Everywhere one looks, there is another announcement about the gobs of money being put into solar power. The Indian government just announced $7 billion for its country's solar industry manufacturing plants while Pythagoras Solar will be receiving $10 million in new funding of its own. Worldwide, solar projects raked in nearly $6 billion in investments in 2007, but a new study suggesting that all this money may be going to waste .

Severin Borenstein, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and director of the UC Energy Institute, says that we are "throwing money away" by using current photovoltaic panel technology. In a recent working paper, unfortunately titled, "The Market Value and Cost of Solar Photovoltaic Electricity Product" (still awake?), he finds that even when you take greenhouse gas reduction gains into account, the costs simply outweigh the benefits.

Proponents of the technology have long relied on solar's unique ability to maximize its output during peak electricity usage (i.e., the bright sunny afternoon time) to justify its economic existence. Although Borenstein's work found that this matching of peak power increased solar's value by 20%, the math still doesn't work out. He says that two problems have short-circuited solar energy's effectiveness. First, electricity rates don't rise with demand. If they did, PV's value could  be 30-50% higher. But that's only because consumers would be paying much higher rates than they do now. Second, utilities often operate with unused capacity still available. The Professor puts it this way, "Basically, the benefits of solar PV are undermined by the way most grids are run today."

Further analysis in his study revealed that while the cost of a 10 kilowatt solar panel system costs between $86,000 and $91,000 over its lifetime, the value of the power produced is only worth $19,000 to $51,000. That means that in order for current PV tech to be worthwhile, the price to reduce a ton of greenhouse gases would have to be somewhere between $150 and $500.

So now what? Professor Borenstein suggests putting more money into research than on rooftops: "We need a major scientific breakthrough, and we won’t get it by putting panels up on houses. It is going to come in the labs." Most likely windowless, sunless labs.