The other day the Boston Globe had a piece on solar technology coming of age in which Caltech chemistry professor Nathan Lewis stated: “We’re not in a hype cycle…If you go to Silicon Valley and around Route 128, everyone and their brother who used to make computer chips are now trying to make thin-film solar cells.”
Dr. Lewis seems to ignore that he gleefully gave a textbook definition of a hype cycle. And an out-of-control hype cycle is literally what we’re in when it comes to solar energy.
There are dozens of separate subsectors of research, development and production that fall under the solar energy banner. I am going to skip passive solar, solar water heaters and solar thermal (which I actually like) and cut right to the solar energy sector most encumbered with hype, technical issues, mad money, and conflicts with reality—photovoltaics.
Photovoltaics (PVs) convert sunlight directly into electricity. Basically, they are those ugly glass boxes you see over at the Porter Square Plaza in Cambridge. Production of photovoltaic cells has been doubling every two years, since 2002, making it the fastest-growing energy technology sector in the world.
PVs break down for the most part into crystalline silicon PV, inorganic thin film, multi-junction PV, and organic and Gratzel PV systems. In a nutshell, you have the old, thick, expensive ones and newer, thinner, cheaper, often flexible ones. The issues making them problematic as an energy solution are that PVs cost too much to make, install, and maintain—oh, and they also only work when the sun is out.
To the cost issue of PVs, you hear a lot about companies working toward “price parity” and “grid parity”—i.e. a cost per megawatt on a par with electricity from fossil fuels—but nearly any number you see in print is half baked. Over and over again, companies have failed to translate the efficiencies achieved in lab experiments into durable solar panels that can be mass-produced cost effectively. Miasolé, for instance, has been getting 8 to 10 percent efficiency in the lab but only 4 percent or so in a mass-production form. Once you account for installation, maintenance, and repair costs for homes and business—which often add more than 50 percent to the base cost of PV panels—it’s clear that PV solar is never going to be cost-effective as a replacement baseload power source.
So if you were to go the Al Gore route of building a national, grid-replacing, mega solar farm in Nevada, we’d all go broke and die. It’s an inconvenient truth (ouch!) that besides destroying 5 million acres of land (about seven times the size of Rhode Island; wait until the environmentalist hear about that!) and another 7.5 million acres of adjoining land to support the system, it would cost around $21 trillion dollars to build a solar farm large enough to meet U.S. power needs—and we’d still have to keep the current energy grid up and running and ready to go for the two-thirds of the time when the sun isn’t doing its job.
In addition, though solar has this reputation of being a green technology, the reality is that PVs are full of gross pollutants, gnarly residues and nasty chemicals. Making PVs requires toxic heavy metals such as lead, mercury and cadmium—and throw in silicon tetrachloride to boot. Then there’s the mining operations needed to get many of the materials. And for good measure, don’t forget that PVs are made in factories. The plant at Suntech, one of the world’s biggest PV makers, is powered by a coal plant. Oh, the delicious irony.
On top of all of this, the PV industry is truly dependent on subsidies. The government now pays 30 percent of the cost to businesses to invest in solar to meet their energy needs. For consumers, there’s a Federal tax credit of $2000 for your renewable energy system (solar or wind) after rebates. States throw in a hearty helping of additional incentives, as in the case of California, which offers a subsidy for residential solar of as much as $2.50 per installed watt, depending on a system’s expected performance.
Even with all those subsidies, and even with oil at $140 a barrel, and even when you add in the federal and state taxes on oil production, solar still doesn’t reach break-even with fossil fuels, except in some start-up’s PowerPoint presentation.
Worst of all, this hype is bad for the environment. Focusing so much on PVs means that we’re moving investment dollars away from other clean energy technologies that have much more potential. I often hear folks at clean energy forums state that the United States needs to emulate Germany by creating more incentives to build PV farms. What’s not mentioned is that it takes six years for a German PV plant to generate the amount of power used to make the PV cell.
So PV solar costs too much, isn’t exactly green, isn’t as good as claimed, and depends on government support. What else can be wrong with it? Investors—and their bad habit of
