How Cheap Can Solar Get?

http://rameznaam.com/2015/08/10/how-cheap-can-solar-get-very-cheap-indeed/

by lxm • 11 years ago

174 130 11 years ago

rameznaam.com

1971genocide• 11 years ago

Does anyone know methods for hackers to help and learn more about solar ?

It it possible for the mathematically trained to easily immerse and innovate in the industry ?

It it possible to manufacture solar cells "in your garage" so to speak ?

ChuckMcM• 11 years ago

Generally you can't grow silicon crystals in your garage, although you can create the photovoltaic effect with amorphous materials (see CIGS solar cells). A good start is to apprentice with a solar installation company to get a feel for what is the "current" situation.

chm2• 11 years ago

My MSc is concerned with a model for simulating molecular photovoltaics. The work I do is a blend of physics, chemistry, maths and programming, in different proportions. I wouldn't say it was "easy to immerse", but complement your skills with physics/chemistry and you could be useful, yes.

A Grätzel or dye sensitized solar cell can be easily created in your garage. Look them up on Youtube.

selimthegrim2• 11 years ago

Better models for molecular photovoltaics are sorely needed. Math skills are not unwanted.

Source: I work in the field.

Gravityloss3• 11 years ago

Production-demand balancing / forecasting will be a huge business.

It can include a lot of software.

silverthorn• 11 years ago

As the article notes, module technology and module costs are no longer the most significant barrier to solar adoption---so if you're in software, the greatest opportunities to have significant impact are probably in tearing down the numerous _other_ barriers to widespread adoption.

To use the situation I'm most familiar with: there are hundreds of millions of people in emerging economies who live off-grid and spend tens of billions of dollars annually on expensive fuel-based energy. They'll switch to solar tomorrow if we [1] can solve the problem of upfront financing [2]. It's the same problem that SolarCity, Sunrun, et al. are tackling in the US. This problem is the kind that gets solved by, among other things, developing the same kind of enterprise-targeted mobile/web/backend/data systems familiar to any developer at a modern SaaS company (but targeting a different, unusually interesting and important market, with some unique challenges).

[1] https://careers.stackoverflow.com/company/angaza/

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/selling-ener...

prostoalex• 11 years ago

There's a solar energy course on edX, where they walk you through designing a photovoltaic system

https://www.edx.org/course/solar-energy-delftx-et3034x

Although most of the current innovation seems to be focused on the panel efficiency, and that area requires some understanding of Materials Science

http://www.rdmag.com/news/2014/01/understanding-perovskite-b...

jl6• 11 years ago

Does this make solar a great industry to invest in because of the growth potential, or a terrible industry to invest in because the prices are racing to the bottom?

RamezNaam7• 11 years ago

Hi. I'm the author of the original post. The amount of solar installed in the world is going to scale by more than 10x in the coming decades. There will be more than a trillion spent.

If you pick the winners, investment will have huge return.

Most solar companies, however, will be casualties in the fierce competition to come.

The other area to look at is energy storage. More renewables will increase the demand for energy storage. And it's early days in that field. Again: Huge returns for the winners. But most companies will be shaken out of the field.

draugadrotten• 11 years ago

Do you have any suggestions about good solar startups with good patents/tech/people?

pjc509• 11 years ago

It's a commodity manufacturing industry. It's going to have big turnover and thin margins. There's scope for innovation-driven cost reduction, but not for SV-style "unicorns".

mtgx2• 11 years ago

There are going to be some huge companies thanks to solar. Those companies are also going to have big valuations, at least until the market is much more mature and saturated, but we're decades away from that.

As Ramez said, you don't bet on an "emerging industry", you bet on the winners in that emerging industry, otherwise you may very well lose your money. When new industries are born there are usually hundreds of competitors in the beginning, but eventually only a few big ones remain, and it's usually those that started early and got big early.

RamezNaam7• 11 years ago

Hi. I'm the author of this blog post. Happy to answer questions people have, as time allows, on Wednesday.

Upcoming posts will look at the future of wind power, the future of energy storage, and what the missing pieces are.

If you don't want to wait, you can read my thoughts on energy storage here: http://rameznaam.com/2015/04/14/energy-storage-about-to-get-...

newman314• 11 years ago

So given the Fed 30% solar subsidy is set to expire at the end of 2016, have you modeled (or know of a model) that shows when the price of solar will crossover the loss of subsidy?

