On Feb 24, 9:51*am, dpb wrote:
On 2/24/2012 8:36 AM, wrote:
...

Yes, either reduce, eliminate or generate a profit.

...

Only in the local sense; it's costing all the rest of us in subsidies to
make up the extra cost for the utility to do that. *At some point it may
be an overall paying proposition, but it surely isn't yet. *

--

Yes, I agree. At least the cost is continuing to come
down. One thing that's particularly funny is what
happened at Solyndra. The govt backed the $500mil
loan as part of a govt plan to get the cost of solar
down. Yet in 18 months, the price decrease of
solar panels bankrupted the company. I mean, what
kind of business plan was that? Essentially what
they wanted to happen, happened and yet they're
broke and the taxpayers are stuck with the bill.

It's also interesting that their state of the art $700mil
fab that the govt money went into was incapable of
making a competitive product. It went from start
of contruction to useless in 18 months. I had a long
career at Intel and never saw such an event occur.
But then Intel stopped building new Fabs in silicon
valley 25 years ago. And they haven't built a new
one in CA in 15 years, because of the costs in
doing business there. No secret, except I guess
to Solyndra.