>I definately agree with you when you say to throw more money at R&D is an easy >way to stifle any growth as people will take the wait and see approach to >solar of any kind.
Another effect of Government Funding of R+D is the removal of the profit-incentive from individual inventors. How the hell is a Thomas Edison type of person to experiment and discover an improvement in PV-or-related if there's no point, and no real prospect of profiting from one's invention? How is he or she to compete with a Federal Government and massive University and corporate system which doesn't respect the patent rights of individual inventors? Heck, the Federal Government receives tax monies and is supposed to spend some of them on *protecting* those patent rights, and this includes those of individual human beings, and yet how often do we hear of such an effort? We have heard talk of protecting Hollywood copyrights for music and film.... after massive lobbying efforts by the music and film industries. But we never hear a shred of concern for the patent rights of individual inventors. So, I"m voicing it. It's bad enough that there is no protection for their rights, but if the government is to then be the one to invent and own patents, why not just throw the towel in? There was an article this month in the NYT about a California company's efforts to develop some plastic (organic) PV which overcomes the drawbacks of previous such efforts, and shows promise for dramatic price reduction. Here is the PR, but not the NYT article (which costs money): http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=SVBIZINK3.story&STORY=/www/story/06-19-2003/0001968208&EDATE=THU+Jun+19+2003,+08:03+AM I"m hoping that, on the overall topic of price reduction of PV, that to some extent it can perhaps follow one of the models provided by previous efforts to bring down prices for this or that chip. In computer chips, we saw this tremendous fervent development for the last forty years, with unbelieveable progress in power and price. With light-sensitive chips for digital cameras, my understanding is that for a few years there was sort of a holdup in that there were some difficult-to-solve manufacturing issues, but then eventually the dam really did burst, and now affordable-much-more-powerful consumer digital cameras are a wonderful reality. With PV, while the oil industry certainly doesn't control everything, they have succeeded in establishing their claims of reduced demand not as a clue to go into the PV powerplant business, but as a way to reduce their production. Hopefully the non-oil-industry PV production owners will, over the next few years, take some market share from the oil-industry participants, and continue their production and perhaps plans for increased production. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Get A Free Psychic Reading! Your Online Answer To Life's Important Questions. http://us.click.yahoo.com/Lj3uPC/Me7FAA/ySSFAA/FGYolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