I.e. I'm trying to figure out if going solar now is better (in California) or just waiting a few more years. I'm in no particular hurry since my electric bill vs. sq/ft is already pretty good.

furyg3• 11 years ago

It appears that all his calculations in the article are done without subsidies factored in.

RamezNaam7• 11 years ago

UBS has done some modeling on this for their clients. They believe utility-based solar will take a hit for a 2-3 years and then rebound. The Fed ITC will drop from 30% to 10%. Making up that 20% cost change will take a little over one doubling of solar scale.

Rooftop solar will probably also take 2-3 years to make up for the cost lost to the subsidy reduction. It may even be 4. So after 2016, I'd expect rooftop prices to rise before slowly dropping, and getting back to 2016 levels around 2019 or 2020.

Jedd3• 11 years ago

Your post focuses on PVC's - what's the impact of / where does thermal solar fit in with these projections?

RamezNaam7• 11 years ago

It's difficult to say. Solar thermal is not dropping in cost the way that solar PV is. For now, at low penetrations, solar PV is a far better bet.

But solar thermal has the advantage of integrated storage. When solar overall is at some reasonably high penetration (say, 10-15%) storage will become important. At that point, it depends on the cost curve of storage technologies.

If batteries or other energy storage technologies have gotten cheap enough, PV + storage will be cheaper than solar thermal. If batteries haven't dropped in price enough, solar thermal may see a resurgence.

My bet is on PV + storage, though there is no certainty here.

minthd• 11 years ago

When we look at figure-1(levelized PPA), we see steady price reductions until mid-2013 , and than none. That is probably due to soft costs starting to dominate.

So since the cost drivers changing - why does it make sense to model future price on old cost drivers ?

RamezNaam7• 11 years ago

The graph doesn't have an 2015 data on it, but the average in 2015 has dropped further.

I initially set out to model soft costs on their own, separate from module costs. However, that effort revealed other factors. Solar capacity factor is rising and operational costs (which are not included in soft costs are dropping. There are more variables at play. For some of those variables, there isn't robust data available over lon times.

All of those variables ultimately feed into electricity prices, in the end, which is why I chose that modeling approach.

nroets• 11 years ago

IIRC all the efficient solar cells we currently have contains some rare materials. Once a particular solar technology reaches grid parity, the demand for the relevant rare material will increase, placing a floor under the price of that solar cell.

In the case of Moore's Law, a transistor can be any size. By contrast, solar cells absorbs too little energy if they are too thin.

TL;DR: There are real physical limitations to solar cells.

RamezNaam7• 11 years ago

Two things have happened in this area recently.

1. The grams of rare earths required per watt of solar have been dropping steadily. And Solar PV panels with no rare earths at all have been developed, though they are not yet common.

2. "Rare earths" are not so rare. Their prices have tumbled substantially as new mines have opened up and substitutes have been found.

crdoconnor• 11 years ago

IIRC all the efficient solar cells we currently have contains some rare materials.

Yeah, but the super-efficient solar cells are not the cheap ones that everybody is putting on their roof. They're the ones going on the international space station.

Once a particular solar technology reaches grid parity

It already did in about half of the continental US, about two years ago.

selimthegrim2• 11 years ago

Some so called third generation cells do not necessarily contain rare earths, especially those invoking multiple exciton generation

mikeash3• 11 years ago

Who cares about efficiency or size?

I mean that seriously. Right now, pretty much all that matters is cost per watt. For normal terrestrial uses, a 20% efficient cell loses out to a 5% efficient cell that's 10x cheaper. (Numbers made up on the fly with no particular basis.) We're not currently hurting for space for these things, and sunlight is free.

netcan• 11 years ago

What's the interaction between the home solar market and the grid solar market. Is the cost p/kw following the same curve?

Even if these two use the same basic technology, I think they are essentially two completely separate "markets."

symfrog• 11 years ago

The actual solar panels used are almost identical. Generally in the residential solar market you may use a slightly more expensive panel for aesthetic reasons, but the improvement in the underlying solar panel technology in terms of efficiency and cost are available in equal terms to both markets.

The inverters used in the residential market versus the solar plant market are usually quiet different and, IMHO, form two distinct markets. Reductions in the inverter cost for solar plant deployments would result in a reduction in the home market, but the relationship is not as direct as the relationship between the panels since you would rarely be able to use the same inverter in both markets.

vilda• 11 years ago

The price of energy storage, an impact of energy storage technologies to environment, and costs of unpredictable energy distribution in the network does not seem to be calculated at all.

