[Bryan24]

There have been ENORMOUS sums of money poured into solar cell material research by private companies and by NASA (who I contract to work for).

Any big advances now will be more by happenstance.

[rdcbn]

You are incorrect on this .

Solar has a very bright future for low cost distributed power but it is totally worthless for industrial grade commercial power generation - ie power plants.

Obama’s solar stimulus killed the solar industry because it forced a lot of emerging tech into the market while still half baked and before it was ready and the crash of the Obama stimulus gold rush mentality destroyed a lot of promising companies that would have solid around the 2020 time frame

Obama’s green initiative was the analog to government stimulating the personal computer industry in 1978 by buying a radio shack TRS-80 for every American family and killing off demand for the IBM PC and putting Apple Computer into bankruptcy

[cymbeline]

“There have been ENORMOUS sums of money poured into solar cell material research”

You say big advances will be more by happenstance. Does that mean the enormous sums are being divided up among numerous independent efforts?

Is the money directed mostly toward reducing the manufacturing cost of existing cell designs, or in developing new cell designs?

How long does the typical cell last as it sits out there with the sun hitting it and ambient temperatures varying from cold to hot.