May 14--The future of solar power in the United States was charted on an industrial, a technological and a political map Wednesday as Buffalo hosted the opening session of the American Solar Energy Society's annual conference.

According to Danielle Merfeld, who is in charge of solar energy work at General Electric's Global Research Center in New York's Mohawk River Valley, GE's 100 years of experience in industrial-scale power generation will help merge new solar generating systems with existing electric utilities over a new smart grid system.

According to Jonathan Pickering, vice president of marketing for the Silicon Valley firm Applied Materials, the computer industry's experience in rapidly cutting the cost of once-unaffordable devices will apply to his firm's ventures in making the machines that make solar power generating stations.

And according to Jigar Shah, a Washington-area consultant who founded solar power broker SunEdison, advocates and marketers of solar power have already solved the major technical issues and now must join the political battle of winning the technology its proper share of the market.

'It has nothing to do with our costs coming down,' Shah told the filled ballroom of the Buffalo Niagara Convention Center. 'It has to do with respect.'

And it is respect that solar power may be in a position to win, he said, now that people are widely upset with their electric bills, concerned about global climate issues and pressuring their political leaders to do something about it.

Shah said that academic research, led by the University of Albany's Richard Perez, and some of his own work in the marketplace have demonstrated that solar energy is already more than cost-competitive with coal, nuclear and other sources of energy. It is just that the 20th century industrial ways of measuring efficiency used by both industry and government regulators hasn't caught up to that reality.

While both GE's Merfeld and Applied Materials' Pickering pointed out that government subsidies are crucial in getting solar power more widely integrated into the nation's power grid, Shah stressed that other energy sources have long relied on government-imposed subsidies--in the form of guaranteed rates imposed by state public service commissions and authorities.

'The utility commissioners are not in the pockets of the utilities any more,' Shah said. 'They and their technical staff are actually interested in what we have to say.'

Solar power, Shah said, has long been treated as a toy by both the big utilities and their regulators. But, he said, technology is overcoming, or has overcome, concerns about cost and reliability. Meanwhile, he said, people are starting to understand that the claim by coal-fired electric generators that their method is cheaper is flawed, based as it is on the false premise that their plants run full-tilt, around the clock. That, Shah said, is a calculation that unfairly flattens out the per-kilowatt- hour cost of operation.

Getting the cost of solar installations down is still an issue for Pickering, who explained how California's high-tech industries first slashed the per-unit cost of semiconductors, and then of flat panel TVs and computer monitors.

An iPod built out of 1970s technology, Pickering said, would cost $20 million.

GE's Merfeld said her company's futurists see two possibilities for energy technology as the world emerges from its current economic woes. They call them 'Fast Green' and 'Slow Brown.' The former is more desireable, though only possible if both governments and markets take aggressive actions. But either, she said, has a large role for sustainable power sources such as solar and wind.

The conference and trade show continues through Saturday at the convention center.

gpyle@buffnews.com

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