Why would anyone want to continue lying about the effectiveness of solar photovoltaics? Or perpetuating the myth that its production needs to be centralized?

Although billions of dollars are pouring into this industry, representing less than 1% of the world's energy mix, there remains a serious lack of accountability regarding the proper redress of the solar PV industry's "dirty little secret" about CO2 emissions during silicon production, and those ultra-high electricity bills for solar-grade silicon production generated in those very expensive plants.

How silicon is made today

Today, we have less than a dozen companies that control this solar-grade silicon production, if not just the Big Six producers. There are maybe a dozen quartzite mines, besides the world’s best source of quartzite pegmatite in Norway.

The supply chain for the PV industry starts with the crushing and pulverizing of quartz silica sands. Then carbon black sand or wood chips are added in a big electric furnace. 

At extremely high temperature, silicon metal oozes out the bottom, is cooled, crushed, and pulverized, and added into a tri-chloro-silane process. Chemicals are added, and voila, the mix vaporizes and condenses pure silicon onto rods. The solar-grade silicon chips off, is crushed, put into a quartz crucible and melted, pulled into ingot, wasting the crucible in the process.

All that converting! And CO2! It just doesn’t seem to be an efficient or clean method to make the heart of a new technology billed as clean and more efficient.

And what about the trillions poured into central generation and distributed transmission? Some statistics suggest 52% of the energy we produce is lost to the grid, lost to entropy. That doesn't seem efficient, but it sure leads to lots of big egos and big profits.

Native North Americans & distributed energy

Native Americans impressed me in my Oklahoma childhood; you learn a lot about the Indians growing up in Oklahoma grade schools - it’s state history. They were so efficient. They had the Economy of Life thing down pat. You know - use everything and don’t waste nuthin’. Live efficiently.

What about the version of the BAPP concept this-land-is-your-land’s ancestors employed? BAPP - or Building As Power Plant - was originally articulated as such by Prof. Volker Hartkopf of Carnegie Mellon University. Driving around Palm Springs, he thought it was criminal that he saw zero solar installations, considering the amount of sunshine. Professor Hartkopf claims that carefully designed buildings can be net energy exporters, even where the sun is infrequent. This is more than just Distributed Generation - it’s actually a New Manifest Destiny... securing one’s own homeland!

So what about Distributed Production? Isn’t silica the most abundant mineral on the planet? Well, yes, it’s dirt, essentially. You have to achieve the right purity levels - but that's not rocket science. Can’t the solar industry figure out a way to spring up anywhere?

We have the technology and the raw materials. We live in abundance of both actually.

Solar, solar, everywhere - and anywhere

Proven technologies exist utilizing uniquely pure silica powder as raw materials that not only reduces CO2 emissions to zero, but presents a USD/kg cost ratio that would reduces the cost of the end product - the 92 to 96% of solar photovoltaic modules out there full of mono or polysilicon cells - to approx. 4 to 6 cents per kwh. This could be done in small 10 to 100 kilo per day solar module warehouses factories anywhere. These factories could happen to be constructed right where electricity is needed most.

We can always just draw and pull wafer, horizontally or vertically, instead of pulling an ingot, which must be diamond-sawed into thin layers of wafers, without cracking, and then made into cells, without breaking. We could all this in a small warehouse too.

Now also existing processing technology, instead of an ingot, which is sawn, you can also just vaporize high purity silicon and condense micron thick layers of it on some special substrate and call that a cell and do it in one or two plants and distribute your product.

Wow, a whole new industry with a carbon footprint that really could be zero! Talk about greening a "green" industry.

It wouldn't be long until people started buying and selling local solar PV roofing materials like they used to do with those old petro-chemical “comp-shingles.” Then they'd get to all those cement slab tile and Spanish/California/Mexican S- and barrel tiles that we break trying to put up today's solar PV modules. And business will be good.

Why should we, as a hopeful and growing solar electric industry, not want to speed up the adoption of solar and become competitive with other sources of energy? Isn’t “Silicon Valley” - which is starting to mean something altogether different - interested in this?

Sure, Silicon Valley loves renewables/sustainables, including solar PV, but does it really embrace the native Economy of Life concepts involved? Can it really translate those concepts to commercial realities, replacing aging infrastructure and ultimately becoming worth the same trillions the hydrocarbon-petrochemical industries are now?

We just need to marry the resources to pull it off.