The executive summary says, in part,
to increase the contribution of solar energy to long-term climate change mitigation, we strongly recommend that a large fraction of federal resources available for solar research and development focus on environmentally benign, emerging thin-fi lm technologies that are based on Earth-abundant materials. The recent shift of federal dollars for solar R&D away from fundamental research of this sort to focus on near-term cost reductions in c-Si technology should be reversed.
Interesting, since there has been such a strong MIT connection at the Department of Energy in recent years.
Although at a high level the report is favorable toward government support for solar energy, in terms of specifics it is often highly critical. My guess is that the outlook for improvement is poor. The beneficiaries of the current inefficient system of subsidies know who they are. There is probably little or no benefit to politicians to be had from following the recommendations of the report. Still, it looks like a great report to have out there.
Gizmodo has a relook at some Scientific American predictions from 10 years ago. Many are pretty risible with the advantage of hindsight. There are a lot of “still working on it” comments, which, like trying to produce electricity from Nuclear Fusion, has always been 20 years away, for 70 years now. Here’s the solar section:
Just like medicine, a bunch if treatment options isn’t a good thing. It means they don’t know what they are doing.
Politics is not about policy; green energy programs are not about green energy.
Infrastructure doesn’t have be roads and bridges. Solar, batteries, fiber, wireless, are all rich areas for investment.
Those things are mostly research areas. I don’t know how to do it, but I do think we should have a lot of low cost, high labor projects on the shelf for Keynesian purposes during recessions.
For example, add current tech solar panels to government buildings or convert government vehicles to natural gas.
I propose we do one thing. A revenue-neutral carbon tax. The automatic neutral offset, an individual tax credit, hopefully means that by having to reduce progressive taxes the climate liberals won’t go crazy mis-pricing the carbon tax. Or at least it should slow them down. I realize they can just tweak the brackets to maintain progressivity and increase income taxes along with the carbon tax, but those are slow debates to have.