Believe it or not, solar energy is not a brand new idea. The sun has always been used to warm the earth and energize our bodies. During the Industrial Revolution, there were a number of engineers that seriously questioned the notion that fossil fuels would always be abundant and wanted to look into using solar power instead. How silly this sounded to everyone. If we had started utilizing solar energy one hundred years ago, we might not be scrambling to design and use solar heating panels as a cost effective alternative.

Grid power continues to be cheaper than grid parity, the point where photovoltaic electricity is equal to or less than grid power. Engineers expect grid parity to be equal to grid power by 2015 but only in sunny parts of the United States. At this pace, only wholesale solar electric panels will be worth the trouble installing.

The cost of solar heating panels and solar power lights will only become economically feasible when our federal and state governments create financial incentives to further the development. On a small scale, this type of incentive was tried in 2006 by a group of investors that offered free solar panel installation in return for a twenty-five year contract or Power Purchase Agreement, to purchase electricity at a fixed price, set below current electric rates. This is a program for solar heating panels that seems to be working well.

Recently, Berkeley, California, came up with an innovative financing arrangement, adding property assessment, allowing the city to pay for the installed solar electric panels up front. The homeowner then pays a rate equal to the annual electric bill savings, spread over 20 years, allowing free installation. There are numerous programs such as this taking shape in an effort to play catch up for what we failed to see years ago.

Price setting by supply and demand is by far the most popular type of system because of competition. However, because of the volatility of the market and the future value of energy produced, an increased risk of the cost of capital borrowed is seen. Subsidies and feed-in tariffs both point to a financial burden on the consumer that we just cannot carry with the current economical situation.

Producing wholesale solar electric panels may be an option as created by our neighbors in Germany as they have been way ahead of the United States in their manufacturing of solar heating panels. With all of the options that seem to be floating around, solar and economical marketing is an excellent career to look into for the future evolution of solar energy. As fossil fuels continue to dissipate, actually any type of education in the solar energy sector will turn into a winner.