Warming up to solar

Another early Christmas present:

Imagine a solar panel without the panel. Just a coating, thin as a layer of paint, that takes light and converts it to electricity. From there, you can picture roof shingles with solar cells built inside and window coatings that seem to suck power from the air. Consider solar-powered buildings stretching not just across sunny Southern California, but through China and India and Kenya as well, because even in those countries, going solar will be cheaper than burning coal. That’s the promise of thin-film solar cells: solar power that’s ubiquitous because it’s cheap.

Nanosolar’s cells use no silicon, and the company’s manufacturing process allows it to create cells that are as efficient as most commercial cells for as little as 30 cents a watt. “You’re talking about printing rolls of the stuff—printing it on the roofs of 18-wheeler trailers, printing it on garages, printing it wherever you want it,” says Dan Kammen, founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. “It really is quite a big deal in terms of altering the way we think about solar and in inherently altering the economics of solar.”

In some developing countries, cell phones are more common than landlines because it was cheaper to build a cell phone tower network than to create the miles of line required for conventional phones. Wouldn't it be ironic if one day the developing world leads everyone else in renewable energy production because they didn't start out wedded to coal- and oil-fired power plants?

Centralized energy production based on carbon fuels needs to give way to decentralized, distributed power production by consumers themselves, based on whatever renewable energy medium--solar, wind, tidal, etc--works for that particular location. There is no "one size fits all solution," but then, that's the point of decentralization. (Works in governance, too, by the way!)

"Power" to the people! :)