Solar Power May Cost the Same as Coal by 2013

There may be as little as two years left before solar power achieves grid parity with more traditional forms of energy in the US, if new estimates from Bloomberg are correct. With the possibility of solar power as cheap as coal for utility companies within our grasp, are you ready for the world that’s coming?

The new forecast comes from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which says that solar is already competitive, costwise, with peak electricity prices in California, Japan and the Middle East. With the cost of solar projects expected to halve over the next decade, Bloomberg expects parity between solar and traditional power by 2013, two years ahead of predictions from the Bush administration and other sources. This doesn’t necessarily mean that major corporations and power companies are about to jump into the clean and renewable energy wholescale, but as Fast Company puts it, even “evil conglomerates with shareholders can’t really afford to make economically stupid decisions, as much as their leaders secretly want to destroy the environment.”

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http://johndavidriser.wordpress.com johndavidriser

What a horribly irresponsible and misleading posting. The principal source for your claims seems to be not the original source, but another blog. Nowhere in the bloomberg report does it say that by 2013 will the costs meet those of coal. Nowhere. The year as a benchmark is only mentioned once. Then the claim is that solar PV power production will nearly doubly by that time. In no way does it claim that costs will fall to the levels of coal in the next two years. It seems the only way you have come to this assertion is by using the bad reporting of the Fast Company piece, which also had no basis for claiming that the bloomberg report makes these assertions. The bloomberg piece is bad enough in its own right. It works solely off the opinions of individuals in the solar INDUSTRY, not scientists. The DOE estimated that by 2015, solar PV cells would be almost four times as expensive per watt as coal when all costs were figured in. I’ll add that those figures did NOT include the cost of energy storage, which beyond being nonexistent and crucial to any replacement of fossil fuels by intermittent producers like solar and wind, would add significant cost. Solar PV power is by far the most expensive source and still will well beyond 2015, much less 2013. Also bear in mind that the DOE figures are for a plant and not private, roof-top production, which is even more expensive. The only people advocating solar PV cells to replace coal fall into one of two categories: those ignorant of science and those who work in the PV cell industry, as evidenced by your blog and the bloomberg sources. It’s the last source to which we should look and owes all of its success to undeserved hype. Even solar thermal plants are a far better solution, but has been largely ignored in the US because of the PV industry’s press. Your blog is the punchline to a long joke made up of misinformation and bad reporting. Why even post this other than for the sake of drawing attention to yourself? You add nothing new and worked solely off the inappropriate conclusions of a THIRD tier source. This is just the kind of bad journalism which plagues the information market and leads foolish people into blindly placing faith in technology that does not warrant it.
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