Wessexman, when the tech becomes both profitable AND economically viable, it will take off, not a moment before then.
You seem under the false impression that there is much of a free market in these things. There are many social, govermental and big business, which is much the same as the state, factors involved
Did you know in 1980 that direct sudsidies to industry were actually higher than total corporate profits? This is according to a study by Congress itself quouted in Kirkpatrick Sale's
Human Scale.
If communities had the spirit and knowledge they could easily set up this sort of system, those sorts of things are lacking sadly in the modern world now.
I have figures on the hidden costs of fossil fuels and Nuclear from Sale's book, they are quite old but I see no reason to presume the general tendency has changed.
Federal Subsidies to the oil industry: $10.3 billion dollars
Federal Subsidies to utility corportations, including uncollected taxes and the 20 percent tax subsidy on new plants:$2.7 billion
Federal Subsidies to coal and Nuclear industries: $3.8 billion
Federal expenditures on its own power projects: $11 billion
Federal agency expenditures for utility regulation excluding pollution $1 billion
Federal expenditures for energy agencies: $11 billion
Total Federal and state gov't expenditure for pollution control(exluding auto.): $4.8
State gov't purchases of utility power: $11.2 billion
Business expenditure on pollution control: $6.5 billion
Business expenditures related(excluding auto.): $3 billion
Consumer expenditure(excluding auto.): $1 billion
General pollution cots: $18 billion.
Total costs: $76.8 billion
No doubt these days renewable energy gets some help itself, however as has long been noted big gov't and big business are addicted to large scale, centralised, technofix solutions which are coslty with renewable energy and usually fail whereas the real opportunity, and much alreadt existing knowledge and technology, is for the small scale, communitarian stuff. Blocks can already largely be powered by small solar generating systems very efficiently but gov'ts and energy corporations waste vast sums on trying to get efficient solar generation for large areas from massive towers of solar conductors.