Seems like Jerome's chart should have shown solar. Nanosolar talks about film getting that cheap but doesn't come out with real numbers to my knowledge.

Lot of deserts in this day and age...

Every time I hear someone say something like this I'm reminded of the fact that the Everglades in my back yard (what remains of it anyways) was at one time considered a swamp that just needed to be filled in and developed.Now we know better.

Don't get me wrong I certainly believe that sunlight falling on deserts can and should be harvested to provide people with energy. It's just that simplistic statements such as this just don't cut it anymore. There are deserts and then there are deserts, some of which are very complex and productive ecosystems. Just for the record I consider blacktop parking lots and shopping mall roofs to be more deserving of the desert moniker by the mere fact that they are rather lifeless unproductive barren devastated areas already...

You see Ive been through the desert on a horse with no name
It felt good to be out of the rain
In the desert you can remember your name
cause there aint no one for to give you no pain
La, la ...

After nine days I let the horse run free
cause the desert had turned to sea
There were plants and birds and rocks and things
There was sand and hills and rings
The ocean is a desert with its life underground
And a perfect disguise above
Under the cities lies a heart made of ground
But the humans will give no love

You see Ive been through the desert on a horse with no name
It felt good to be out of the rain
In the desert you can remember your name
cause there aint no one for to give you no pain

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/story?id=54313

Most thin film solar companies fail.

The reality, according to Neal Dikeman, partner with VC firm Jane Capital Partners, is that only one or two thin-film projects have brought product to market in 30 years, and it's a US $100M-$200M dollar up-front investment "just to play the game and see if your product really works."

Silicon Valley investors have mistakenly bet on "really great teams" while the technology is still at a science experiment stage, he argues — investors are beginning to realize this, he thinks, and that the industry is sitting on the back end of about 5-10 years of US $100M bets. "We're going to see a bunch of write-offs coming up," he warns.

The challenge that has caught startups in this sector time and time again, Dikeman explained, is underestimating the engineering scale-up and production on a tens-of-megawatts (MW) scale.

"People always assumed that if the technology worked and the team was good, that the rest was just engineering...and so far, that has never proven to be the case," he observed, noting that there have been several hundred (thin film) companies that have tried and only two succeeded.

"The challenge has been that the engineering scale-up has been much harder than the science experiment." Citing the "black art" aspect to thin-film projects, he observed that for factories in the 30-40 MW range, what matters is getting the same yields, distributions and performance out of the second plant as was achieved in the first.