Solar Forward!

Solar has arrived—on Earth! Just a few short years ago, most people associated solar with exotic uses like the wing arrays on the International Space Station or the small solar modules powering the Mars Rover. By NASA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

That now seems like ancient history as you will now find solar panels on your neighbor’s roof, your partner’s backpack (got to have that power for your cell phone), and on those solar lights in your garden (won’t exactly reduce your carbon footprint, but it’s a start).

Other solar technologies like time-tested solar thermal have risen to the fore. Just ask the 100,000 or so households that are receiving 1000 gigawatt/hours every year from the massive Ivanpah plant with a jaw-dropping capacity of 392 megawatts.

The world is changing in a fundamental way when Elon Musk introduces a new battery that could potentially allow you to store all of your energy needs at your house—without ever having to tie into the grid. That is mind-blowing. You wonder what the world will look like in five years.

Author: Jamey Stillings Some rights reserved. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Solar has now become a fixture in our nation’s energy landscape. Yeah, it is still less than 1% of the nation’s energy generation but that is a huge increase from the asterisk that it was a few years ago. Last year, solar accounted for .4% (O.K., still not a lot) of the country’s nation generation, but that is twice as much as it was just a few years ago.

You know that solar has arrived when fossil fuel interests feel threatened enough by solar and wind energy. Coal producers and their allies, as pointed out in The New York Times, view solar and wind as a threat to their long-term business interests. Solar is just a pimple on the proverbial posterior of the energy production of the country, but the Koch Brothers would like nothing better to do than to quash solar in its infancy. As the industry matures and costs decline, it will be more difficult for them to get their way.

When SolarTown was just starting out six years ago, we were selling some of our home solar panels for $5.00 a watt. Do you know what that is today? On some of our modules, we have seen the cost to our customers go down by a whopping 80% or more.

Sure there have been a lot of companies that are out of business, and the ones that survived showed that they could do the same job for a lower cost. The industry is now much more stable and mature. We would like to think that we have played a small role in helping our customers on their path to adopt solar as part of their life style and commitment.