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SunShot: Lowering the Price of Electricity from the Sun: The U.S. Department of Energy aims to make electricity from the sun cheaper than that from burning coal or natural gas (David Biello, March 14, 2011, Scientific American)

Silicon translates sunshine into electricity—and Earth receives enough sunshine in a daylight hour to supply all of humanity's energy needs for a year. But despite being as common as sand, photovoltaic panels made from silicon—or any of a host of other semiconducting materials—are not cheap, especially when compared with the cost of electricity produced by burning coal or natural gas. The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) aims to change that by bringing down the cost of solar electricity via a new program dubbed "SunShot," an homage to President John Kennedy's "moon shot" pledge in 1961.

"If you can get solar electricity down at [$1 per watt], and it scales without subsidies, gosh, I think that's pretty good for the climate," notes Arun Majumdar, director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA–e), the DoE's high-risk research effort. "With SunShot, the goal is to reduce the cost of solar to [$1 per watt] in the next six years." [...]

Already, electricity from the sun costs roughly the same as that generated from burning fossil fuels in places like Hawaii, which remains the only state to rely on imported oil for the bulk of its power. And solar power represents the fastest-growing sector of electricity generation. U.S. solar production in 2010 increased by nearly one gigawatt (billion watts), although that represents roughly the amount of electricity one nuclear power plant can produce. But even at that pace of adoption—spurred by both federal and state government largesse—solar still produces less than 1 percent of all U.S. electricity. And in 2035, by which time the DoE's Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicts that solar will have grown fastest among all energy resources (increasing sevenfold), all renewables put together, solar included, will only provide 14 percent of U.S. electricity.

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