They are not trivial. Germany claims one trillion EUR direct costs on network upgrades to cope with renewable energy. They do not take into account energy storage costs. Even now (at least in my country) 75% of energy costs are distribution costs.

EwanToo• 11 years ago

I believe almost 70% of that cost is in feed-in tarriff payments, not network upgrades, and is spread over the next 25 years?

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP-Trillion-Euro_cost_of_G...

RamezNaam7• 11 years ago

Germany gets roughly as much sunlight as Canada, and started installing solar when costs were 5-10x what they are today. They paved the way for future installations at lower costs, but their experience isn't directly applicable.

Energy storage is indeed going to be vital once solar exceeds 10-20% of capacity. Energy storage, fortunately, is also dropping fast in cost:http://rameznaam.com/2015/04/14/energy-storage-about-to-get-...

I have future posts coming with closer looks at the future of storage prices, wind prices, and possibly one on nuclear.

le_clochard• 11 years ago

If you could add the trendlines of conventional power sources (thermal, hydel, nuclear) it would give a better idea of when we can expect solar to emerge from the competition.

kefka• 11 years ago

Greetings,

I do agree that Moore's Law generally holds true. However a better model is an approximation of multiple S-curves, where each S curve represents the beginning, growth, and maturation of each step in technology.

The smearing of S curves and integration of new lines of tech allow for what appears an exponential growth.

Also, I'd like your opinion on http://www.bioinspired.net/ -- Commercially available memristors, albeit high priced.

VLM2• 11 years ago

Assuming solar panels always require weather sealed sheets of glass, it would be interesting to look at graphs of cost of LCD displays per Sq Meter vs year compared to graphs for plain old house windows per sq meter over the years.

Its likely it'll never be cheaper to build traditional sealed glass panels cheaper than house windows, although per sq meter it might get cheaper than televisions.

Some of the more optimistic claims outside the article seem to have very unusual assumptions about the cost of glass.

Grantarvey• 11 years ago

Thanks Ramez! Cool of you to come on here.

fpgaminer• 11 years ago

If I could install solar today I would, regardless of cost (apartment living prevents it). That may sound crazy, but I theorize that when you consider externalities the cost of grid electricity already far exceeds the cost of solar. It's going to cost humanity a whole lot of money to both survive and fix the damage we're dealing to the environment today. I'd rather pay more now for solar, than pay through the nose later for the environmental equivalent of a triple bypass surgery.

I doubt others see it that way, so I guess I'll pay the cleanup cost later like everyone else regardless. Such is the human condition.

leni5363• 11 years ago

I'd rather pay more now for solar, than pay through the nose later for the environmental equivalent of a triple bypass surgery.

That's really generous, however I think it would be the government's duty to compensate for these externalities so you don't have to pay more for solar (or not much more) than for the grid. Otherwise the environment will just stay a huge "tragedy of the commons".

mtgx2• 11 years ago

The very least the governments can do is eliminate all subsidies to coal, oil and natural gas. They've had them for decades. I don't think it's healthy for a society to prop up an industry that long with subsidies, especially when it's one of the most profitable.

redcalx• 11 years ago

Have you factored in the CO2 footprint of solar panels? Producing pure silicon is energy intensive, then there are various metals involved, so you've got mining, refinement, smelting, and bulk transport costs. The panels also have a limited lifetime so you need to think about the disposal or recycling cost in 15-20 years. Pretty sure I've missed a load of costs too.

simonbarker87• 11 years ago

One thing to remember though is that there is a reasonable level of CO2 extras around generating traditional non-renewable sources (mining, transportation, materials to build the plant, maintenance of machinery etc).

jeletonskelly• 11 years ago

Could it be said that in order to gain the technology and production methods of a cleaner, more efficient energy source we must expend energy from dirty and inferior sources first? It seems to be the case; we go after the low hanging fruit or the fruit that we know we can do something with. If that is the case, then can that be seen as a optimistic outlook for human kind in regards to climate change? That in order for there to be a clean energy future we have to harness the energy sources available to us to get there.

brrt3• 11 years ago

This is calculated in energy return on energy invested (EROI). Solar is doing.. ok in that regard: http://rameznaam.com/2015/06/04/whats-the-eroi-of-solar/

The comparable number for fossil fuels (in this case, oil) is 'well to tank efficiency', which amounts to about 25% for oil, if i recall correctly. So 1/4th of energy contained in oil is already spent to bring it to market.

