Thanks,

Hal

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

However, it is *definitely* true that some people here think they can put solar on “a faster track” by reducing costs and making manufacturing easier, and it’s not a comparison with growth rates of other technologies, it’s because the same people also talk about climate change, peak oil, and efficiency issues and they think we need to do everything we can to accelerate solar power [and also, in parallel, energy storage].

Low-hanging-fruit efficiency measures tend mostly to be outside VC investment boundaries, but VCs are always looking for fundable efficiency-oriented startups [I’ve helped several companies get funded whose products are used this way]. It is also the case that the computing community here is working very hard on energy-savings, not just in low-power computers, but for data center design and operational improvements. We devoted a half a day to that at the 2008 Hot Chips conference at Stanford.

The most irksome thing to me was the confusion over Moore’s Law, which has almost nothing to do with solar cell efficiency improvements.

For something more useful, see Applied Materials’ page:

http://www.appliedmaterials.com/news/solar_strategy.html

and look at the Webcast / presentations, which might address some of Hal’s Q’s.

Improvements come, not from finer lithography [i.e., Moore’s Law], but from improved materials and manufacturing processes, and what AMAT is doing is more related to flat-panel display manufacturing than to microprocessor or DRAM manufacturing.

Starting from Bell Labs’s 1954 solar cells, if people *could* have done Moore’s Law improvements in energy efficiency, we’d have few energy worries. [Of course, we’d have had to break laws of physics. :-)]