Sure, you could sit around and shake your head about Georgia’s 1973 “Territorial Electric Service Act“, and then spit out your morning cuppa when you hear Georgia Power’s defense of the law that prohibits selling power to anyone but a utility.  In the words of GPB “…the current law protects consumers and costs they pay. If some customers leave for third party suppliers, those remaining with a utility have to shoulder more of infrastructure maintenance costs.”

Umm…OK.

But really, it’s just a waste of perfectly good fair-trade coffee to expectorate your surprise, because guess what?  Solar power is getting cheaper by the day and silly arguments like the one above will be swept into the gutter as eco-freaks and neo-nomics alike will demand more solar options.

Why the cocky confidence?

Because price is the only real remaining hurdle for solar power to overcome and become the energy of choice for any reason.  Sure, if solar got a bit cheaper than its current price, more environmentally conscious folks would be up on their roofs installing panels.  But we’re not talking about a small price decline. We’re talking about the potential of costs so low that fossil fuels aren’t even a consideration anymore.  According to a recent article on Grist by solar expert Kees Van Der Leen, if solar PV capacity continues to grow at just half the rate it grew from 2005 to 2010 (49%), solar will become the cheapest energy option in the sunniest areas of the world by 2018.  6 years from now.  As capacity grows in the years following, the obvious result is solar eventually can become the cheapest option most anywhere in the world.

If it plays out the way it looks like it will, it’s a mind-blowing proposition.  One that will change the way the world thinks about and uses energy forever.  But few are talking about it yet.

They should be.  Because “the amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet is so vast that in one year it is about twice as much as will ever be obtained from all of the Earth’s non-renewable resources of coal, oil, natural gas, and mined uranium combined.”, according to one Stanford study.

Hot damn.