Notably, wind energy has a far more favorable EROI than solar does (currently), but wind power is a relatively limited resource.

slxh2• 11 years ago

You probably also should include the CO2 footprint of energy storage/batteries if you plan on going 100% solar.

Asbostos• 11 years ago

Are you sure you can't? Apartment building rooftops in China are typically covered with solar water heating panels. Sure it's not PV, but it's solar and it serves tenants all the way down the building, not just those adjacent to the roof.

Perhaps you just need to check with your building owner.

mhb• 11 years ago

If your goal is to reduce environmental harm, why is it necessary that you use the solar electricity yourself?

Gravityloss3• 11 years ago

If you own the apartment, you can formally present to the building board that solar panels should be built on the roof. They would be owned by you, some group of people living there or the housing association.

If you're a tenant looking for an apartment you can keep asking it from landlords. Hopefully they start seeing that it's something that can be a distinct factor.

If you're a company doing real estate software, you can incorporate info about solar panels (and things like energy efficiency metrics) to the software.

Spooky23• 11 years ago

Being a good citizen now doesn't reduce my obligations in the future, so I'll be avoiding a solar retrofit as long as possible.

Personally, it would take something like a decade to recapture the capital costs associated with a solar installation. I don't have a 10-year commitment to my home, and don't have a capital gain tax liability to offset. So with solar I save a few bucks a month, and pick up alot of risk that my electric utility bears right now.

walshemj2• 11 years ago

Even in the UK with a massive government tax break our set of panels will take 8 or so years to break even - and we have an almost perfect south facing roof.

Makes sense if you own the property and have the spare cash to take the free money (8% yield tax free) - though the UK government is reducing the subsidy

ZeroGravitas4• 11 years ago

For the north american audience, it's worth pointing out that the UK is as northerly as Canada, so its not ideal for solar, though it does have a part to play I think.

rm_-rf_slash3• 11 years ago

I used to think this way until I started dating a geologist. She brought down my optimism when she detailed the ways that the environment is ravaged to extract the materials necessary to create solar panels, wind turbines, and so on. Rare earths are great for handling high heat, but their resistance to reaction also means it takes a LOT of nasty chemicals to purify the ore. Not that we should keep on burning fossil fuels, but we shouldn't kid ourselves into thinking that renewables are a one-way street to environmental prosperity.

ohitsdom• 11 years ago

A one-time dirty process for a future steady source of clean energy. Isn't it still much better than continually burning fossil fuels? And if we're counting extraction costs, don't discount the extraction cost to get fossil fuel and build fossil fuel processors (car engines, power plants, etc).

pjc509• 11 years ago

The thing is, exactly the same is true of all the other methods of power generation and mineral extraction. You have to at least compare the size and nastiness of the tailings piles. Not to mention CO2 produces carbonic acid when dissolved in oceans; the least "nasty" acid, but still enough to very very slightly change the pH and damage a lot of ocean life.

ZeroGravitas4• 11 years ago

Not all PV panels, wind turbines or EV car designs use rare earths e.g. Tesla doesn't use any in their motors.

Also, lots of other things that aren't good for the environment use rare earths. Kind of weird and illogical that people only care about it when you're trying to do good.

ciconia• 11 years ago

It's funny how the current debate regarding sustainable energy is always about production, not consumption. Somehow consumption is always taken as a given, about which nothing can be done.

It's obvious modern societies are wasteful - energy, food, water, transportation - but everybody is talking about how to increase production efficiency, no one is talking about how to decrease over-consumption.

ZeroGravitas4• 11 years ago

In many places you can pay extra to get your electricity from less carbon intensive generation sources without actually changing anything in your home, it may be worth looking into if you feel strongly about the issue.

In the UK Co-operative energy and Ecotricity are two that I'm aware of.

The other thing you can do is invest in a "community solar garden" project, which basically means you pay for the panels, and get the benefit of their generation, but they don't sit on your roof.

brightsize• 11 years ago

Avista Utilities, here in Washington state, is offering community solar in a nice, self-contained package. You lease a panel in their solar farm, they install and maintain it, and you get a credit on your electric bill for whatever it generates. At the end of the lease you will presumably have a positive ROI from it though that of course depends on actual power generated. It seems like a really nice way to "go solar" that's accessible to anyone with the cash to buy the lease. http://www.avistautilities.com/services/Pages/communitysolar...

plorg• 11 years ago

Even a few years ago, the amortized price per kWh of installing, operating, and maintaining a solar installation was lower for an end-user than the price they would be paying the utility for electricity, in most parts of the U.S.

