Let's study the to be built Victoria PV station, technology choosen being mirrors concentrating sun on small patch of satellite tech PV:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_station_in_Victoria

It is announced at a price of 11.3 USD per installed effective watt (I took fx 1 AUD = 0.83 USD).

Effective watt = wh effectively produced over a year divided by hours in a year, here effective is 20% of rated watt-peak taking into account day/night/clouds/etc... according to their published data.

The published data from Jerome offshore windfarm:

http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2006/10/26/155548/15

378 millions euros for 120 MW peak, 40% load efficiency (from Jerome comment in the discussion) makes it to 10.7 USD per installed effective watt (1 EUR = 1.36 USD).

Price of installed effective watt does not take into account financing and maintenance.

So we have to compare maintenance cost over the next N years of an on-shore bunch of mirrors and off-shore wind farm. And also to compare photovoltaic expected lifetime (we know that old tech lasted 23 years in hostile polluted environment loosing only 10% of output and probably no maintenance at all) and the offshore windfarm lifetime.

Does that make 11.3-10.7=0.6 USD per installed effective watt? I think so.

So all in all I'd say according to published numbers concentrated solar PV can already be cheaper than wind.

PV using dedicated silicon wafers is starting about now. These wafers will have way more impurities than VLSI grade wafers, and the PV will go down a bit in yield, but the panels should be much cheaper after a couple of years (like 2-3 times per peak watt I expect). Also, they will be decoupled from VLSI economic cycles (by which production of PV basically stopped whenever their was an expansion of the microchip business, every 3 years or so)

Pierre