Rising Sun at Honda

Honda to Produce Solar Panels
$86 million investment to provide power for 8,000 homes/yr
What Could $200 Billion Accomplish?

Honda has announced that it is investing $86 million in a new factory to produce thin-film photovoltaic solar panels. The factory will produce enough panels each year to outfit 8,000 homes.

Honda recognizes that it's important to get in on the ground floor of emerging technologies. If you don't, you lose the efficiencies of the learning curve. The learning curve is an economic construct that describes the observed phenomenon of reduced unit costs as a function of cumulative units produced. In other words, the more that you've produced, the less each costs. Why does it work that way? You get better at things the more you do them. You learn to do things better.

The US automakers don't have the money to invest in photovoltaics. GM has invested heavily in fuel cells, but it doesn't appear ready to bring the fuel cells to market.

If the United States Government was serious about alternative technologies, it could contract with the automakers to used idled auto plants to produce solar panels, first for use on federal buildings then expanding out from there. If the money would scale up from the Honda investment, an $8.6 billion investment would produce enough power for 800,000 homes and would advance US producers on the critical learning curve.

How many homes could we outfit with solar cells for the $200 billion that we've spent (so far) on the Iraq war? By my calculations: 18.6 million. By the same token, the $100 billion lifetime cost of the International Space station, could fund enough photovoltaic panels to power 9.3 million homes. How much have we spent subsidizing nuclear power? by one estimate, $150 billion, there's another 14 million homes. You can go on and on. We have always subsidized certain technologies, it's a matter of political choice which technologies that we've subsidized. It's just as legitimate to subsidize fuel cells and solar power as it is to subsidize oil, nuclear and defense/space.

Rising Sun at Honda