In places where the regulatory regime and utilities are sane with regards to metering and feed-in tariffs putting in a solar installation is already a winning proposition.

leni5363• 11 years ago

What is the environmental impact of making solar cells?

chm2• 11 years ago

Sorry for the non-answer:

The term "solar cell" refers to a wide variety of technologies[1]. Anything from common semiconductors, rare-earths or even fruit juice can be used to make solar cells. The impact will be highly dependent on the type of cell in question.

[1] http://www.nrel.gov/ncpv/images/efficiency_chart.jpg

The above graph isn't all-encompassing.

leni5363• 11 years ago

Fair enough. I think the most satisfying answer would be the released chemicals and other environmental effects normalized to kWh for various cell types, taking the designed lifetime and recycling into account maybe with some emphasis on cell types that are currently sold for households, or planned to be sold in the not too far future.

I'm interested in these questions:

- What cell types are currently bought, will be bought in large quantities?

- How it affects / will affect the environment?

andyjohnson02• 11 years ago

There is some information at [1], and refers to reports at [2] and [3]. The latter tries to numerically quantify the environmental impact.

[1] http://info.cat.org.uk/questions/pv/what-environmental-impac...

[2] http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/ethicalconsumer_researchrepor...

[3] http://www.solarscorecard.com/2014/2014-SVTC-Solar-Scorecard...

erikb• 11 years ago

I'm not happy with the diagrams. Example: the first one compares time to costs. That's really what we want. But why not add some lines for traditional ways to make electricity? That's what we want to compare to, or don't we?

justaaron• 11 years ago

i live off grid inside of a 500w/h peak footprint. i paid around $1000 for proper German (Schutten) panels, a charge controller suitable for them, 2 110ah "solar batteries" (lead acid usual cheapo old school stuff), and a Xantrex inverter. After nearly 1 year running a fridge, lights, computer, router, & studio monitors, I'm ready to add more battery capacity before the winter (cloudy days) and a small wind turbine.

grid-tie systems are another story and a bigger investment. (need a proper electrician to wire it etc...)

feeding ignorant "city ways" in terms of people's silly habits fed by years of cluelessness (no a hairdryer will never ever be possible, as that's 2kw right there...) that's where the biggest expenses come in... if you don't try to keep up with the usual clueless electrical consumption, a well organized person can begin cutting their footprint down...

for example my alleged 85w macbook pro power supply consumes less than 20w typically... my inverter says so...

aembleton• 11 years ago

That 85W rating on your Macbook Pro power supply is it's peak power output. Typically it will be much less.

jacquesm• 11 years ago

If you're up for it I still have my 2500 W windmill here and can't use it so you can have it, the base is damaged (slip rings, tower shaft and tower mount) and you'll need to put up a pretty solid tower. It's a 2.5 meter diameter machine.

See:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/how-to-build-a-windmill

It weighs about 100 Kg and it's currently in storage near the town of Beverwijk in NL. It cost a small fortune to make it and I'd rather see it being used than slowly rust away in storage.

snsr• 11 years ago

What a fantastic project - thanks for documenting and sharing!

watchdogtimer3• 11 years ago

Do you always use your MBP connected to a power outlet? If so, try running it until its battery is drained about 50%, then plug it into your inverter and see how much power it draws. My guess is it will draw about 50-60 W.

I've been using a pedal-powered generator to power my computer, phone, tablet, and LED lights for the last 5 years and have tested several laptops and other devices using it. I've found that most laptops draw from 12 W (11" Chromebook) to 25 W (older 15" Dell) when their battery is charged, but 40-60 W when charging. The power supplies of most devices seem to have about a 50% safety factor, so a device that has a normal max power consumption of 50 W will use a 75 W power supply.

mikekchar• 11 years ago

How much electricity can you generate? Just thinking off the top of my head, I'm a sucky cyclist so can only manage about 150W power output sustained, probably. I'm not sure I could handle more than an hour of stationary biking before I collapse in a puddle of sweat ;-) So that's about 150 WH...

Is that about right (ballpark), or have I missed something? It would probably power my laptop for the day, anyway... It's something to think about (since I love cycling, even stationary ;-) )

imglorp• 11 years ago

I wonder how much inefficiency there is due to the inverter and the computer's wall transformer. Would it be better to run DC from the generator to power a dc-dc converter (which might have its own losses)?

mlrtime• 11 years ago

Can you expand on your views on ignorant city ways? Just because you don't need to run a hairdryer does not make everyone else ignorant and clueless.

