Actually by the standards of rates of change in the energy industry, we are going to all have solar panels powering our homes 'overnight' (see the rapid growth of solar forecast in slide 33 of the doc linked below). In many areas, due to rapid price declines and relatively low prevailing interest rates, solar is cost competitive without subsidy now so the ROI is real. As cumulative solar installations continue to grow, we will continue down the cost curve shown on slide 13 and that will be true for more and more people. Which means that subsidies today can actually lead to long term lower energy costs as prices continue to drop. On that topic, we should all be thanking Germany for being farsighted enough to invest in subsidies to keep the industry going for long enough to get us down to where we are on the cost curve today.

Bloomberg new energy finance talk slide deck: http://about.bnef.com/content/uploads/sites/4/2015/04/BNEF_2...