Not Spaghetti

The Department of Energy's new "ARPA-E" program has released the list of winners of their first round of funding for advanced energy projects (note: the link goes to the ARPA-E home page and so will surely change, there doesn't seem to be a better one yet though). A version of the following comment was posted at DotEarth along with some others.

The sustainable energy transition blog has a brief summary of prospects for solar photovoltaic prices over the next couple of years - basically that they're headed down. As this graph from SolarBuzz shows, prices have been pretty much stagnant in the $4 to $5/watt range for about the last 6 years, in spite of exponential growth in production.