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Breakthrough in solar photovoltaics
An anonymous reader writes "The Holy Grail of researchers in the field of solar photovoltaic (SPV) electricity is to generate it at a lower cost than that of grid electricity. The goal now seems to be within reach.
A Palo Alto (California ) start-up, named Nanosolar Inc., founded in 2002, claims that it has developed a commercial scale technology that can deliver solar electricity at 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. " As always, take these claims with a dose of salt the size of the Hope Diamond.
What about the cells themselves, the life duration ?
Could we "coat" a laptop with these in order to enhance its battery life duration ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
The semiconductor paint can be applied to a flexible substrate , such as a polymer sheet , through a simple web printing process, to create an array of ultra-thin solar cells.
Does this mean I can turn my roof into one huge solar panel by "painting" solar panel on it?
"You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
However if it is indeed true, it should not be a huge surprise. The cost of solar has been falling in recent years.
I did speak to a solar firm about putting in enough to run my house ( 69 kwh/month ) the cost to install was going to be around 75,000 dollars, and in my area electricity is still to cheap to justify the cost.
However if I can install at this super low 5 cents/kwh, I just might bite the bullet. That is roughly 2 cents/kwh cheaper than my utility sells juice for!
Good article!
http://www.nanosolar.com/articles.htm
They've got government contracts, funding out the wazoo, etc. They're not just a garage shop with fancy website.
Actually, i don't think that the glass was the most expensive. Most of the cells used ruthenium dyes for their light absorbing dyes. Ruthenium is not exactly cheap. Moreover, it is not even all that plentiful. I remember hearing once at a conference that the amount of ruthenium expected to be in the earth's crust is only enough to make enough solar cells to cover the state of north dakota or something like that.
I think this is the main problem with solar cells. Until someone comes up with an effecient dye based on a more abundant metal there is no possible way that solar cells can become ubiquitous.
Though it is unclear from the site what sort of dyes this company is using -- perhaps they have found a new one. Though i suspect if they had it would be all over their site. I gather, rather, that they are just using the "nano" buzzword to make their stuff sound new and cool. Oh well.
OH, by the way i am not a solar cell scientist -- but i do work down the hall from a few. Cool.
Actually, I *am* a fan of nuclear energy; the economic case is only poor because the clean-up requirements are absurdly expensive - considering that coal-fired plants spew an order of magnitude more radioactive fallout across the countryside.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Even at five cents per kWh, it's more than 40% more than the target cost for other methods, which is around 3.5 cents per kWh. That's the range where gas, coal, and oil plants live, and where nuclear is striving to be (Westinghouse's 1000MW AP1000 reactor design is the only approved one that may reach that, and it came about because the AP600 wasn't efficient enough).
Anything much more than that without ample tax incentives (and maybe not even then) just isn't going to happen on a large scale.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Google news is not exactly the best place to look for a company. They do have a darpa contract, so they can't be too insane. And they have been around and getting grants since 1999. http://eisg.sdsu.edu/PIER%20area/..%5Cshortsums%5C shortsum0216.htm so I think they are perhaps marketing, but not outright crackpots or liars.
I'd do something interesting, but my server can't handle a slashdotting.
If this cost # is true, then the cost of this solar panel is approximately the same as the cost of ashphalt shingles. And if *that* is true, there would be no reason to put any sort of roof on a house except for a roof made of this stuff...
Yeah, this is definitely wrong.
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Peak ncident solar radiation is typically ~ 1 kW per square meter. That the article claims efficiency of 12%, so the 120 watts is per square meter (under strong sun). It's interesting to me that this thing delivers at 110V.
Affordable solar has been on the horizon for a long, long time. There's a good amount of activity at present (Konarka is another interesting company); let's hope someone is actually able to deliver soon.
Also, let me pre-emptively respond to a few posts that I know we'll see:
- solar energy is transient, but if it's cheap enough, you can (gasp!) store the energy- compress air, lift water, etc.
- if the efficiency is high enough, you can generate a significant portion of U.S. electrical demand with solar.
To wit:
Annual U.S. electrical consumption: ~ 3.6 trillion kWh (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geo
Avg. daily solar insolation, U.S.: Around 5 kWh per sq. meter (http://www.windsun.com/Solar_Basics/Solar_maps.h
Okay... 365 days in a year... 12% efficiency... that works out to 16 billion sq. meters of panels... that's 6400 sq. miles... U.S. has ~ 3.6M square miles... so you'd need to cover 0.2% of land area. So it's a matter of economics, not raw requirements.
I wonder what % of U.S. land area is rooftops & other available space.
Someone please check my math, but I've heard the '100 mi x 100 mi of panels powers the US' claim before, so I appear to be consistent with that (I arrived at 80 miles on a side).
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
To put it another way, you can potentially air-condition and service large buildings with solar panels on the walls and heat sinks in the basement, but you will not solve the eventual oil crisis while people are still commuting from suburbs to those buildings. You would need a social transformation that moved the economy back to where people live, so that transport costs are minimised. The real snake oil is the so-called hydrogen economy which depends on making the centralised power available via transported hydrogen gas, supplied by the existing oil companies. It will enable the oil companies to maintain the social structures and the distribution system which enable them to make so much money - and society will have to pay the cost of conversion of the distribution system, vehicles etc. while maintaining their strangehold on the economy and the political system.
Of course, I might prove wrong and society might be prepared to change its ways in the necessary time frame - but if it does, I will be pleasantly amazed.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
What! 14ft x 10ft panel delivering 120watts per sq inch. That's a panel that's 20,160 square inches. So that means almost 2.5Megawatts per panel. Don't fancy that on my roof ! Solar Radiation only has an intensity of 1500 watts/square meter.
I suspect somebody has got their units mixed up somewhere....
Absolutely not, and I would mod you up if I could.
I wonder if this is part of the "most Slashdotters are Trekkies" effect which presumes that all power in THE FUTURE is generated by antimatter reactors, and so if we haven't found a power source that can replace everything, it must not be any good.
Morons.
+++ATH0
Their website lacks simple details. If you look at other sites that sell BP solar panels, they say "You can expact this many KwHr from a 20 2'x4' panels." They show pictures of the 14x10 array, but it doesn't actually commit the output of it. It says the per square inch figure. The commercial page mentions installations of 1Kw or more... 1Kw would be 10 square inches of their product. Very odd. If normal solar panels were less expensive I'd be all for it. If every house had a 2Kw array, it would definitly help reduce load during peak times in the summers, and reduce overall consumption. I did some research, and if I were to pay $60,000+ (new price) for a solar array, after 30 years I could expect to have saved $30,000. Groan.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
120 watts per sqare inch would indeed be 186kW/m^2, much more than the sun delivers.
...
If we assume they actually meant that the complete panel had 120W, at the size given it would make 9.2W/m^2, which would be an efficiency factor of about 1%. (10W per kW incoming sunlight). I don't know what the typical efficiency factor of other solar cells is, but I'd be surprised if they are all below 1%.
Or maybe it's actually 120 W/m^2 (which would make an efficiency of about 12%)? After all, confusion between metric and imperial units is not unheared of
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
New Rule:
(which congress should pass but never will)
Oil companies should not be permitted to buy this
company, or the patents.
Guess who owns nickel-metal hydride battery patents? Yup. Exxon-Mobil. No electric cars here, move along, nothing to see.
If there is a threat to their business model, energy companies will buy out the corporation which developed the tech and drown it in the nearest toilet.
I think it's closer to the truth to say you just aren't comprehending what I am saying. I never said solar was free. Solar's *ENERGY COST* - what you pay to get energy out of it - I set at that $.20 / kWh sort of range. None of that is fuel cost.
A solar panel, you have to buy and install the panel. You must also maintain it. That is your cost. You HAVE A CAPITAL COST. You have maintenance costs, too. You have to pay money to get solar energy. How many ways do I have to say it? But there IS NO FUEL COST. If you'd like to test this, I'll suggest an experiment! Go *buy* a solar array (note, again, i said buy, I'm not claiming the panel is free,) and then just *leave it outside*. Be sure - this is critical for the experiment - not to pay anybody any money. You will notice that it produces energy. For free. Hence no fuel cost.
Now, go buy a natural gas generator. You will, again, have to pay capital cost. (albeit much less.) Now. Leave it outside, don't pay anybody. Wait as long as you like. You will notice no energy comes out of it. You will have to go *buy fuel* to make it go. Hence, you have a fuel cost.
For both energy sources, the cost of energy produced is capital + O&M + fuel. Roughly, for a diesel generator, that works out to (very little + something substantial + quite a bit.), with a sum of maybe $.04 / kWh. For a solar array, it's (really kind of a lot + very little + zero.) fo ra sume of about $.18 / kWh.
Sure it can. The problem is that people just don't think big enough.
Generally, current solar technology can harness and deliver to the consumer about 1% of overall solar influx per square meter (this applies to photovoltaics, thermal collectors or other means). With an overall world consumption of about 5e20 Joules/year and solar intensity of 1.4kW/m^2, you end up needing a total collector area about the size of Alaska.
That sounds big, but get out a globe and look at it. Alaska isn't all that big compared to the size of the earth, and we already utilize much more than that space just to grow food. Just the amount of space we've allocated for paved roads and parking lots worldwide adds up to a noticeable fraction of this amount.
If plastic photovoltaic or photosynthesis-based solar power collection systems were deployed in small patches floating on the oceans, all energy needs for the world could be supplied without much noticeable impact on the environment or people. (I think photosynthesis makes more sense because it can generate more convenient and storable hydrocarbon fuels and it can create the plastics used to build the systems out of thin air.)
The key is to develop highly automated industrial scale deployment and maintenence methods. Just like huge cargo ships currently operate with just a couple of people on board, these huge collectors would be tended to by a few people using massive automated equipment. If deployment costs can be reduced to $30/m^2 for example, it would take about $30Trillion to build the trillion square meters of collectors required. That's less than one year of the world's gross economic output, and only equivalent to a few years of total fossil fuel expenditures.
What about the deep Sahara desert? There are vast (almost) lifeless parts of the desert which could be "paved over" -- this might have a few benefits: 1) It could bring some much needed economic benefit to the continent, and 2) it much halt some of the unnatural (?) growth of the desert.
I'm partly serious here.
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
Lots of great points. I work for one of the largest renewable energy companies in North America, and I'd like to mention a couple of things you touched on that are worth some extra mention.
Similiar to hydro, solar's cost component is primarily in the upfront cost of equipment rather then the uncertain "trailer" of fossil fuels. Coal - the dirtiest fuel you can imagine - is currently extremely available for next to nothing, however. Natural gas prices fluctuate a great deal but natural gas power plants are relatively cheap to setup and can be run at opportune times when power is extremely profitable. These plants are often called "peakers" for that reason. I mention the timing aspect because it is especially important to analyzing solar. Why you say? Because
solar's timing stinks.
Direct solar energy availabilty does not line up well with electricity consumption. This means that as solar power approaches "free" the part of the system that stores the solar energy becomes the dominant cost component. There also aren't many great ways to store energy from PV panels. Chemical batteries deteriorate, are usually toxic, heavy, expensive and space hogging. Demand forms of energy production like hydro and natural gas do not have this limitation and can be respond to customer needs rapidly. Coal is slower but can be moderated with the demand curve to an extent.
Another key point is that photovoltaic cells produce direct current and not the alternating current required for most consumer and industrial needs. A small amount of energy storage and an inverter are necessary to transform the energy from a solar panel into something useful. This becomes important again when talk turns to distributed production. The fixed cost of the electronics simply does not scale particularly well. I wish it were simpler to just hoist some PV panels on everyone's roof but it isn't.