Solar Cycle
Silicon just got a LOT cheaper, and this is reportedly going to drop the the price of solar panels. Technologyreview has an article on it.
I would love to see solar drop to the point where it’s competitive, or even cheaper, than grid-tied electricity. We have plans in our next house to generate much of our electricity from solar panels. I mean, how cool would it be to run the whole house off of solar-tied to the grid for when I’d like to run my table saw or dishwasher, of course.
Ultimately, it’d be nice to be able to generate enough power to charge a plug-in hybrid so that we could almost completely do away with paying for gasoline as well. I think within 10 years we’ll start to see this kind of thing become mainstream. It’s possible now (there are thousands of people living completely off the grid), but the primarily-electrical, plug-in car is only now starting to hit the streets. Give it a few more generations and some improvements, and I’ll bet that we see this soon. Not only will this get us off of foreign oil, but it’ll reduce emissions and free us from the tyranny of the gas pump.
It can’t happen fast enough for me.
May 5th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
I was just looking into this (solar panels on the roof) a few weeks ago. But it looked like the cost would be somewhere near $30,000, which was a bit more than I felt like spending. At that cost, you probably can’t ever break even. But it would be so fantastic if my roof were full of solar panels and I could AC my house down to 72 in the middle of summer for free