, why does no one build it? Answer: it's not, as soon as you include the costs of waste disposal and disaster insurance, both of which are effectively infinite because no one has a solution. See http://www.ncwarn.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/NCW-SolarReport_final1.pdf http://www.ncwarn.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/NCW-SolarRe... among many others.
- spenrose 15y ago
  More details: http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/11/07/362705/krugman-solar-power/ http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/11/07/362705/krugman-sola...

wavephorm 15y ago

Moore’s Law — in which the price of computing power falls roughly 50 percent every 18 months I stopped reading right there.

Symmetry 15y ago

We know that it produces toxic (and radioactive) wastewater that contaminates drinking water Yes, some of the runoff is almost five times as radioactive as a banana. I don't mean to say that we shouldn't be concerned about the chemical sin fraking fluids, clearly those are things we should worry about. But raising the specter of radiation here just seems like fear mongering.

JoeAltmaier 15y ago
Water evaporates, concentrating contaminates. Its much more important to have water safe to begin with.

wbracken 15y ago

I was not concerned with fraking until I read: "the heavy trucking required for fracking inflicts major damage on roads"

tryitnow 15y ago

Krugman's article is not very interesting (at least not by HN standards). It's clear he has his biases. But the HN comments here contain some pretty cool links, which is why I upvoted it. I worked in the renewables space for a little bit and my conclusion was that far too many companies were making political bets, not technological or business bets. Specifically, a lot of business models depended on an extension of Kyoto to the US, which did not happen and is unlikely to happen any time soon. Without that the business models were interesting,but not compelling. Personally, I do believe renewables can replace a significant fraction of fossil fuels, but they have to do it based on cost, not political correctness. I'm not saying that as a normative statement, but as an observation of American politics. There was a brief window of time when carbon could be priced the way environmentalists wanted it to, but that's not going to happen again any time soon.

patio11 15y ago

Clayton Christensen had a much more interesting take on solar power at the Business of Software conference: it won't compete with fossil fuels in the US anytime soon (except as a recipient of huge amounts of government largess), because for the most part our energy infrastructure works really, really well. It's ubiquitous, cheap, and mostly doesn't kill you. In much of the world, energy is 0 for 3! This makes e.g. small solar cells just good enough to run a cell phone charging station into revolutionary, disruptive devices in parts of Africa, because they're not competing against a well-developed multi-billion dollar infrastructure, they're competing against "no electricity at all." If they're expensive and fail to work in poor weather and available only spottily and... who cares, some electricity still beats no electricity. His thesis was that if solar ever becomes a big thing in the US it will be because it grew like wildfire on the global periphery until the tech gets mature enough to start peeling off bits around the edges of US consumption (and then implied it might go further than that, using the same disruption mechanic).

roc 15y ago
I'm not sure how solar can become cheap/effective enough for the developing world without commodification due western subsidies and demand.
- tptacek 15y ago
  It can't be cheap/effective enough to provide power at western service levels, but it can within developing world budgets be cheap/effective enough to provide useful levels of power. The key point here is just a restatement of Christiansen's "Innovator's Dillemma": a new product incapable of meeting the needs of most users of an incumbent product, but capable of meeting the needs of some other related market.
  - roc 15y ago
    I suspect we're having a difference of definition. When Christiansen is paraphrased as saying solar won't become a big deal in the US, I took that to mean "not a big deal, in total", whereas everyone else seems to be reading it as "in comparison to fossil fuels".

flipbrad 15y ago

One fantastic presentation given at HomeCamp 4 last month was by Moxia. Their angle on this is retrofitting homes to use DC sockets rather than AC (via USB ports and convertible DC cables, so you don't have to carry the brick around with you). They install batteries, an AC/DC transforming battery charger (charging overnight, using off-peak, cheap electricity) and solar panels (presumably wind turbines and other generators can be used too). All with clever management and monitoring integration. The point of this (besides the convenience of having DC sources for everything, and LED lighting) is shifting your power consumption off-peak, and to an extent, offgrid.

orijing 15y ago

It's interesting that he started the discussion with a reminder of externalities, pointing out that the negative externalities from fracking were not properly internalized. I'm surprised he didn't mention the FITs in Europe, and the cheap loans in China. Was he making a singular point of the United States, or did he overlook places where solar is relatively advantaged relative to fossil fuels?

PaulHoule 15y ago

Moore's law is the wrong analogy. Computer chips become better every year because they get smaller, use less materials. We could make solar cells thinner, but we can't appreciably reduce the area that they take up. The solar cells need some backing material, brackets to hold them, infrastructure to move the electricity away, security mechanisms so that people can't steal them, and other forms of material that can't be rapidly dematerialized.

nobody3141592 15y ago
Moore's law is all about improvements in the fab process which drives down not only design rules but also defect rates to mean that putting more devices on a single wafer is more cost effective. As you reduce the process costs then there is no reason that the cost of solar panels doesn't approach coated window glass.

yummyfajitas 15y ago

Krugman, as is his custom, criticizes his political enemies without even knowing their position. From the article: Let’s face it: a large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives. If they are "actively hostile" to alternatives, why did they pass a law subsidizing alternatives? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005 Also, why are we submitting inflammatory and dishonest pundits to HN, rather than a source that might skip the politics and cover some actual science?