Power Point

Something came up at the last minute, so Eric Schiff didn’t make it to the Landmark Theatre on June 2 to see Alec Baldwin and comrades on stage to present their views on hydrofracking in conjunction with the screening of the Josh Fox film, Gasland.

Had he gone, the physicist and Syracuse University professor, who sounds pretty well informed even as he insists that fracked gas is not his area of expertise, would probably not have learned much that was new to him. He counts himself in the “go slow” group wary of the promise of cheap energy to be obtained from hydraulic-fracturing shale gas. But his real passion is the sun.

Schiff has labored in the vineyard of solar energy production since the late 1970s when he finished his graduate work at Cornell and made his way to the SU campus. At age 61, the DeWitt resident teaches a course on solar energy to undergraduates and conducts research both for the government and private companies.

“I work on the engineering of the solar cell,” says Schiff, “trying to make them more efficient.” Among his current projects is a study of the properties of cadmium telluride, a promising compound with poorly understood properties being used successfully of late in solar cells.

Schiff belongs to a merry band of hundreds of scientists around the world who have been on a multi-decade crusade to make standard silicon solar cells thinner, cheaper and more efficient at doing what they do: capturing light to make electricity.

While power generated from sunlight still represents a small percentage of the electrical power used in the United States, Schiff points to a trend that no other energy source can match: constantly declining costs. The professor notes that since 1980, when he was just getting started in the solar panel business, the cost of generating a kilowatt hour using solar technology has gone down 100 times. “Back then it was unimaginable that it would have gone down that much.” Moreover, the price of solar has dropped in half in just the past three years.

For Schiff, the key thing to look for is what he calls “the crossover point,” the moment when you can get energy from the sun as cheaply as it is generated from burning fossil fuels. Cautious and given to caveats, Schiff’s not ready to make a precise prediction, but he thinks it could easily take place within a decade.

“No one has ever generated a kilowatt hour of electricity from solar as cheaply as you can from coal,” he says. There are many factors to consider, but coal still beats almost all other sources of electricity—coming in at about three cents per kilowatt hour, while solar, at best, still costs you a dime. All that will be changing, predicts Schiff, as the cost of solar technology continues to decline, which he sees as a certainty. Currently solar and wind power cost about the same, but the cost of wind technology has remained constant in recent years as solar costs have declined.

The simple cost analysis doesn’t take into account any of the environmental impacts of burning coal or, for that matter, gas. Gas costs so little right now that it seems attractive as an energy source, but this isn’t likely to be the case for long. As a number of participants at the Gasland event pointed out, the natural gas industry appears to be planning to export the commodity, which sells for triple the price overseas, a development that will almost certainly raise the costs of gas-generated power at home.

When climbing coal and gas costs meet solar prices coming down, that’s the crossover point. Will we be ready for it? “Every time we install solar is a step toward the future,” says Schiff.

Does this mean you should be looking at putting solar panels on the roof? Not really, he says. Industrial scale solar generation will be cost effective, but “homeowners get killed on costs of installation. Most people who do that are making a statement. It’s a good thing to do, but you have a hard time justifying the cost.”

Schiff, not surprisingly, argues for continued government support of solar development, which like all new industries, he says, needs subsidies in its early stages. “The market alone would never have done what we’ve been able to do {lower the cost}.” He says it makes all the sense in the world to plan for a solar future, but at the same time he wonders if we are capable of such long-term thinking.

In this sense, he sees cheap fracked gas not as a benefit, but as a threat. “It makes you feel like you’re doing something—moving away from coal. You have to make long-term decisions, and the big uncertainty is fracked gas.” Planners dreaming of cheap gas coming from the Marcellus shale combined with gas companies looking at this year’s balance sheet might be blinded and afraid to look at the sun.    

Read Ed Griffin-Nolan’s award-winning commentary every week in the Syracuse New Times.