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It’s easy to get ridiculously excited about solar power these days. The panels keep getting cheaper as technology improves. Large photovoltaic arrays are sprouting up around the globe. Sure, solar still produces only 1 percent of the world’s electricity, but it’s growing at double-digit rates each year.
So with all this momentum, you’d think the solar industry could kick back and celebrate, right? Domination is only a matter of time!
Well … not so fast. A provocative recent essay in Nature Energy by two solar analysts, Varun Sivaram and Shayle Kann, argues that solar still has some hard economic obstacles to overcome before it can become a major energy source and provide (let’s say) one-third of our power. Overcoming these hurdles could mean the difference between solar leveling off as a niche technology and solar taking over the world.
Thanks to a little-discussed phenomenon known as “value deflation,” the electricity generated by solar panels […]
There are two reasons our psychological enslavement to the idea that alternative electrical power sources need to be “cheaper” really angers me. One is that the analysis don’t take into account the true costs of fossil fuel, like the billions spent on treating the millions of cases of cancer that result from pollution, as well as global warming. The second is that we don’t need to take the cheapest option. We certainly don’t do that for transportation. Buses, bikes, and walking are much cheaper alternatives to cars for many of the miles we drive. But we don’t use them anyhow.