SOLAR ECONOMICS I

Can solar photovoltaic power nevertheless become economic?

Yes and no.

Yes: The DoE hopes that new techniques, particularly those allowing mass production (such as coating collectors with amorphous, rather than crystal-grown, semiconductors) can depress the cost of solar cells from the present $10 per peak watt to 70 cents by 1986, which would begin to make it competitive with conventional electricity (made artificially more costly by government overregulation and environmentalist obstruction).

No: Decentralized, small-scale (feudal) production can hardly become cheaper than the large-scale production introduced by the capitalist system. It always costs more to weave your own cloth than to buy a mass-produced shirt; and electricity is going to be no exception. The goods and services produced within the modern household are produced there for convenience rather than for lower cost. This is so for washing and cooking (think of the military, not of luxury restaurants, for comparison with large-scale production!) But electricity is void of quality and sentiment.

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How tenderly can your lover serve you a kilowatt-hour? On the other hand, solar space heating makes very much more sense. To degrade energy into heat is always a comparatively simple process, which can sometimes be made to reach a full 100% efficiency. Mass production of the collectors and plumbing is becoming feasible by such inventions as the recently patented SolaRoll, a heat absorber/exchanger mat made of highly durable and flexible synthetic, unfreezable and lightweight. Each mat has 6 tubes for carrying water (the 12 above belong to two adjacent mats), with the webbing between them acting as the collection plates; the mats come in rolls 600 feet long and are cut to the desired length. Teflon inserts connect the tubes to the manifolds without soldering or clamping.

Such innovations will make solar heating cheaper, particularly for new construction; it will reduce fuel bills, but not eliminate them. In any case, residential and commercial space heating together amount to only some 17.5% of total US energy consumption (1977 figure).

And so once again it is the familiar story: Solar can supplement, but never substitute for, coal and nuclear power.

[More: On photovoltaics of different types, see five short articles in IEEE spectrum, Feb. 1980; for details on SolaRoll, write to manufacturer, Bio-energy Systems, Inc., Box 87, Elmersville, NY 12428.]