Solar panel made with ion cannon is cheap enough to challenge fossil fuels

That being said, at .40/watt you can cover a lot of rooftops economically and that means that you cut the top off the 'peak' usage for a city or town. Cutting that peak off is a huge win because often power companies have fossil fuel plants (called 'peaker plants') which they bring online only during peak power requirements.

The cool thing about having the buildings support the power load is you get a benefit of not transporting it very far (few losses due to power line resistance). And yes, even on the most overcast day solar panels generate power. The ones on my roof in California can generate nearly 50% of their best days on overcast days. That does not hold though for panels covered in snow so there is some requirement to keep them clean.

There are hundreds of other processes with huge energy inputs that are currently satisfied by cheap fossil fuels, but could well be met by equatorial solar facilities. Considering how quickly manufacturing transitioned to China, it seems entirely plausible that we could move most high-energy, low-labour processes to equatorial regions within a couple of decades.

But still the author is right, we need ways to store electricity and we will also need a much more flexible grid than the one we have today.

The neo liberal FDP here in Germany is trying to kill off the solar market by drastically reducing the fee you get for feeding solar electricity into the system. But we already have net parity, therefore it is feasible to put up a photovoltaic system on your house, when you size it carefully and consume much of the energy by yourself. It simply reduces your utility bill. If this new technology really halves the price of modules, people for sure will continue installing new systems. Yay!

I actually worked at a startup from about 2007-2009 that was designing particle accelerators for another company pursuing what appears to be the exact same technology (possibly some of the same people).

http://www.sigen.net/solar_technology.html

No idea what came of the project. Very high current ion accelerators in the +1 MeV range is quite the trick without a huge budget. Our company was full of people from Los Alamos. We were actually focusing on a different application that needed higher output.

There is a quite sizeable commercial accelerator market for medical, industrial imaging, and radiation sterilization use (and of course various "homeland security uses".

It's not that new.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Television_set_from_the_ea...

I don't see politics as being the primary challenge; the US has allies in almost every time zone that could fairly easily facilitate this. I imagine the greater challenge would come from trying to get all that electricity across oceans. Copper wires thick enough to carry a substantial amount of electricity seem like they would be too think to actually lay, and then you have parasitic losses to contend with should they manage to find a way to do it.

Why? Look at the world today. Russia supplies energy to Western Europe, Saudi Arabia provides energy to the US, Australia provides coal to China. None of them have much love for each other, it's just mutual self-interest.

No denying it's still amazing though...

Well, you could build a push-pull Van de Graaff generator, hook it up to a discharge tube, hook the tube to a high vacuum pump, and there ya go, linear accelerator in the 1 MeV range. Totally doable in a garage.

There are people who built a cyclotron at home. You'll need to wind a huge coil, but it's doable.

https://www.google.com/search?q=mass+spectrometer&tbm=sh...

I guess it's just a question of power!

Or maybe it would create peaceful nations on each continent. You may say I'm a dreamer.... :)

Here's a link to a graph created by the Lawrence Livermore Lab that quickly illustrates the miniscule impact of doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling the three primary alternative energy sources.

I wish we could all live in a world powered by solar cells etc, but it just isn't going to happen.

This is probably true. But as always, the problem is money. More specifically, the money that entrenched interests possess (and throw around).

I'd love for solar energy to happen as soon as possible too. It shows great promise. But it might not happen for a while.

> Nuclear technology will probably never be gone, or at least not within the next century.

100 years is a mighty long time. Who knows, nuclear reactors might be completely replaced by renewable energy sources within the next fifty years. Let's hope for the best.

Once solar is significantly cheaper than coal and demand pricing kicks in, a lot of time-shifting of energy use could occur. Right now, night-time electricity is cheaper because demand is lower at night, but if the supply of daylight electricity increases dramatically, any activity which currently benefits from cheap nighttime electricity could be shifted back to the daylight hours.

Data centers currently consume something like 2% of electricity -- it is probably possible to shift at least some of that to bright, sunny days. It may stop being cost-effective to run night shifts at factories, especially if your manufacturing process is energy-intensive. We might end up charging our electric cars at our offices during the day instead of over night at our homes. It'd be pretty silly to fill a battery with solar electricity during the day just to transfer it to another battery at night.

Even without batteries, solar energy could still pick up a lot of our current nighttime energy usage because a lot of our nighttime energy usage doesn't actually have to be at night.

Just imagine the world if it was 10 cents per watt instead of $1 a watt for solar. I hope I live long enough to see it. Dare we dream 1 cent per watt, just like what has happened with CPU development in the past three decades? Could we have 1 cent per watt solar in 30 years? 50 years? 100?

I hope this helps.

edit: napkin math: .40 * 1000 watts = $400/kw Assuming 4380 hours of optimum sunlight per year and lifetime of 10 years ~= .01/kwh Should be competitive even when my ridiculous assumption meets reality.

[0] http://www.twincreekstechnologies.com/

"A typical wafer is made out of extremely pure silicon that is grown into mono-crystalline cylindrical ingots (boules) up to 300 mm (slightly less than 12 inches) in diameter using the Czochralski process. These ingots are then sliced into wafers about 0.75 mm thick and polished to obtain a very regular and flat surface."

So it's a better way to slice the ingots into wafers. Those ingots are ridiculously expensive.

The PVinsights link suggests that wafers are a big chunk of the cost of cells. Depending on how much of current costs are ingot production and how good the relative efficiency of this cutting method is, the wafer could become a small part of the costs of cells. That doesn't justify claims of a 50% cost reduction, but it supports the notion of significant cost reductions.