DMX

Keeping Alternate Energy In Perspective

Good posts, however to be more accurate the cost/KWh figures posted above should be split in non-recurring and recurring costs. Lumping those two costs in one category is pretty much useless.

PV has a large initial cost, but very low recurring cost. From an investment standpoint if you put money into a small PV system you can already expect more return per year than you're going to get from most stocks or low risk investments.

Considering the low recurring costs of PV and the already high and rapidly increasing ROI, there will soon come a point where the ROI of PV solar will reach a tipping point where it return-risk profile beats all other options, causing a crazed rush of investment $ that will send the PV market up faster than dotcom stocks in the late 90s or housing before '06.

A subtlety here is that PV enables simple small scale distributed power generation (not the case for most energy alternatives), which coincidentally is most efficient when energy demand is the highest (hot days when everyone A/C is on).

PV may be a year or two away from exploding but when it goes up it's going big.

Rupert's Pincer Movement Around a Trapped Times

R.I.P. NYT