EEX here.

(can't copy the graphs.)

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

Of course, it is worrying that a magazine which is widely read amongst the political elite is really just a neoliberal propaganda unit but, ultimately, this says more about the general cluelessness of the people who read it than it does about the industry it describes.

keep to the Fen Causeway

From 2004 to Q3 2008, the price of PV modules remained approximately flat at $3.50-$4.00/W,
despite manufacturers making continuous improvements in technology and scale to reduce their
costs. Much of this can be attributed to the fact that the German, and then Spanish, tariff
incentives allowed project developers to buy the technology at this price, coupled with a shortage
of polysilicon that constrained production and prevented effective pricing competition. The 18
largest quoted solar companies followed by Bloomberg made average operating margins of
14.6%-16.3% from 2005 to 20083.

Consequently, both polysilicon companies and downstream manufacturers expanded rapidly.
When the Spanish incentive regime ended abruptly at the end of September 2008, global demand
stayed roughly flat at 7.7 GW in 2009, from 6.7 GW in 2008, while polysilicon availability
increased at least 32%; enough to make 8.5 GW of modules, with an additional 1.6GW of thin
film production. As a consequence of this sudden need to compete on price, wafer and module
makers gave up some of their margins, and the price fell rapidly from $4.00/W in 2008 to
$2.00/W in 2009. The ability of manufacturers to drop their prices by 50%, and still make a
positive operating margin, was due to the reductions in costs achieved over the previous four
years, driven by scale and advances in wafer, cell and module manufacturing processes, as well as
to improved performance resulting from better cell efficiencies and lower electrical conversion
losses (Wesoff, 2012).

(bold mine)

This can either be seen as an argument for a "free-market" approach, or alternatively the state gives the initial boost to help establish industrial critical mass and then market forces can operate. A bit like the "Internet" model where the (US) state reasearched and built the infrastructure and then, with critical mass, the market could then enter.

If it is technologically underdeveloped and capital intensive, the initial boost might be critical.

The price should be held globally at a level necessary to destroy demand, and as much of the resulting surplus as possible should be invested in renewable energy, and in the cheapest energy of all - energy saved.

In order to do this you need to literally monetise energy. Deficit financing and funding simply will not cut it.

IMHO one of the Big Trades of the 21st century will be the value of IP and Knowhow exchanged for the value of carbon fuel saved.

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson

Vattenfall also announced today that it has submitted an application to Sweden's radiation authority for permission to develop plans for new nuclear power stations. Chief executive Løseth emphasised that the company has not made any binding decisions to pursue new nuclear. "We are just investigating building new nuclear in the Nordic market," he said, adding that there are other options for replacing lost capacity when Sweden's existing nuclear power stations are decommissioned. These options include additional renewables capacity.

The root of this claim is a couple of much-reported occurrences during the last winter, when wind and solar power were low and an oil-fired power plant in Austria was asked for help. As IWR reports, the actual power loss event during this day that called for the extra peak power was not a fluctuation of wind or solar power, but the unplanned shutdown of a nuclear reactor in southwest Germany (due to the discovery of leaking fuel rods). And the fun fact: the three gas-fired power plants which E.on wants to close, all of which are much closer to the closed nuclear plant than the Austrian peaker plant, stayed on cold reserve during the period!

IWR speculates that this may indicate the unfitness of (older) gas-fired power plants to be on reserve. But there seems to be a much better explanation, something IWR reported in the past, too (a news I linked in a Salon): the federal grid agency found that during one of these electricity shortage periods, speculative traders hoping for higher prices were holding back capacity en masse (reminding of the Enron blackouts).

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

"We should not be in the business of steering investment toward particular politically favored approaches,"

like we republicans have been doing for fossil fuels and nuclear for decades, absolutely. that's not political favourisation, it's business.

The power of knowledge is in mortal combat with the knowledge of power. It really is that simple... That's the Edenic apple we are all munching on.