A word of advice to solar energy entrepreneurs: you just might want to think twice before pitching that business plan to Vinod Khosla, legendary Silicon Valley VC and clean tech guru. Khosla, who’s placing big bets on biofuels, told the audience attending Tuesday’s California Clean Tech Open awards ceremony in San Francisco that “solar is going in the wrong direction.”
The problem? In Khosla’s view, solar energy proponents are too fixated on making solar cells cheaper to produce. “If I were an entrepreneur in solar, I would not be working on lowering the cost of solar cells; I would be working on higher efficiency solar cells.”
“Solar of course is a great technology and we imagine many uses,” he said. “But even with subsidies solar is quite uncompetitive. Being a Republican, I don’t like subsidies.”
Much more promising on the solar front, Khosla noted, are solar thermal power plants, some which use the sun’s rays to heat fluids to create steam to drive electricity-producing turbines.
Green Wombat 
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