Wind energy costs approach nonrenewable levels

Agreed, Doitsujin. A combination of solutions is going to work out the best because of geographic resource differences.

Something else that is relevant here, and which I saw the other day, is about this new solar power plant being set up in Morocco. As I discussed earlier in the thread, Morocco sits in the "sweet spot" for solar power.

user link on www.computerworld.com

Concentrated solar looks like it uses a BIG lot of land area!

I just have to wonder if there is an upper limit to how efficient solar panels can be (obviously not at or over 100%). Covering lots of land with solar panels seems inefficient. Also, in terms of being "green" (and I know we've covered this before), the production of solar panels is relatively bad for the environment compared to the benefit resulting from their use.

My impression is that covering lots of land area with solar panels isn't going to be practical. They'll need to be "denser" for more widespread adoption.

I have to say, I totally agree with your concerns, Nitro. As regards the fact that in their production, solar power isn't so 'clean' at all - I feel much the same, especially with regard for the raw materials (esp. raw earth elements), which has both environmental (damage from mining) and political repercussions (some of the world's largest supplies of rare earth elements are located in developing countries - for example the eastern portion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo - which was the source for civil war and intervention from neighbouring countries in the past decade. Its horrible affair, truly. )

Second, I'm actually more in favour of a decentralized solar power - i.e. supplying buildings individually. In countries like Morocco that should actually work well.

On the flip side, there's a few things to be considered: first is that a kind of Moore's law type of effect seems to apply to solar cells, which means that up to a point they should become more efficient and cheaper. Second, I'm hopefully that recycling of rare earth elements will improve (or we'll be able to extract that from other, unusual sources, such as coal ash, for example... let me see if I can find that article again, for I read about that recently), which will reduce somewhat the need for mining in the future.