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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (4695)	9/4/2006 4:43:13 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24210

Solar is solution to energy crisis By MARK SOMMER After decades of frustratingly slow growth, rising energy prices are hastening the dawn of a long-heralded solar renaissance. Though still outdistanced by the rapid rise of wind power, silicon-based solar technologies are finally becoming sufficiently efficient to be competitive with conventional energy sources – without subsidies and with the cost amortised over 20 years – in regions where electrical power costs customers $0.25 or more per kilowatt-hour. Demand for the refined silicon that is the core component of solar panels, manufactured in just five plants worldwide, has grown so rapidly in the past few years that there is now a two-year lag time in the supply chain. This year for the first time, use of silicon in the manufacture of solar equipment exceeds its use for computer microprocessors. But the full potential of the world's most plentiful and renewable energy source will not be tapped until a new, less energy-intensive non-silicon based technology is invented. Solar experts say that it is only a matter of time, perhaps as little as five to 10 years. Twenty-five years ago, the manufacture of solar panels was a cottage industry funded on a micro-experimental basis by a few American oil companies (Arco and Exxon among them). Today, solar panels are three times the size they were then and twice as efficient (50 per cent more efficient than just five years ago), at a quarter the price they were in the 1970s. Efficiencies in their manufacture continue to rise, but individual users have been largely supplanted by institutional and corporate installations. GRAND VISIONS of the dawning of the solar age have thus far not come into being, and barring a revolutionary non-silicon breakthrough solar technologies are likely remain a growing but still modest portion of the global energy budget. But solar advocates argue that in an era of permanent oil decline, if the photovoltaic industry sustains growth averaging 50 per cent or more per year for the next two decades, it will contribute as much as 20 per cent of the global energy budget. This is an ambitious, even unlikely rate of growth, but it also presumes no significant technological breakthroughs. And given that necessity is the mother of invention, solar energy may yet surprise us all. Mark Sommer hosts the internationally-syndicated radio programme, A World of Possibilities, broadcast worldwide on iTunes nationmedia.com