News & Views item - November 2011 |
Paul Krugman's Take on the Rise and Rise of Solar Power. (November 7, 2011)
Following is an excerpt from today's op-ed in The New York Times by Paul Krugman.
Has it relevance for Australia?
[P]rogress
in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at
Scientific American put it, “there’s now frequent talk of a ‘Moore’s
law’ in solar energy,” with prices adjusted for inflation
falling around 7 percent a year.
This has already led to rapid growth in solar installations, but even more
change may be just around the corner. If the downward trend continues — and if
anything it seems to be accelerating — we’re just a few years from the point at
which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated
by burning coal.
And if we priced coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and
other costs it imposes, it’s likely that we would already have passed that
tipping point.
But will our political system delay the energy transformation now within reach?
Let’s face it: a large part of our political class, including essentially the
entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels,
and actively hostile to alternatives. This political class will do everything it
can to ensure subsidies for the extraction and use of fossil fuels, directly
with taxpayers’ money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for
environmental costs, while ridiculing technologies like solar.