[ExI] [tt] Smaller, cheaper, faster: Does Moore's law apply to solar cells?

[Damien Sullivan]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 01:17:04AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 12:21 PM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> > Smaller, cheaper, faster: Does Moore's law apply to solar cells?
> 
> Yes. Great article. Thanks for sharing Eugen. However, the cost of
> solar cells are half of the expense of a single home system. The other
> half are batteries (which are on a similar cost reduction curve) and

Are they?  I did read recently of lithium batteries dropping a lot --
but that still leaves them very expensive as a power storage, and well
above lead-acid batteries.

At 17 cents a watt-hour, cheap lead-acid is $47 million for terajoule
capacity.  10,000 seconds of US power would be $470 billion, not too bad
over a 10 year period, but less than 1/8 of a day.  100,000 seconds
would be $4.7 trillion.  And that's diurnal load, never mind balancing
annual solar variations.

Plus, the US currently uses 3 TW of energy, though much of that is lost
in heat engines, and electrified transport + heat pumps could bring
future usage to under 1 TW of electricity.

-xx- Damien X-)