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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (330353)	3/26/2007 3:27:10 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574737

re: The first problem is trying to reduce the cost of solar cells by a factor of five Factor of five? I don't think so. Remember the cost of the panels is amortized, just as the cost of a nuke plant would be amortized. solarbuzz.com

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (330353)	3/26/2007 3:32:24 PM
From: Alighieri	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574737

Huh? The problem is indeed money. It doesn't matter whether you cover 7% of the Arizona desert or convert every single roof tile in America into solar cells. Someone has to pay for it. The first problem is trying to reduce the cost of solar cells by a factor of five, and that will require a breakthrough in material science. Oh no....amorphous materials have the potential of being very cheap. They are fabricated in a roll to roll process much like a newspaper is made, on a substrate of very thin stainless steel. The W/ft^2 is comparable to that of crystalline PVs and life expectancy is similar. Roughly speaking, if you were to cut the current cost of amorphous PV in half from what it is today, it would cost ~$500B to cover 7% of Arizona with it. Clearly affordable. I could easily see amorphous PVs costing 10% of what they do today, in volume. But there are just a couple of factories in the entire US. No capacity. Al

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (330353)	3/26/2007 6:03:45 PM
From: American Spirit	Respond to of 1574737

How to reduce the cost of solar power? Huge government incentives; federal, state and local. And that money must come from taxing the dirtiest energy forms. Then little by little we get cleaner and cleaner. And clean fuels can be a huge new growth industry creating hundreds of thousands of good jobs. The problem is the pollution and oil lobbies. They will do anything to stop this. They want everyone on their grid burning their black gold. In short, the energy business must be re-regulated. De-regulating the energy business (Bush, Cheney and Enron all were instrumental in that) has cost us all tremendously.