Tag Archives: price
Solar Power: Cheaper than Wind?
Everyone knows wind is cheaper than solar, right? Wind energy was the first renewable to mature and the first to achieve parity with coal in many situations. But solar is growing up and catching up to wind on price and definitely on installations. Last year, in certain markets, it cost less to buy solar systems than wind per watt. [...]
Solar and Moore’s Law
Late last summer, I was walking the neighbourhood near where a rooftop residential solar PV system was about to be installed. People tend to be more interested and less sceptical about solar when their neighbors are getting into it, so it’s good policy to pound the pavement in the hopes of drumming up some business. [...]
Louisiana’s Solar Boom: Just Getting Started
Louisiana’s solar market presents a baffling study of what happens when market forces come face-to-face with ideology, geography and demographics. Like most of the country, Louisiana has benefited from the more than 40% drop in average PV panel prices last year. By most accounts, this trend will continue despite the US Commerce Department’s proposed tariffs [...]
The New Rules of Green Marketing
On September 13th, 2012, Jacquie Ottman conducted a webinar on the new rules of green marketing. Jacquie Ottman is a New York city-based expert on green marketing and advisor to Fortune 500 and entrepreneurial companies and several U.S. government eco-labels. She is also a sought-after speaker who has written four books on green marketing. She [...]
Solar + Nanotechnolgy: The Future of Energy
One of our Solar Energy World Facebook fans requested a blog post about solar power and nanotechnology. These two technologies combined could pave the way for even more efficient and cost effective solar power generation in the future. This post will give an overview of the concept of nanotechnology, and the effect that it may [...]
WOW: GM Loses $50K on Every Volt Produced
Despite selling a record number of Chevy Volts in August, General Motors is losing money on its plug-in electric hybrid, and a lot of money at that. Industry analysts estimate GM is losing as much as $49,000 on every Volt it produces. This number could be even higher with cheap leases now being offered for [...]
Green Homes Get 9% Premium in California
Having a green certified home adds 9% to its appraised sales value in California, finds a new study. The study is the first rigorous, large-scale economic analysis of the value of green home labels in California and was conducted by state university professors. Researchers conducted a pricing analysis of all 1.6 million single-family home sales [...]
Are Renewables Too Expensive?
Yesterday, I shared with you the American Council on Renewable Energy’s “fact check” on renewable energy job creation. As you read from that piece, renewable energy employs hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country. But even with job creation, is renewable energy even worth it if it’s too expensive? Perhaps. But that’s the catch [...]
Solar Panel Prices to Drop 70% by 2020!
Despite what some opponents of solar energy would have you believe, the industry isn’t sputtering to a stop in a classic display of boom and bust. Like any relatively new industry, there are periods of awkward growth, or “growing pains” as the new McKinsey and Company report “Solar Power: Darkest Before Dawn” plainly states. In [...]
Solar for the Price of a Television
The crushing margins experienced by solar manufacturers over the past couple of years are likely to get worse and force consolidation of the industry to just a handful of manufacturers by 2015. Consolidation is also happening on the installation side of the solar industry. That’s what the Shawn Qu, CEO of Canadian Solar said, according to [...]
Can Solar Leasing Get Cheaper?
Before solar leasing came along, installing PV on a residential rooftop was expensive. The approach to achieving the allusive breaking point of “grid parity”, or when solar PV is the same cost or cheaper than fossil fuel generation, was to chip away at the expenses with government incentives. Rebates, small grants, and more recently renewable [...]
The New Price of Oil
In the Spring of 2011, when Libyan oil production — over 1 million barrels a day (mpd) — was suddenly taken offline, the world received its first real-time test of the global pricing system for oil since the crash lows of 2009. Oil prices, already at the $85 level for WTIC, bolted above $100, and [...]