Apple Inc is considering harnessing the sun to power its iPod music players. California's Ironwood prison is installing more than 6,000 solar panels, and Boston's Fenway Park is tapping solar power for Red Sox baseball games.
After decades on the fringe, solar power is closing in on the US mainstream as surging fossil fuel prices and mounting concern over climate change spur states, businesses and homeowners into a quickening embrace with alternative energy.
Panels bolted to roofs to convert sunlight into electricity are still too expensive in most regions to compete with cheaper, less environmentally friendly fuels like coal without generous subsidies. Solar's high costs have kept the resource out of reach for many residences and businesses,.
But not for long, industry analysts and scientists say.
The tipping point at which the world's cleanest, most renewable resource is cost-competitive with other sources of energy on electricity grids could happen within two to five years in some US regions and countries if the price of fossil fuels continues to rise at its current pace, they add.
"In the long run - as in two to three years - you should see competitiveness especially with the grid in a number of regions in the world," said Vishal Shah, an analyst who tracks the industry at US investment bank Lehman Brothers.
Tom Werner, chief executive of SunPower Corp, the largest North American solar company by sales, sees such "grid parity" for solar power in the United States and elsewhere happening in about five years, or possibly as soon as 2010.
"That's actually more aggressive than what we would say previously, and that's because the cost of electricity is going up faster than we had ever modeled," Werner said an interview at the Reuters Global Energy Summit on June 3.
"It is becoming more and more clear it is a real possibility, and we believe, a reality," he said.
'Holy grail'
Richard Feldt, chief executive of US solar panel maker Evergreen Solar Inc, calls grid parity the industry's "holy grail" and sees it happening in about five years.
Suntech Power Holdings Co Ltd, one of the largest of a growing number of Chinese solar companies, sees the same five-year timeline, thanks to increasing supplies of silicon that will help drive down costs.
Although solar power is easily installed, building solar panels is expensive because of tight supplies of silicon, their costliest element. Most industry analysts expect a constraint on silicon supplies to end within two years. But they are divided on whether this would help or harm the industry.
Some say a drop in silicon prices would tip the scales from boom to bust by dramatically boosting supply of photovoltaic panels that make up 90 percent of sales in the industry.
Such panels use refined crystalline silicon. But rival technologies are emerging such as thin-film panels that require almost no silicon, raising the possibility of a costly battle in the industry over which type of solar power will dominate.
"The solar industry will look very different just two years from now," said Ted Sullivan, a senior analyst at Lux Research, a New York market consultancy.
He said he expects "a shake-out among companies that aren't prepared to thrive in this new environment - particularly crystalline silicon players that haven't invested in new thin-film technologies."
Those concerns have helped to cool red-hot solar panel stocks, a volatile sector that also faces uncertainty over whether the US Congress will renew tax incentives that expire at the end of the year.
Shares in California-based SunPower Corp are down nearly 60 percent this year, Colorado-based Ascent Solar
Technologies Inc has shed 50 percent and Evergreen has lost about 40 percent of its value this year.
That compares to a heady 2007 when industry leader SunPower rose 253 percent from the start of last year to the end, Ascent surged 785 percent and Evergreen shot up 134 percent.
Some analysts urge investors to look beyond volatility in the near term to a promising future for solar in energy-thirsty nations such as the United States, which could overtake Germany as the world's top solar market within four years, according to the European Photovoltaic Industry Association, a lobby body.
Source:China Daily/Agencies
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