Three Ways to Make Solar Cheaper than Coal
Solar power is magnificently exciting. Just lay down a sheet or a panel and every day, for the life of the device, you get free power. There are no fuel costs. No one is ever going to start charging $4 per gallon of sunlight. But, unfortunately, the size of the initial investment keeps the cost of solar generated power higher than the cost of coal.
It's worth noting that, if you take into account the environmental costs of burning coal, solar power is already slightly more economically sound (according to an analysis by the IPCC.) But we're not taxing carbon (yet) so we've got to make solar power cheaper.
There are thousands of people working on that right now. But here are three of the finest examples of companies that are working to bring solar power to grid parity.
Concentrate on the Silicon
The most expensive part of a traditional photovoltaic array is the silicon wafers. It's the same stuff that microchips are made out of, and it's in short supply. The solar industry eats up every ounce of the stuff that's being produced today, and so prices are skyrocketing. To solve this problem (and also the problem of the environmentally wasteful process of creating the silicon crystals) several people, including IBM and a small startup called Sunrgi are concentrating the sunlight thousands of times onto a extremely small solar panel. They decrease the amount of solar material needed by thousands of times, and produce just as much power.
via:ecogeek
