It's not feasible for lower-middle income families until it is as cheap or cheaper than the alternatives.
But there are many factors complicating this kind of cost comparison. For one, pv solar pays off over years, while others are paid per as pennies per kWh used. Another complicating factor is the environmental impact of oil and coal. Do you include that? If you do, how do you quantify it?
In short, solar has a long way to go. Twenty or thirty times more expensive than the traditional sources of energy. It looks like a huge breakthrough and alternative method is needed rather than incremental improvements in current methods.
What this article is about is reducing cost by using a type of solar cell that can handle incredibly dense concentrations of sunlight. So you can use a cheap lens to take say 30 square feet of sunshine and focus it on one square foot of solar cell. Once square foot of solar cell is much cheaper than 5 square metres of solar cell. But the article doesn't go into detail about how much these high capacity solar cells would actually cost at mass consumption levels.
'Los Angeles area households paid an average of 20.3 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity in July 2013, up from 19.3 cents per kWh in July 2012.'
Whereas, according to the linked article,
> 1 ton of coal costs $36 = $0.006 per KWH | 1 barrel of oil costs $70 = $0.05 per KWH | 1 cubic foot of gas $0.008 = $0.03 per KWH
Which may well be true, to the people with the powerplants, - but consumers can take advantage of the price of solar much more directly.
Assuming that we buy into their stats about the price of solar, (which I'm now a bit reluctant to do,) things look a bit happier; more like 1.7 times the price rather than twenty or thirty times.
Awesome, if true. At 1.7 times the price it should be pretty easy to convince some early adopters. If I were building a house in the right area I would love to do a solar/wind combination for power.
Those numbers are way off base. They assume 100% energy conversion when calculating costs which is a clear sign they have no clue what there talking about.
They also completely ignore the cost to build and maintain a coal power plant as well as transportation costs for coal. Consider the lack of west coast coal mines has a significant impact on the west coasts electricity costs.
Worse they use a reduculus 45,000 for 2kw system which is ~3 times the going rate. Solar is far from cost effective in Alaska but there are places in the US where solar + grid is cheaper than grid power.
PS: Off grid solar is not worth it, but neither is off grid coal so it's a pointless comparison.
Concentrating sunlight like that also creates potentially dangerous high heat. As a kid I had a 24" fresnel lens that would almost instantly ignite anything I focused it on. Having an array of those on a residential rooftop would require some good safety engineering and insulation, which will add to the cost. It may still be a net win, but this might be something that's going to be more suitable for stand-alone, "solar farm" type installations.
But there are many factors complicating this kind of cost comparison. For one, pv solar pays off over years, while others are paid per as pennies per kWh used. Another complicating factor is the environmental impact of oil and coal. Do you include that? If you do, how do you quantify it?
This looks like a decent article http://greenecon.net/understanding-the-cost-of-solar-energy/...
In short, solar has a long way to go. Twenty or thirty times more expensive than the traditional sources of energy. It looks like a huge breakthrough and alternative method is needed rather than incremental improvements in current methods.
What this article is about is reducing cost by using a type of solar cell that can handle incredibly dense concentrations of sunlight. So you can use a cheap lens to take say 30 square feet of sunshine and focus it on one square foot of solar cell. Once square foot of solar cell is much cheaper than 5 square metres of solar cell. But the article doesn't go into detail about how much these high capacity solar cells would actually cost at mass consumption levels.