After some searching around, I found that solar power plants cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars (around $500,000,000) to build. To generate a lot of solar power, basically what you need is a lot of land in a sunny place. The largest solar power plant is in the Mojave Desert in California.

Installing solar panels on one home costs about $20,000 to$50,000. Many states now offer discounts to families who want to install solar panels, so the actual cost is not that high. The average cost of electricity from coal-burning power plants is around 10 cents per kilowatt hour.

A kilowatt hour is the amount of energy used if you leave a 100 watt light bulb turned on for 10 hours. The cost of electricity from a solar power plant is about 30 cents per kilowatt hour.

Many scientists and engineers are trying to lower this cost so that more people buy their power from solar power companies. A good website for reading about solar power is Wikipedia:

solar cells

As the cost goes down and the efficiency goes up, the price of solar-generated electricity will go down.

I wanted to know what it would cost to have some solar power in my home once, so I looked on the web and I found it was very expensive to buy a unit that would supply only a little bit of solar power. The prices have come down a lot now with new solar cells. I think they are starting to use a less expensive form of silicon that isn't crystalline.

If you were going to set a rate for selling solar power, you would need to consider a lot of things such as how much it would cost to buy the solar cells and stuff, how long they would last, how much it would cost for the employees and the land for the solar cells and the building[s], how much profit you would want, and how much people would be willing to pay for solar power if it was going to be more expensive than the power they were already getting.

I searched for "solar power cost" and found this, linked to a 2004 article from the Christian Science Monitor:

"Though still expensive compared to commercial power, solar costs have fallen about 90 percent since the '70s. When today's $4.50-per-watt cost for solar ..."csmonitor