@jesse_conover

I was unclear when talking about efficiency. What I should have said was overall efficiency. The reason it is so expensive is because it requires so much electricity to manufacture. The cost of electricity in the material costs far outweighs labor and capital equipment costs (for PVs, which have lower requirement than IC...ICs have much greater capital equipment costs). So...I guess I communicated poorly. But when talking about efficiency, ultimately, like you said, we are looking at the cost per watt, over a set time period (I think that is usually 10 years), and including support infrastructure.

About the companies making raw silicon, all I know is that there are a bunch of "Mom & Pop" ingot producers in China that make the ingot from IC industry scrap...and they are making a fortune. And they can make a fortune because the Chinese PV manufacturers who want to buy raw materials are put on a 2 year waiting list. They have difficulty getting the raw material, even in a market down-turn. There is a possibility this has more to do with the material suppliers desire to make more money for their product selling to IC manufacturers than to PV companies. This is what I was told when I toured these Mom&Pops.

"Anything that can be said about PV manufacturing should go double for semiconductors. "

Big difference is the level of quality needed. For IC chips, you need clean-rooms and very special high-grade ingots. You need extremely high levels of purity in the raw materials, wafers, photo-resist chemicals, etc. Achieving this quality level is not impossible, but difficult in China.

"Once PVs can be manufactured at the proper price point, there's no reason not to put them on existing homes and commercial buildings. Doing so would eliminate the need for most of these new power lines."

Agree. But, according to what I have seen, with existing technologies - and using silicon-based PV - we are far from being there. It is not simply a matter of economies of scale. Energy costs do not go down with more scale.

Note that I'm not saying lets delay using green energy. I think you would agree that when total efficiency is low, the end result actually is that manufacturing the PV uses a considerable amount of fossil fuels (to say nothing about manufacturing and shipping all the accessory devices needed to wire up every roof-top of a city) that it may just be that this does not help us.

And my original point is this: if you / someone believes that, today, an "every roof-top" approach is feasible and will result in actual emission decreases when including the manufacturing energy - then show data based on empirical evidence to support the claim.

This is a stupid article. It uses biased language and definitions. And many of the letter responders (especially those who are attacking Jim) have not thought this through.

Lets start this off about my background. I’m a management and HR practices consultant in China. In China, the laws are very strict about protecting workers from dismissal. To fire a worker, you need to have evidence that a worker had poor performance. You need to have evidence that management took steps (training, coaching, etc) to review and correct the performance. Or the company needs to have rock-solid evidence the employee was corrupt. If a company does not follow these steps, the company very likely will be sued. So fireings, (for better or worse) are difficult and rare. The problem for most companies in China is that most of them don’t have performance management systems or cultures that emphasize performance. Hence, there is usually no record of poor performance.

I’m wondering if the problem with the American companies is similar. I do know that American companies often lay-off workers for financial reasons without consideration on operational impact. On the other hand, this article suggests to me that there are legal and compliance issues which are not being looked at.

Now back to this article.

“Companies stand to gain a lot these days from such small-scale but decisive actions. After all, they reap a double benefit. Not only do they pare down the size of their payroll, often without needing -- as in Juanita's case -- to consent to unemployment compensation, but they also contribute to a climate of intensifying fear.”

Companies stand to gain when they get rid of in-efficient workers and redundant workers. They do not gain from simply laying off people. This article makes it seem that management likes to fire workers for the hell of it. I posit that if you believe that, you have never been a manager. The above quote (and the article) also connotes that workers should not have to fear for their jobs. Hello? I have always feared for my job. And I have always seen that those who perform worst are those that do not fear for their jobs. If you want to work somewhere where you do not fear for your job, then I suggest you join a State-Owned Enterprise in China or France.

In this article, the author did not research the basic question: for those people interviewed, what was the real reason why they were fired? Sure, using an expired license is a sucky way to fire some one. But the article does not look into the “root cause”; it uses conjecture to assume that the workers were cheated and “attacked” in a “war”. Question: were the interviewed employees actually productive? Did the companies have performance management systems to measure employee productivity?

This article makes it seem that these employees were merely scapegoats. That might be true. On the other hand, the real cause may be much more complex.