Alternative Energy Power Cost Parity By 2011 Experts Say

The magic number we have to look at is $4. At that cost level, solar would be essentially at grid parity, not everywhere of course, but at least in the electric power markets with higher than average prices such as Hawaii, California, Italy, Japan and those types of markets. It’s going to take quite a while, as you might imagine, for solar to get to grid parity in, say, Kansas or Alabama, places with very cheap power, or France, where it’s very cheap because it’s overwhelmingly nuclear. In the higher price states, we’re 50% of the way toward grid parity, and it’s been barely nine months from that $7 number of last summer.

So how long is it going to take for us to cover the second 50% of that road? Hopefully it’s going to take longer than nine months, quite simply because the industry cannot sustain this pace of price declines for much longer, but even if it’s two years or so, that’s a much more gradual decline in pricing. By 2011, solar power should be at a point where it has never been in history, which is being cost competitive with traditional power generation without taking any subsidies into account. If you take subsidies into account, as Mehdi alluded to, we are already at grid parity in many markets, and that’s why the economics are starting to look very attractive, even today.

TWST.com