cost-benefit
purepedantry | March 2, 2009One of the impediments to the adoption of a solar alternative to fossil fuels is that solar panels are relatively expensive to make. A big benchmark to making them competitive is to get their cost of production per Watt produced comparable to energy produced by fossil fuels.
A company in Arizona, First Solar, claims to have broken the $1/Watt barrier for producing solar panels using panels made from cadmium telluride (CdTe). I am definitely impressed, particularly because the company aims to read "grid parity" with fossil fuels, meaning that they will be cost-competitive even without…