| Solar energy’s contribution to total U.S. energy needs is gathering momentum thanks, in part, to continually falling costs for solar panels. But technical success also makes for a tough competitive environment that has claimed the lives of many solar companies – with more victims likely. The falling costs recently caught the attention of Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning columnist at The New York Times. In a recent article, he wrote that solar panel costs have dropped so much that the energy they produce is now priced competitively with fossil fuels in many cases. “We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power.” Krugman also references a recent blog post at Scientific American, which noted “there’s now frequent talk of a ‘Moore’s law’ in solar energy.” (Moore’s law suggests that the amount of computing power that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every 18 months.) Inflation-adjusted prices for solar equipment generally are dropping about 7% annually, and solar panel prices fell by about half over the last two years, according to some estimates... |
