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David Victor Quoted on Energy Grid Parity

Praying for an Energy Miracle

02/22/2011
David Rotman, MIT Technology Review

Every clean-tech startup these days claims to have a breakthrough that will finally make renewable and clean energy sources cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels. But are we really on the brink of a clean-energy economy?

The company's breakthrough is strictly off-limits to outsiders. Work on the technology goes on in an unseen part of the sprawling one-story building, beyond the machine shop, the various testing and fabrication instruments, the large open office space stuffed with cubicles. What a visitor gets to see instead is a thin wafer of silicon that would be familiar to anyone in the solar-power industry. And that's exactly the point. The company's advance is all about reducing the expense of manufacturing conventional solar cells.

In its conference room is a large chart showing the declining cost of electricity produced by solar panels over the last three decades. The slightly bumpy downward-­sloping line is approaching a wide horizontal swath labeled "grid parity"—the stage at which electricity made using solar power will be as cheap as power generated from fossil fuels. It is the promised land for renewable power, and the company, 1366 Technologies, believes its improvements in manufacturing techniques can help make it possible for solar power to finally get there.

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David Victor is Director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation (ILAR). Looking across a wide array of issues from environment and energy to human rights, trade and security, the Laboratory explores when (and why) international laws actually work.

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