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Comment by john61 | Hacker News Reader

Because of the ongoing massive costs savings it is expected that within 2015 or so it will be cheaper for house owner's to produce their own energy with photovoltaic than buying it. (Without governmental support) This will be a massive game changer: Decentralized, DIY, prosumer energy connected in a smart grid. The private rooth area and climate in for example Austria is enough to produce 1/3 of the electric energy used in Austria.

The Germans are actually ahead in this area because of current governmental price guarantees for selling self produced electricity back to the grid. This is stimulating accelerated cost savings development in the German solar industry.

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A plus-energy house from a German university won the last competition in the US.

http://www.solardecathlon.gov/past/2009/final_results.html

Citation needed. Is this with photo-voltaic cells built with dangerous and scarce materials?

http://www.taz.de/1/zukunft/umwelt/artikel/1/solarstrom-wird...

Taz seems to be a rather leftist newspaper, wouldn't take it at face value.

There are citing a study by the bank "Landesbank BW". You can find the same study in other media mentioned.

A bank is usually very reputable in calculating economics.

Oh, the fear of 'leftist' newspapers.

For the US, pretty much every newspaper in Germany is leftist.

You betcha ;-) Even for european standards this is leftist. They do have good articles though as it is usual for ideologists only on topics where the ideology doesn't already provides the answers.

Also, the mentioned bank is a state bank. Usually not the moste creditable ones. Especially not on issues that include subsidies.

According to [1] photovoltaic energy might be competitive in Germany by 2012/2013 in regions with a lot of sunshine and by 2016 "in regions with less intensive sunshine." (I'm not sure whether "less intensive" means average.) These numbers assume consumer prices and no subsidies. For industry users competitiveness is expected by 2019.

Hawaii: already competitive (2009), California: 2011 (assuming 3kW plants)

Reuters [2] writes that "very sunny countries could reach that breakeven in five years[2012] or so, and even cloudy Britain by 2020."

The breakeven is called Grid Parity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity

[1] http://www.wm.baden-wuerttemberg.de/fm7/1106/Endbericht%20Br... (German, 2009, this is the report cited by taz.de)

[2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/10/19/environment-solar-... (2007)

This doesn't answer his question, but anyway: it depends on how you account for things. When you take into account the production cost and materials needed for PV, electricity from them is not a sustainable energy source in any non-marketing meaning of the word.

I think he's mistaken is saying that it'll only come from PV; it's for all forms of 'sustainable' energy (I myself wouldn't count PV under that, but the popular opinion does so I'm including it here).

So it's including geothermal, air heat pumps, zero energy use for residential heating (high insulation and heat recuperation in ventilation systems), etc.

Some countries (e.g. Ireland, UK) are a bit more north than Austria. Would they get enough sunlight to go solar?

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