Commercial Solar Power: The Pros and Cons

Here's the bad news about solar power systems: at the moment

, electricity from these facilities costs about five times as much as that generated at coal, gas and oil-fired power plants and the amount of polysilicon, which is the main component of a photovoltaic cell, is disappearing fast.

It doesn't help matters that the federal government in Washington D.C. has been run by the coal and oil industry for the past thirty years.

The good news is that advances in technology are making commercial solar power more viable and cost effective all the time. The main goal of the players in today's solar industries is to eventually bring the cost of solar power systems down to a level that is truly competitive with other forms of energy.

One of the challenges of building a full-scale commercial solar power plant is the fact that areas that are the most suitable such as the desert country of the Southwest are far removed from the grid. It would require a fair amount of costly engineering to bring these plants online.

In the future, the most efficient approach will be to make individual homes and buildings into "mini solar power plants." This is in fact already happening in Germany. Through a government-sponsored program of subsidies, low-interest loans and "feedback tariffs" (in which a power company is legally obliged to pay homeowners for any excess power fed back into the grid), people are able to create their own solar power systems at virtually no cost. This idea has not yet caught on across the United States, but under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the state of California is moving forward with a similar program for homeowners in that state.

Dependent as it is on the vagaries of weather, latitude, vegetation, roof angle and orientation, such systems will not be a complete solution for everyone but in combination with wind, geothermal and other renewable sources, these sun-powered solutions will go a long way toward freeing the world of from the tyranny of fossil fuel.

Commercial Solar Power: The Pros and Cons

By: Wayne Hemrick

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