Solar power is now cheaper than nuclear

No, it's not. The position paper (from an organization whose whole mission is to push solar and get rid of nuclear) simply makes up a bunch of number. <a href="http://v.cx/2010/07/lying-about-solar" rel="nofollow">http://v.cx/2010/07/lying-about-solar</a>

Here in Germany we add half of this years world's photovoltaic solar panel production. Much of that is installed by small consumers, houses, farms, factories. This gets us away from the huge expensive centralized energy production. Panel by panel.<p>A new nuclear power plant has not been built in he last twenty years and is not planned.<p>Thus we can concentrate on bringing the price of renewable energy down.<p>The new reactors that are under construction in Finland and France are both much more expensive than planned and are coming years late. France also has to invest several hundred million Euros per reactor to keep them running. They haven't done much for those - a full fifty reactors. Here in Germany we need to spend some ten more more billion Euros on closing old East German reactors and for cleaning up an experimental storage site for nuclear waste. That experiment has failed. Spectacularly. Billions and billions that could have been invested in clean and renewable energy.

That's easy - you just impose expensive environmental regulations on top of building nuclear reactors and, suddenly, solar power becomes cheaper. With a couple iterations, even hamsters in cages will surpass nuclear.<p>How green is solar panel production, BTW?

In Australia, we have one of the cheapest electricity prices in the world. Wholesale(national pool price) is about USD 65 per MWh + Network charges.<p>But Solar PV electricity is 1/3 cheaper than the Retail price of electricity <i>WITHOUT ANY SUBSIDIES</i>.<p>The current Peak Retail price (Midday - 8.00pm)is circa USD 0.29 kWh (Aust$0.32kWh) and the 'real' unsubsidised cost of solar PV is about Aust $0.21 kWh.<p>With the current subsidies the price is <i>NEGATIVE</i> $Aust 0.50 kWh (USD -0.45)<p>Yes, we get paid to produce through grants and a Feed in Tariff

They sell solar panels in Menard's now, <i>freakin' Menards</i> (A mid-western version of Lowe's/Home Depot). I think they cost 300+ for 60 watts. I for one would love to put a bunch of solar panels up on my house, just for the cool factor.<p>Not to mention, centralized power is vulnerable. Terrorists, grid failure, etc. Something so vital should be so centralized. I'm going to dub the coming DIY power generation "Cloud Power", remember you heard it here first.

As has been pointed out this study is filled with a lot of stats and little methodology. They assume that solar tech is getting cheaper and cheaper $/KwH (quite valid), however they seemingly think that nuclear is frozen and the tech costs are rising.<p>I think it could be argued that the lobbies subsidizing both sides are causing each trend. Westinghouse wants subsidies so more plants are sold, however that also increases the tendency to over-build. A friend of mine in their nuke dept. said this very true. Compare western to foreign nuke prices.<p>Also, the green movement has every interest to encourage increasingly strict nuclear regs that make it difficult to make new ones while they support solar subsidies.<p>All of this leads to nuclear power going up in price while the tech remains underutilized. This report shows these price trends, but does little to elucidate the underlying causation in them.

Is solar still coming down in price? What kind of bothers me is even if the panels were free it would still probably cost $10,000+ to have someone install them on my house, thus I'll probably never be able to do it :-(

This is a bunch of anti-nuke nonsense written by non-experts in the energy field.

Base load.