Costs
It is difficult to weigh the true costs of using petroleum over it’s alternatives. Solar power isn’t as flexible in generation or delivery as fossil fuels and currently doesn’t compete well with the current infrastructure.

Should the higher costs of solar power discourage development and government incentives?
My opinion is a rather obvious no. Working towards energy independence has its own merits. The technologies used in solar can be widely applied to other industries. Governmental policies will be less influenced by foreign interests and focused more here at home.

Solar power isn’t going to replace all uses for fossil fuels but it can through development replace many of them. The hope is that by educating ourselves and our representatives we can make an informed choice.

~Best Wishes

In this case a bubble is actually exactly what we want! The housing bubble was a bad thing all around because it involved giving mortgages to people who could not afford them, and most of the investors financing those mortgages had no idea how risky they were because they were all tied up in complicated securities and other financial products that you need an MBA to understand. When the bubble popped, investors lost all their money, but the poor folk who have the homes still got foreclosed upon (mostly) – nobody won except a few greedy hedge fund managers and the like.

In this case, if the government can stimulate a massive influx of investment into this new and growing field, the companies who get that money will (presumably) use it to go out and build the infrastructure. Stock prices of these companies will inflate erroneously, therefore stimulating even further private investment and (hopefully) further building of the alternative energy infrastructure. Of course, like any bubble, the markets will eventually figure out that these companies can never return even a fraction of the amount of money that they’ve been given, stock prices will plummet and anyone still holding onto it will get burned. That will be temporarily bad for the economy, and a potential catastrophe for anyone who didn’t diversify enough.

However, all that infrastructure isn’t going to go away. So the government will put a few billion into the alternative energy industry – but the private sector will pump many times that much in as a result. Everyone involved will lose a crapton of cash over the deal, but when the dust settles our country will have a truly well developed alternative energy infrastructure.

Don’t believe me? Look at the so-called “Dot Com” boom of the late nineties – a lot of folk got screwed on that deal, but now we have a LOT more data infrastructure in this country than we would have had without it. Same thing happened with the railroads in the late 19th and early 20th century. Most of the people who put money into building the railroads never got a dime back because of a similar ‘bubble’ popping – but the railroads were still there to use, and contributed greatly to this country’s prosperity.

I say bring on the bubble! Just make sure you get your money out before it starts to go down the crapper!