Tonight I went to a talk about solar panel technology at Swinburne, and it was a great talk - but one of the things that was really nice about it was hearing a positive vision rather than a doom-and-gloom vision, but that that vision was (hopefully) based on real future potential from current and emerging technology and trends, not just head-in-the-sand business as usual.
Some numbers presented: Solar panel price per kWh has dropped by a factor of 500 since the speaker was born in 1976, and is projected to continue to drop, while in the same time capacity has grown by a factor of a million (from a very low base, obviously), and is apparently projected to grow by a factor of 80 in the 30ish years to 2050.