VLM2• 11 years ago

"no a hairdryer will never ever be possible, as that's 2kw right there"

You don't mention the model of Xantrex inverter but the 813-3000-UL is a 3 KW model.

I'm old enough that when I was young inverters and switching DC-DC and power supplies in general cost about a buck a watt, now its ten cents and dropping. That would have been $4000+ decades ago, now its about $300 delivered.

That's not the only cost, of course, 3 KW at 12 V is a non-trivial DC current, and two hundred aH isn't going to run that hair dryer for hours, but how much hair do you have to dry anyway?

arkem• 11 years ago

Off topic but Ramez's novels are excellent, have a look at Nexus!

europestup• 11 years ago

We all know that PV panels have a limited lifetime, and that building them has environmental cost. But I was wondering about recycling: does anybody know how much energy can be saved by creating new panels using materials from old ones?

andyjohnson02• 11 years ago

Not really answering your question, but as far as I know panel lifetime is largely determined by cumulative damage from the environment. Scratches from trees, etc. reduce effectiveness, as does rain leaking into the panel through gaps created by the daily thermal cycle. There may be a lot of scope for extending their lifetime by improving packing, which would defer the environmental impact of recycling. There is some info on these factors in [1].

Also, panels may be declared end-of-life because they are not as effective as newer ones, even though they are still generating to original specification.

[1] http://energyinformative.org/lifespan-solar-panels/

nell• 11 years ago

If solar is really that viable of an option, India should be investing a lot in this research. Power is a huge problem there. 24 hours of power supply is a luxury even in top cities. Small industries in rural parts operate around availability of power. There are a lot of wins here. And guess what, there is a lot of sunlight in major parts of the country throughout the year.

ZeroGravitas4• 11 years ago

There's a lot going on (note that wind is currently cheaper)

http://cleantechnica.com/tag/india/

hwstar2• 11 years ago

I have a 1kW solar panel battery storage system which I use to power my computers and servers. I installed it a couple of years ago to help mitigate the $0.37 kWh top tier rate that SDG&E charges.

In California, a minimum charge was introduced and will be $10.00 starting in 2016. I suspect that this charge will be jacked up in increments till it is a significant fraction of the monthly bill.

If this does indeed play out, then the only option will be solar with localized energy storage, and disconnect completely from the grid.

California also will be flattening the rate curve at the Utility companies request to combat solar installations in the next 1-2 years. Users in the first tier will be paying more, the other tiers will be combined into one and be at a lower rate than the current top tier. In 2019 there is a plan to move everyone to time of use pricing. Once time of use is mandated, it may be too expensive to remain connected to the grid.

RealityVoid• 11 years ago

What you're saying does not make sense from the utilities point of view. Why, if they have superior competition, would they make themselves more uncompetitive?

Besides, centralized energy systems have certain advantages that household operations do not have. Maybe even better ones will arrive once solar becomes more accessible. SO it makes sense that they will stay at least as competitive as off-grid systems.

tired_man3• 11 years ago

Can't keep customers? Then charge the ones you do have even more to make up for that shortfall.

Businesses trying to keep their outdated business models alive do that sort of thing all the time. Just look at the music and movie industry's continued flailing as they try to keep CDs/DVDs profitable while their customer base wants files that they can play on _any_ device they own, not a physical copy or some DRM-laden crap that forces them to use it on one system.

tired_man3• 11 years ago

That's San Diego Graft and Extortion you're talking about, right?

This movement is going to put the skids under the home solar company's pitch that you'll be able to feed electricity back and sell it to the power companies.

hwstar2• 11 years ago

Yep, that's the entity I'm talking about.

Unless the utilities decide to become more competitive, the only way to win in the long term is NOT to feed the energy you make back into the grid.

mark_l_watson• 11 years ago

I installed solar a few years ago. I didn't do it for economic reasons, rather because I wanted to.

There is now push back by the dominant power company in my area against solar. When I got solar they gave me a small grant.

Solar is the future I think. Too much potential danger from nuclear and coal polutes too much.

JoeAltmaier• 11 years ago

Power-company solar may matter more than rooftops, in the end. They have the economies of scale, choice of location and orientation, grid connection expertise.

How Cheap Can Solar Get?

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