This one goes out to my brothers, Cliff and Ron, and to everyone else doing what they can to protect this beautiful blue planet. As the boy says, Dig on it!

And to Jeff McMahon, former colleague at True/Slant, current and future friend wherever, who turned me on to this wonderful video.

The Holy Grail of the solar industry — reaching grid parity — may no longer be a distant dream. Solar may have already reached that point, at least when compared to nuclear power, according to a new study by two researchers at Duke University.

It’s no secret that the cost of producing photovoltaic cells (PV) has been dropping for years. A PV system today costs just 50 percent of what it did in 1998. Breakthroughs in technology and manufacturing combined with an increase in demand and production have caused the price of solar power to decline steadily. At the same time, estimated costs for building new nuclear power plants have ballooned.

The result of these trends: “In the past year, the lines have crossed in North Carolina,” say study authors John Blackburn and Sam Cunningham. “Electricity from new solar installations is now cheaper than electricity from proposed new nuclear plants.”

If the data analysis is correct, the pricing would represent the “Historic Crossover” claimed in the study’s title.

Two factors not stressed in the study bolster the case for solar even more:

1) North Carolina is not a “sun-rich” state. The savings found in North Carolina are likely to be even greater for states with more sunshine –Arizona, southern California, Colorado, New Mexico, west Texas, Nevada and Utah.

2) The data include only PV-generated electricity, without factoring in what is likely the most encouraging development in solar technology: concentrating solar power (CSP). CSP promises utility scale production and solar thermal storage, making electrical generation practical for at least six hours after sunset.

Power costs are generally measured in cents per kilowatt hour – the cost of the electricity needed to illuminate a 1,000 watt light bulb (for example) for one hour. When the cost of a kilowatt hour (kWh) of solar power fell to 16 cents earlier this year, it “crossed over” the trend-line associated with nuclear power. (see chart below)

Solar-Nuclear cost comparison (from Blackburn and Cunningham)

The authors point out that some commercial scale solar developers are now offering electricity at 14 cents a kWh in North Carolina, a price which is expected to continue to drop.

While the study includes subsidies for both solar and nuclear power, it estimates that if subsidies were removed from solar power, the crossover point would be delayed by a maximum of nine years.

The report is significant not only because it shows solar to be a cheaper source of energy than nuclear. The results are also important because, despite the Senate’s failure to pass a climate and energy bill this year, taxpayers now bear the burden of putting carbon into the atmosphere through a variety of hidden charges – or externalities, as economists call them. Fossil fuels currently account for 70 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. annually. (Nuclear generates 20 percent.)

Having dropped below nuclear power, solar power is now one of the least expensive energy sources in America.

SOHO image of the Sun

Raise your hand if you don’t believe in nuclear fusion. If your hand is in the air, just take a look at the photo to the left.

That’s the largest nuclear reactor within 24,690,226,567,371 miles — and it works by fusion. Nuclear power plants on Earth depend on fission — a process in which energy is released when the nucleus of an atom is split. The sun releases energy when atoms of hydrogen gas are fused by the enormous gravitational pressure at the solar core.

Since The Phoenix Sun is devoted primarily to developments in solar power, it seemed appropriate to have a picture of the sun on the front page (appropriate and, not incidentally, so very geeky-cool). Thanks to the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory satellite feed, we’ve been able to maintain an image of the sun that self-updates daily since 2009.

The SOHO satellite had been beaming back solar image of the sun for fifteen years. As anyone with a HD TV knows, imaging technology has changed a lot over those years. So, on February 12, NASA launched a new and improved solar observatory: the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which, in April, started beaming back sharper images with far higher resolution and sent more frequently.

As much as we liked the SOHO images, we’ve made the switch. Earlier this week, our highly adept technical team (cough, cough) switched the widget feed over to the SDO channel. That’s it, now playing in the Current Image of the Sun theatre.

The thing is, at this size and resolution, it’s really hard to see any difference between the SDO and the SOHO images. Thankfully, with SDO, we have options that allow some pretty awesome close-ups. To put things in perspective, below is yesterday’s SDO image. That small green box is the area we’re going to zoom in on.

The Sun, SDO image w/green zoom box

The Sun, Closer-Up

The Sun, SDO #2

The Sun, Full Close-Up

SDO, Full Close-Up

What looked like simple bright spots in the original view, now show themselves as immense solar flares. The Earth could just squeeze through the loop of hot plasma near the bottom.

Pretty cool, eh?

To get the highest resolution possible, go to the Current Image widget in the top, right-hand corner of this page. Click on the words LARGE IMAGE. Place the magnifying glass/cursor on the spot you’d like to see better and double-click. Whoa, that fills the screen! You can zoom in further by pressing the Ctrl button and the + key (Windows) at the same time, repeatedly. The picture above, bounded completely by the green box, is as far as my monitor allows. As they say on the commercials: Individual results may vary.

The image is updated daily. You can read far more about the amazing SDO on their website and watch HD videos of the Sun.