Solar Power

Solar pow­er, if it were only afford­able, has the pow­er to fill the entire coun­try’s ener­gy needs — using exist­ing rooftops and oth­er already paved sur­faces. The main thing keep­ing solar from rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing our ener­gy sys­tem is its cost. A KPMG report, com­mis­sioned by Green­peace in 1999, shows that for about $660 mil­lion (the cost of only 2 of the 1300–1900 new pow­er plants pro­posed under the Bush/Cheney Ener­gy “Plan”), a large-scale solar pan­el fac­to­ry can be built which would bring the cost of solar pow­er down by 4–5 times so that solar is com­pet­i­tive with exist­ing con­ven­tion­al ener­gy sources.

Mass pro­duc­tion of solar PV can make solar cost-com­pet­i­tive with (or even cheap­er than) dirty ener­gy tech­nolo­gies. As nanoso­lar appli­ca­tions and oth­er new tech­nolo­gies roll out with­in the next 5–10 years, this cost reduc­tion is inevitable. Once solar is cost-com­pet­i­tive, there’s no lim­it on the amount of ener­gy that can come from dis­trib­uted solar gen­er­a­tion (and there are many jobs to be cre­at­ed in installing it all).

The Depart­ment of Ener­gy esti­mates that a dis­trib­uted solar sys­tem would involve an aver­age of 17 square miles of PV per state. Using vacant land, park­ing lots and rooftops would pro­vide plen­ty of land for this. They state that using the esti­mat­ed 5 mil­lion acres of aban­doned indus­tri­al “brown­fields” sites in our nation’s cities could sup­ply 90% of Amer­i­ca’s cur­rent elec­tric demand.

To learn more, visit:

• Solar Maps of the U.S.
• Home Pow­er Magazine

Solar pan­el pro­duc­tion can involve some pret­ty tox­ic chem­i­cals. How­ev­er, after solar cells are pro­duced, there is lit­tle haz­ard from ongo­ing use and no need for the con­tin­ued pol­lu­tion that nuclear pow­er and all forms of com­bus­tion (fos­sil fuels and biomass/incineration) cre­ate. Some stud­ies on the tox­i­cs used in solar man­u­fac­tur­ing are below:

• Overview of Poten­tial Hazards