Solar power will never work on a large scale. CA might as well suck it up and start building nuclear power plants.
"Solar power will never work on a large scale."
Depends what you mean - if you are thinking of covering square miles in the desert, no - but covering hundreds of thousands of square miles on rooftops ... it will work when they are cheap enough.
"Solar power will never work on a large scale. "
It doesn't have to. All it has to do is substitute for the grid when it can, and it will make a difference.
"[W]hen the Paris Exhibition closes electric light will close with it and no more be heard of."
- Erasmus Wilson (1878) Professor at Oxford University
"This `telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a practical form of communication.
The device is inherently of no value to us."
- Western Union internal memo, 1878
"Radio has no future."
- Lord Kelvin (1824-1907), British mathematician and physicist, ca. 1897.
"Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia."
- Dr. Dionysus Lardner (1793-1859), Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at University College, London.
The real problem becomes storage. This sort of capacity will actually cause problems because the Base generating stations need to be able to make a winter heating peak that occurs on super cold mornings. Otherwise, Solar power is the best because it generates power along the path of the day time load curve.
This is possibly something very very important for the US.
Its probable that these cells will only in real life generate a fraction of their capacity except on clear summer days but with the right price, every roof across the world is a potential solar collector.
The real impact on US and world fuel prices from this development may be kind of indirect. Solar power would nicely offset the need for peak power generation via oil and gas turbine sources. But this Generation may be put to creating Hydrogen and Hydrogen products as a means of storage and also for distribution to hydrogen powered motor vehicles.
Now on the issue of real impact the first year... 485MW is about equal to 0.2% of US generation capacity.. so it would take 5 years just to make a 1% difference assuming this is the only plant making solar cells by this process.