Quote:
Originally Posted by Aurel
By then, the combination of mass production and new technologies will make them financially viable without subsidies. It is considered that a production cost of less then $0.5/Wp is competitive with oil or coal electricity. Silicon is challenged to achieve that, because of the high refining energy cost for making pure enough silicon. But other semiconductors, such as CdS/CdTe, do not have such high production costs. 10% efficient Modules produced by first solar are already at 1$/Wp, and they are cloning factories like crazy. People need to understand what is expensive in photovoltaic technology, and how cost can and will be reduced.
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I have designed prototype tooling for First Solar and recently designed several machines for another Toledo Ohio company Xunlight. I have been in both Toledo locations several times. I am fully aware of the very expensive process of sputtering large quantities of precious metals in a semi conductor clean vacuum onto large quantities of solar panels in a production enviroment. It has been done for many years now in large scale plants and it is not going to get much cheaper. Maybe someday someone will invent
some other way to glean energy from solar.... until then solar will only be "viable" large scale if it is propped up by subsidies and by govt's taxing more affordable power.
I have not gone political here.... I only am stating the facts as I have witnessed them here in Toledo, Ohio where three solar companies have started up in recent years.
I apologize if I read the OP wrong. This just happens to be a subject that really gets under my skin after seeing numerous campaign photo ops in the national news a couple years ago making it sound like Xunlight is on the verge of greatness when in reality, they are not doing well at all. First Solar is in production obviously, but most of their sales have been heavily subsidized including some very large 1 million dollar + solar fields that were 100% govt funded.
The MSM does not say this on their broadcasts... rather they paint this stuff in a rosy light and fail to mention much about the subsidies.