Word: solarity
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...Sachs' article should be required reading for every Senator and Representative in this great country - before it's not great anymore. The one point that really blows my mind is that the U.S. in 2006 spent $3.2 billion on energy research - nuclear, wind, coal, solar and biofuels - while the Pentagon spends that much in about 40 hours. Howard Sandt, Big Stone...
Mike Gering, CEO of the start-up Global Solar, picks his way along his factory floor, tracing the convoluted path that his thin-film solar panels follow from birth to shipping truck. The raw materials the workers carry are ultra-thin sheets of flexible plastic, which are then coated with a series of chemicals--indium, gallium, diselenide--that allows the module to turn sunlight into electricity...
...atmosphere here is less high tech than high school chemistry lab, and Global Solar's days in this cramped Tucson, Ariz., facility are history. The company is shifting production to a sparkling factory just a few miles down the road. The new facility is fast enough to churn out 40 megawatts' worth of thin-film solar panels a year, more than 10 times Global Solar's previous capacity...
...story being repeated throughout the solar world, from the Southwest to Silicon Valley to Germany. Everywhere you look, thin-film solar companies are opening new, more efficient factories. The thin in thin film refers to the skinny layers of photoactive chemicals needed for the technology, as compared with the thicker films used in crystalline-silicon solar modules. Though thin-film photovoltaics are cheaper than the crystalline ones on most rooftop solar panels, the technology has proved maddeningly difficult to mass-produce, which had kept it from going mainstream. But today thin film is the hottest part of the fastest-growing...
Certainly Lovins is right to argue that the nuclear industry can't compete on the free market on its own terms - or even without the billions in subsidies it already receives. But renewables also receive their share of government largesse - the booming global solar industry wouldn't be anywhere near as hot without a generous German tariff. New research and development might cut atomic costs, just as we hope will happen for alternatives. And the sheer size of the problem facing the global energy industry demands that no solution can be dismissed out of hand. On June 6 the International...