Most people consider shifting their energy consumption to clean solar power, but are relunctant due to the consideration for high costs.

In the website “solar power – green power” some tips are given to lower down the costs:

“Deals on solar panels can be found on many Internet sites, including ecobusinesslinks.com, wholesalesolar.com, and Solartron Technologies.  If you are wary of the cost of a full solar panel set, you may want to consider a mini solar panel set that you can purchase for a DIY home improvement project.  Instead of spending thousands of dollars, you can install mini sets for a few hundred dollars. ”

Moreover, the real cost of solar panels is showing a tendency towards decline. Raymond Kurzweil at the Fortune Brainstorm: TECH conference in Pasadena, California, said that the investments and technological advances decrease and will go on decreasing that cost of solar power systems. As a side effect he adds, “ it’s environmentally much friendlier.”

Elsewhere he gives more detail on this trend:

We are awash in energy (10,000 times more than required to meet all our needs falls on Earth) but we are not very good at capturing it. That will change with the full nanotechnology-based assembly of macro objects at the nano scale, controlled by massively parallel information processes, which will be feasible within twenty years. Even though our energy needs are projected to triple within that time, we’ll capture that .0003 of the sunlight needed to meet our energy needs with no use of fossil fuels, using extremely inexpensive, highly efficient, lightweight, nano-engineered solar panels, and we’ll store the energy in highly distributed (and therefore safe) nanotechnology-based fuel cells. Solar power is now providing 1 part in 1,000 of our needs, but that percentage is doubling every two years, which means multiplying by 1,000 in twenty years.

Raymond Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) is an inventor and futurist, author of several books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism.