WASHINGTON, May 22 (UPI) — With production levels on the rise for solar photovoltaic cells, industry analysts are predicting a rapid decline in costs.

The affordability could make solar power a mainstream option in the next few years, according to a new assessment by the Worldwatch Institute in Washington and the Prometheus Institute in Cambridge, Mass.

Global production of solar PV cells, which turn sunlight directly into electricity, has risen six-fold since 2000 and grew 41 percent in 2006. Although grid-connected solar capacity still provides less than 1 percent of the world’s electricity, it increased nearly 50 percent in 2006, to 5,000 megawatts, propelled by booming markets in Germany and Japan. Spain is likely to join as a major market in 2007 and the United States soon thereafter.

The solar industry’s growth has been constrained by a shortage of manufacturing capacity for purified polysilicon, the same material that goes into semiconductor chips. But the situation will be reversed in the next two years as more than a dozen companies in Europe, China, Japan and the United States bring on new levels of production capacity.

In 2006, for the first time, more than half the world’s polysilicon was used to produce solar PV cells. Combined with technology advances, the increase in polysilicon supply will bring costs down rapidly — by more than 40 percent in the next three years, according to Prometheus estimates.

“Solar energy is the world’s most plentiful energy resource, and the challenge has been tapping it cost-effectively and efficiently,” said Janet Sawin, a senior researcher at Worldwatch who authored the update. “We are now seeing two major trends that will accelerate the growth of PV: the development of advanced technologies and the emergence of China as a low-cost producer.”

MINISTERS were under fire last night over their high-profile plans to cut primary class sizes, as new figures showed there will be only a small increase in the number of teachers available from next year.

Education Secretary Fiona Hyslop told Parliament earlier this summer that an extra 250 teacher-training places would be made available. She has pledged to reduce P1, P2 and P3 classes to no more than 18.

The extra places have been secured in teacher-training colleges, as promised, but it has emerged this has only balanced out a cut in the number of total places.

Education chiefs decided in January that the number of teaching-training posts should be reduced by 205. Consequently, the extra 250 posts announced by the SNP means the actual number of places is only up by 45, from 1,476 to 1,521.

A spokeswoman for Hyslop said that the small increase would still ensure class sizes were soon reduced. But Labour education spokesman Hugh Henry, the former education minister, claimed: “These kinds of numbers will in no way deliver what they want to do. I know people who voted for them because of this pledge and it is a disgrace that they won’t be able to deliver on that.”

However, Hyslop’s spokeswoman replied: “We have got falling school rolls. We have looked ahead, as always happens every year, and then given guidance on the numbers of places that will be required. We don’t want to churn teachers out for the dole.”

The extra places refer only to postgraduate training posts, where students train for one year following a degree.

In the SNP government document last week setting out their first 100 days in power, it insisted: “We will ensure that teacher numbers in the teaching training colleges in the autumn of 2007 are at a level to start driving down class sizes in P1-P3. Ministers will identify which schools can move to class sizes of 18 from 2008, with our full commitment rolled out thereafter”.

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The mystery surrounding the death of a judge killed by a fireball in his garden shed may never be solved after a second inquest today failed to reach a definitive conclusion.

Andrew Chubb, 58, died in a blaze at his farmhouse near Chard, Somerset, just over an hour after telling his wife, Jennifer, 60, he was ending their 34-year marriage.

But at the end of the second inquest - held after years of campaigning by Kerry Sparrow, who had a two-year affair with Chubb - a coroner said today that the cause of the fire remained “unascertained”.

Sheriff Payne said there was insufficient evidence to prove it had been an accident or suicide, but he was satisfied there was no third party involved in his death.

“It has not been possible to determine whether he was disabled from escaping by the effects of the products of combustion or any other means,” he said.

“Both the means and the cause of his death remain unascertained. Evidence that might indicate that he had expressed thoughts of harming himself fall far below proof beyond doubt that is the standard request for the conclusion that he deliberately took his own life.”

In recording his narrative verdict, Mr Payne said it was a mystery why Judge Chubb had closed the doors to the shed and why he had not tried to escape the fire.

“It is likely that the fire was caused or accelerated by the ignition of petrol vapour. It has not been possible to establish how the vapour arose nor the source of ignition.

“There was no electricity or gas supply to the shed. No match or means of fire lighting were found.”

He said the judge did not smoke or carry matches and no one had heard any attempt by him to start the lawnmower.

Mrs Chubb was arrested on suspicion of murder and perjury a year after her husband’s death. No charges were ever brought and the coroner said today it would have been virtually impossible for her to “disable” him and then set fire to the shed.