The high PV tariff, which ensures that Solarpark's equity investors will clear about ¤5 million per year, is under fire from unexpected quarters—environmentalists, who bemoan the loss of precious green space, and Germany's leading renewable energy advocate, who fears that the money is enriching foreign competition.

"I think that the mechanism of feed-in tariffs, that showed its merits in the German success story in wind technology, should not have been identically copied for PV," says Gerd Eisenbeiss, architect of Germany's feed-in tariff strategy in the late 1980s. Eisenbeiss, who now oversees about 40 percent of all German public energy research from his post as a managing director at Forschungszentrum Jülich, would prefer direct government grants to German manufacturers for innovative projects instead of a system that rewards native and foreign entities alike.

Other observers contend that such generous financial support encourages companies to foist immature technology on unsuspecting consumers. "With the right subsidies, you could give away 2-carat diamonds in cereal boxes," says Howard C. Hayden, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Connecticut, in Storrs, and author of The Solar Fraud: Why Solar Energy Won't Run the World (Vales Lake Publishing, 2001). "The upshot is that the productive Germans, the ones who are using electricity for something useful, are subsidizing these solar toys."

Expensive toys they are. PVs are by far the priciest power source per kilowatt to install, according to estimates compiled by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. EIA numbers for 2002, the last year for which they are available, show that the cost to build a solar PV plant (minus 10 percent to account for a U.S. investment tax credit for solar power) is a whopping $3915/kW—nearly 10 times that of a conventional, gas-fired combustion turbine. The capital outlay for PV is more expensive, and so, too, of course, is the output: PV power costs three to five times as much per watthour as nuclear, gas, oil, or coal generation. And a PV plant's capacity factor—the ratio of the total electricity that a plant produces per year to the total potential electricity that would be produced if the plant operated at 100 percent during every hour of the year—is anywhere from 12 to 30 percent. That pales in comparison to the 84 percent-plus capacity factor of the 19 nuclear plants Germany wants to replace.

Despite the higher costs and lower output of PV power, Germans support their government's policies: in a recent poll, 58 percent said they would not go back to relying on nuclear energy and would instead pay more for renewable sources. To ensure the ready availability of such resources, the German government ostensibly aims to create a thriving indigenous renewable energy industry. The Association of the German Solar Industry (known as the UVS), in Berlin, estimates that last year the country's PV industry generated ¤1 billion in revenue and created 5000 jobs.

But the real point of German government support for PVs is actually far more ambitious. The ultimate goal, say Solarpark stakeholders, is to foster the growth of a global PV industry and to count on economies of scale to bring the price of PV down to levels that even developing countries can afford. And if that means goosing demand by taking advantage of Germany's feed-in tariffs to pay a U.S. company to build a solar power station in soggy, overcast central Europe, then so be it.

"Every doubling of shipments in our industry has resulted in a 20 percent decrease in cost," says PowerLight's executive vice president Howard Wenger.

Such cost decreases will benefit K&S Consulting's Third World clients, like the parliament of the Casamance region in the Republic of Senegal, in West Africa, which has commissioned a 10-MW-peak PV plant.

"We produce in Senegal 80 percent more energy than in Bavaria," says Jochen Kleimaier, managing director of K&S Consulting Group. The 10-MW-peak Casamance project will provide the region with 35 percent of its power needs. Similar projects under development could over time supply the entire country, which basks in more than 3000 hours of sunlight per year, with one-third of its 1 gigawatthour-per-year requirement.

Kleimaier believes all developed countries have a responsibility to nurture new energy systems at home and to help developing countries move up the economic ladder. This should be done without consuming massive amounts of greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels or building nuclear power plants in unstable regions of the world.

"We have to find a way to produce energy in Africa, in China, in India," says Kleimaier. "We figure Senegal is a very good country to develop those kind of projects."

And while the subsidies last, Bavaria is also a very good place to install PV plants. Just don't expect them to make a dent in German energy demand. A plant like Solarpark that is projected to put 10 GWh/year onto the grid will supply less than 0.002 percent of the country's needs. It is merely, in Smil's words, "a spit in the ocean."