tom Andersen

Solar Breaks Oil Price Dependence

Look at First Solar. The market cap, 20 billion, and it will produce panels that would produce less power than a 0.06 billion dollar nat gas generation plant that you can almost order from a catalog. There are no US contracts for it, as only the Europeans have the stomach to pay $0.60 per kwh for power where nuclear and coal are about 1/10th the cost. When the global recession deepens subsidies like these will fall away long before basics like health care and defense spending. US government income will drop substantially next year across all levels of government. Solar as it exists is a bubble. This is electronic tech, though, someone may have a breakththrough - a 10x cheaper way to do it, but all the companies around today will have spent way too much money to be competitive at 5c/kwh.