Will solar power ever be as cheap as coal?

Various : The high price of fossil fuel energy earlier this year helped push renewable energy, and solar power in particular, into the public consciousness. The sudden drop in the price of oil however is an incentive to ‘green’ energy companies to make their products cheaper and more efficient to be price competitive. A 3% increase in the efficiency of a solar cell for example, can result in dropping the cost of solar energy production from $2.20 cents per watt today to $1 a watt--almost equal to the cost of coal writes Mark Clayton of the Christian Science Monitor . To do so requires manufacturing thousands of test samples to find out which combination of elements will create the best solar cells, and thousands of hours of production tests. One short cut to narrow down the testing time is to run million of computer simulations of how the different types of silicon behave. Scientists at Harvard University and IBM have created a giant virtual supercomputer by harnessing the idle computer cycles of home desktop computers to run these calculations, potentially shortening a solar cell project that could take 22 years to just two years writes Reuters reporter Matt Daily .