ej san fran

Need Cash? See Suntech

Dean,
We can only hope that their investment in silicon supply is at a price that turns out to be too high. Why? That would imply there is abundant silicon at low prices that Suntech can mop up to make even more panels, at prices even closer to grid parity.
Grid parity is the key word.
Suntech talks about $0.50/W of 'other' costs on top of silicon costs. It seems to me silicon cost can go down to $0.50/W as well, getting them to $1/W total module cost. That's low enough to be real competition for fossil fuels, allowing the solar industry to ship enormous volumes. This way Suntech has a path to grow their revenue 10x.
Note that electricity prices in Europe are very high (due to the high Euro and the high natural gas price which is linked to the oil price), so grid parity in a country like Italy is not far off.
As of yet I don't see competition from thin film technologies that would derail this plan.
So what's a fair value for Suntech stock? Currently their profit runs at about $2/share; I think they're worth a P/E of 50, so the stock is worth $100/share, growing 50% per year for the foreseeable future.
What if their upstream silicon investments are a failure? It wouldn't change the fair value calculation much, as long as they can get cheap silicon elsewhere.
What about other risk? All sorts of minor problems can and probably will occur, but I don't see a big risk that can cause a total failure here (although it is likely that some day a new, better solar technology will make all current technology obsolete).
Full disclosure: I'm a shareholder.

Solar Stocks: Nine That Will Shine in a Bull Market

Nuclear is not safely scalable for worldwide deployment.

Just imagine World War II with Germany, France, Britain, Russia, Japan and the US 'loaded' with nuclear facilities and bombers and missiles flying back and forth targeting those facilities.
Or try to imagine Iran and Iraq at war with each other while 'loaded' with nuclear power plants.

Done imagining? Then you realize spreading nuclear power implies spreading nuclear warfare capability around the world.
With a nuclear facility in your backyard you give any potential enemy the option to explode a nuclear bomb in your backyard.

That's a bit too scary for my taste!