- More than 15 rooftop arrays go onto Arizona homes each day.
-Utility companies across the country have launched a propaganda war against an energy source that still accounts for less than one quarter of 1 percent of U.S. electricity.
-But the utility met resistance from a coalition of liberals and libertarians decrying monopoly or wanting to help cut greenhouse gas pollution.
-If solar rooftop arrays became as ubiquitous in home design as chimneys, the U.S. grid could indeed cease to exist.
-This war over solar has pitted Republican against Republican, and formed new alliances between libertarians and liberals.
-The roughly 3,000 electric utilities that now control U.S. electricity may be as dim a memory in a decade or two.
-The cost of a photovoltaic cell drops by 20 percent every time global manufacturing capacity for such cells doubles.
-Even as an "expensive" alternative, solar is the fastest growing electricity source in the world.
-Solar power may be finally beginning to follow a 25-year path similar to that of now ubiquitous cell phones—from an oddity in the 1990s to world domination in the next decade or so.
-In Georgia a Southern Co. subsidiary has blocked solar power development. That caused the local Tea Party, led by activist Debbie Dooley, to form what she called the "Green Tea Coalition" .
-"Solar is a natural fit for conservatives," Dooley says, noting her amazement at conservatives who claim to be in favor of a free market but support a government-mandated monopoly like local utilities.
-A schism of sorts is forming within the Republican Party: Libertarians and Tea Partiers like Dooley who support a homeowner's property rights have sided against other conservative groups like Americans for Prosperity (a group largely funded by oil magnates the Koch brothers) and think tanks like the Heartland Institute. Grover Norquist of the Republican-group Americans for Tax Reform has decried the Georgia "green tea" alliance.
-But property rights and self-reliance seem to be issues that Americans of most political persuasions can support, from the primarily blue state of California to the reliably red state of Georgia.
-If solar module prices drop to 50 cents per watt, then solar power becomes as cheap as other forms of electricity in all 50 states, once installation costs are included.
-"How shockingly stupid is it to build a 21st-century electricity system based on a system of 130 million wooden poles?" asked NRG's David Crane at the ARPA–E summit on February 25. "The day is coming, within a generation, where the grid is, at best, an antiquated backup system."
-NRG is investing in natural gas generators to fit in people's basements that could either provide all the electricity a house needs or to be paired with rooftop solar cells to offer electricity after sunset.
But only if the powers that be stop fighting the sunshine.
