The current state of the solar industry & reevaluating

A web page with recent testimony to the US Congress related to solar energy:

http://www.seia.org/news/releases/release042604appropstestimony.asp

"Our industry is at a critical decision point. While clean energy
industries soar worldwide, the US is increasingly left behind. Worldwide
solar production in 2003 was more than 760 million watts, up from just
over 550 million in 2002. However, the US produced just 109 megawatts-
the first US production decline in recent memory. We must stop this
trend, before we become dependent on importing yet another source of energy.

The overall industry is supercharged; world PV production is now
doubling almost every two years. Bell Labs produced the first watt of
commercial PV in 1954, and we expect to produce more than one billion
watts in 2004. However, increasingly, that production occurs in Japan
and Germany .

Leaving aside environmental and energy security concerns, this is a
major issue. The Renewable Energy Policy Project estimates that each
megawatt of solar produced supports 35.5 jobs over ten years more than
any other energy source. At that rate, a solar industry which continues
to grow at current rates would support more than 100,000 jobs by 2020;
an industry half the size of General Motors.

...

The DOE PV research program has been a major reason why solar
manufacturing prices have dropped by more than half in the last ten
years alone. At left DOE's PV Roadmap is now predicting that solar
electricity will be available for less than $.08 /kWh within the next
ten years .

...

Continuing advances in crystalline silicon technologies could bring
prices down by half again, while DOE's Systems-Driven Approach squeezes
optimum efficiency and reliability out of every part of the solar
system, from panels to connectors to inverters. Meanwhile, the Thin Film
Partnership is beginning large-scale commercialization of their
products, which use much less raw material and more rapid
continuous-line production processes. Equally exciting are the
generation beyond next nanostructured and organic solar cells being
developed by many domestic companies and labs these flexible cells
offer the possibility of manufacturing millions of watts of solar on
machines similar to today's printing presses, out of chemicals we
currently use to make paint and toothpaste.

...

If we are to meet DOE's goal of PV-generated electricity for $.06 /kWh
by 2020, funding needs to be increased substantially. SEIA requests $100
million for the photovoltaics program in total."

====

Also, a proposal to add baseline solar to the grid:
http://www.seia.org/news/releases/release09030310percentsolution.htm
"EIA today cited several key reforms that should be part of the energy
bills efforts to address the blackout, and which could be done for
one-tenth of the estimated $100 billion grid fix price tag. Chief among
the recommendations is to direct investments to technologies that allow
businesses, homeowners and farmers to generate their own electricity,
known as self-generation or distributed generation."

====

So PV is truly a dynamic industry these days, growing exponentially
(well, at least outside the USA).

Anyway, I just don't see how SSPS can hope to compete with this sort of
momentum happening right now -- not next decade, not thirty years from
now, but right now. People are puttng up solar panels locally now, and
as they get cheaper, there will only be more of them on Earth. And yes
there will be scaling issues both for the grid and for local energy
storage and for recycling and for maintenance as Tangoman aptly points
out -- and they will IMHO likely be dealt with as they present themselves.

I still believe in the importance of space settlement for several
reasons, but I just don't see power generation (or most of the other
economic proposals such as SSI outlines here
http://www.ssi.org/research_update.html beyond SSPS like platinum
retrieval from NEOs or space tourism) as being viable options that lead
to space settlement on a large scale. IMHO it is time to drop the
business oriented approach for a philanthropic/volunteer one. Not to say
SSI doesn't fund some spectacular and worthwhile basic research related
to space settlement, by the way. The single launch of a self-replicating
seed idea remains very much in terms of SSI's orginal vision - but the
issue is perhaps just pursuing it more directly by philanthropy and
volunteerism. Perhaps the real issue is in a sense "capitalism vs.
philanthropy" driving space settlement -- with the implication of
corporate colonies vs. free societies?

Gerry O'Neill was always one to examine new ideas skeptically and yet
openly and contemplatively, and I think perhaps if he were looking at
current price/performance curves for ground-based PV and current and
projected technological advances related to cleaner manufacturing of
such PV systems projected forward thirty years as opposed to what was
available in the late 1970s, he might be moving SSI in some very
different directions these days (especially inspired by new ideas in
computing and collaboration). Perhaps the deeper question is whether SSI
as a legacy focuses on honoring just the concrete ideas of SSPS etc. as
opposed to the deeper spirit behind creating those ideas in the first
place. What would Gerry O'Neill as a physicist and economic analyst say
in 2004 given all these advances in ground based PV technology and
GNU/Linux type collaboration concepts in terms of future SSI directions?
Sadly, we'll never know, but we can always speculate.

--Paul Fernhout