Solar power, which has been the next big thing on the energy horizon for decades, may finally be reaching a tipping point.

Long considered far too expensive to be a viable power source, solar energy is now benefiting from technological innovation, environmental concerns and the ever-rising cost of fossil fuels.

In the latest discovery, an MIT team yesterday announced it had developed a new way to concentrate solar beams, potentially reducing the cost of solar panels.

But such advances, still far from becoming commercial products, are only a small part of the forces finally making solar look feasible. Unlike in the early 1980s, when cheap energy prices helped derail Jimmy Carter's ambitions for solar power, today's technology is getting close to being cost-competitive with other forms of energy.

"We're not in a hype cycle," said Nathan Lewis, a chemistry professor at the California Institute of Technology. "There's a lot of innovation we're seeing now, regulations guaranteeing a market expanding for the next decade. . . . If you go to Silicon Valley and around Route 128, everyone and their brother who used to make computer chips are now trying to make thin-film solar cells."

In Massachusetts, the Patrick administration's Commonwealth Solar rebate program, implemented in January, is part of a push to increase the amount of solar energy used from 4 megawatts to 250 megawatts over the next decade. (By comparison, the Pilgrim nuclear plant has a generating capacity of nearly 700 megawatts.) A novel program included in the state's new energy bill would allow utilities to own solar panels for the first time.

Solar power has also benefited from competition and from scale, as more companies begin to get into the business. Evergreen Solar Inc., for example, will bring part of its new solar manufacturing plant in Devens online this month. Lux Research Inc., which follows emerging technologies, has predicted that the solar industry will grow at nearly 30 percent a year, to reach $71 billion by 2012.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has made investigation of solar power a priority, with a number of solar-specific initiatives, including the $10 million Solar Revolution Project this spring, the Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Center established this month, and the MIT-Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems earlier this year.

"Tremendous progress has been made, much higher technical performance, for much lower cost," said John Deutch, an MIT Institute professor who knows something about solar's troubled trajectory.

Full Story: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/07/11
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