«But what about the economic burden for the citizens? Will people ever want or could simply afford to buy PV devices and become energy entrepreneurs selling electricity to local utilities? To give an answer, we can make some simple calculations analyzing the case of Italy. Current peak demand in Italy is 55 GW. Installing 100 GWp of c-Si silicon panels all over the country, at the average current turnkey price of about 3000 €/kWp, would result in a huge distributed bill of 300 billion €, apparently unaffordable. But let us turn our attention to cars. Every year Italians buy an average of 1000000 new cars at a (conservative) price of 15000 €, thus spending 15 billion euro. There are 35 million cars circulating in Italy, each of which costs on average of 3000 €per year for maintenance (fuel, insurance, taxes, tires, etc.), totaling 105 billion euro annually. So Italians, every year, spend more than 120 billion euro to run their cars. If we compare this number with the above theoretical investment for PV (300 billion €) and consider that the latter will work with free fuel and very little maintenance cost for at least 25 years, we can probably understand that, even with today’s high price, PV is already an affordable choice for affluent countries. In fact the people regularly spend similar amounts of or even more money for what they believe to be indispensable, for instance a car. Sure, a Maserati or even a tiny Fiat 500 is definitely more sexy than a boring chunk of silicon encased in a gray aluminum box, but that is another story»
Estratto da : Nicola Armaroli, Vincenzo Balzani: “Energy for a sustainable world”, pag. 200
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