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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

many solar markets around the world have reached grid parity

I'm not one who watches alternative energy technolgies closely, but this statement screams out for further substantiation. Examples. Which markets? At least citations of reputable reporting on this. Because it strikes me as patently unbelievable.

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Wikipedia has a few citations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity#Solar_power

The key detail is that the cost per watt for PV on the open market dropped 40% in 2011.

This struck me as a fallacy as well. Those subsidies won't be around forever, and last I heard, the PV cells aren't cost effective without them.

It would help if you continue the very sentence:

After decades of global competition and collaboration, many solar markets around the world have reached grid parity—the point at which generating solar electricity, without subsidies, costs less than the electricity purchased from the grid.

No?

Fair enough. The way it's worded really seems to target the public sector though. Maybe I'm just way out of touch, but has the cost of PV really come down far enough that it's cheaper for the average homeowner to generate solar power than to buy power from the grid? And in which countries is that true? Or, is this statement targeted at large-scall installations only (power plants, warehouses, etc)?

Yeah, I don't know about that. I assume it's the large-scale pricing myself..

It's my understanding that the cost to create a new power plant powered by solar cells is cheaper than the cost to build a new plant powered by coal or oil.

I'd love to see some reports to back up that claim. Not that I'm rallying against solar power or anything, I'm just skeptical. I personally haven't seen anything about huge breakthroughs in solar power generation... not that I've been looking though.

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