California Center for Sustainable Energy

The financial failure of the solar company Solyndra and its default on $535 million in loans guaranteed by the Energy Department has been running in the headlines for months now, leading some to predict the demise of solar in America. I’d like to paraphrase Mark Twain by saying - Reports of the death of solar are highly exaggerated. And anyone who thinks solar is dying must be living in a parallel universe.

I’m not a financial expert, but my take on Solyndra is that they had a good idea – making photovoltaic ( PV) cells from materials other than silicon. For years, the price of silicon has been one of the biggest obstacles to bringing down the cost of solar. What happened was the price of silicon dropped, and then China started flooding the world market with cheaper, government-subsidized PV panels. Solyndra’s business model just didn’t work. Solar does.

Why am I optimistic about solar while many others are afraid to do it or think it’s going away? Because I read the headlines, and then move on to the deeper news about how solar and renewable energy are booming. Let me point out just two recent developments that give me great hope.

• Analysis released in September from DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab shows that the average installed cost of residential and commercial PV systems completed in 2010 fell by roughly 17 percent from the year before, and by an additional 11 percent within the first six months of 2011 — record reductions since they began tracking the data.

• Also in September, The Solar Foundation announced that 100,237 Americans are now working in the U.S. solar industry, representing a 6.8 percent growth rate since August 2010. During the same 12-month period, jobs in the overall economy grew by a mere 0.7 percent, while fossil-fuel electric generation lost 2 percent of its workforce.

There are many more bright spots in the world of solar. It’s not dying, and it’s not going away.

If you do not have solar on your home or business, you need to rethink your energy strategy. Let us help you to learn more by taking the workshop “Solar for Homeowners 1 – Getting Started” on Oct. 27 or “Solar Water Heating Basics for Homeowners” on Nov. 30. We offer these workshops monthly, so they are always available.

Continue reading October's newsletter.