Anyone planning to clamber aboard the investment bandwagon on renewable energy might like to heed a warning handed out at the 235th national meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). The title of the press release says it all Expert Foresees 10 More Years of R&D to Make Solar Energy Competitive.
The expert in this case is Harry Gray, PhD, Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry and Founding Director of the Beckman Institute at the California Institute of Technology. The press release tells us:
“The single biggest challenge, Gray said, is reducing costs so that a large-scale shift away from coal, natural gas and other non-renewable sources of electricity makes economic sense. Gray estimated the average cost of photovoltaic energy at 35 to 50 cents per kilowatt-hour. By comparison, other sources are considerably less expensive, with coal and natural gas hovering around 5-6 cents per kilowatt-hour.”
Anyone old enough to have lived through the energy crises of the mid 1970s may consider Gray’s timetable to be optimistic. Way back then there were plenty of demonstration projects to impress visiting journalists. Investors weren’t among the folks you needed to persuade way back then, with so much government loot sloshing around.
Ventures in Italy and the USA stand out, partly because they were in nice places. I wonder what became of them.
There is a difference between the current rush to go green and earlier episodes. Back then there was, thanks partly to that government money and the public ownership of many energy utilities, little private interest in investing in solar energy, for example, or much of any technology come to that.
Governments did all the spending on energy R&D, often through surrogate agencies such as state owned electricity companies, which really didn’t want any truck with flaky ideas that got in the way of their plans to build nuclear power stations.
Of course, had those electricity companies achieved their nuclear ambitions back then, we might not need solar power. But that is another issue.
