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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 flagship product, Nanosolar SolarPly, is a 14 feet x 10 feet solar electricity module delivering 120 watts per square inch at 110V.
Something seems fishy about this. Isn't the amount of sunlight hitting the earth only about a KW per sq. M?
on google news. This is setting off the crackpot alarm big-time, as much as I want to believe.
Everyone feels the same way about this - quite doubtful (but still somewhat optimistic inside). Wouldn't it be great to be able to charge your cell phone by exposing it to some sunlight? Solar energy has a lot of 'potential'. Even with its current state, it does have some uses. Eventually, one of these 'breakthroughs' might have some merit, and give the technology the push it needs to become more mainstream.
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
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
"The breakthrough has come through the application of nanotechnology to create components via molecular self-assembly, including quantum dots (10nm large nanoparticles) as well as nanotemplates with structural order extending through all three dimensions." Even more exciting, the raw material used in this process is snake oil.....
From what I read on the website: nanostructured materials, estimated lifetime of 25 years, made of "nontoxic semiconductor paint" suggests that it is about dye-sensitized solar cells. These are based on small TiO2 particles, the same that is used as a pigment in white paint. These do not absorb visible light by themselves, but can catch and transport electrons from certain light-absorbing dyes. These solar cells were invented around 15 years ago; the necessary components of such a solar cell, TiO2, dye, solvents, sandwiched between two glass plates, are relatively cheap, but the yield is still below 10% (sunlight power to electrical power).
Apparently, this company has found a way to mass-produce cells based on this principle using plastic films instead of glass. The glass was the most expensive component; the problem with plastic films is that it is hard to make them last a long time while still being impermeable to oxygen and the liquid solvent inside the cell.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Their management team looks top-notch (ex-Intel, NIST, etc.); their partners include Sandia, Stanford, and Berkeley; and their investors include Stanford and Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
I think these guys are for real.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
Look, I haven't even RTFA, but isn't it the case that having a the best (i.e., cheapest, most efficient) technology doesn't guarantee you squat? (At least in the U.S.) Even if it's easy to implement, won't existing energy concerns have it in their best interests to block its adoption?
Before anyone questions the unimpeachable reputation of "The Hindu" - "Online Edition of India's National Newspaper", please keep in mind that they've brought significant news to us in the past.
How many of us would not be alive today had they not warned us about mysterious monkeymen?
I'm a big tall mofo.
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!
Not too good with reverse-logic, are we?
The reference is to a grain of salt because, with just a grain of salt, one wouldn't eat much of what's being served.
To take something with a dose of salt "the size of the Hope Diamond", well, one could conceivably eat the whole thing -- wait for it... -- hook, line and sinker.
This isn't snake oil. They have pictures up here.
Philip
Signatures are broken
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.
http://www.nanosolar.com/pr2.htm
No, that's correct - it is 120 watts per square inch. What they don't tell you is that you have to install a 300 foot diameter magnifying glass over your house.
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...
Also, the AG has written the binding opinion that anyone trying to exploit technology supposed developed by NanoSolar, Inc. would be open to physical coersion up to and probably including limb removal that would not legally be considered to be torture.
Go about your business. Nothing to see here.
If you check out their site you'll see immediately that they are seeking finantial backers. I'm sure their intention is to create some buzz to attract more investers. Unfortunately for them, making outlandish claims may have a reverse effect.
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
It doesn't make it better to continue to post both crap and legitimate articles and to put "take it with a grain of salt" at the end. Whether or not Slashdot science links are snake oil or legit news seems to be random. Basically, not enough of the editors can tell the difference. Slashdot needs a qualified science editors!
I've heard it stated that the amount of energy in sunlight on Earth's surface is between 1 and 6 KW per square meter, probably being closer to 1 KW per square meter.
.65 Watts per square inch, with 12% efficiency would be about .08 watts per square inch made by these solar panels.
There are 1550 square inches in 1 square meter. Even if there was (optimistic) 6 KW/sq meter of sunlight hitting the Earth, you'd only have 3.9 watts per square inch.
So their claim of over 100+ Watts per square inch is obviously an error. I don't think they'd even claim that since it doesn't even come close.
They also claim that their panels are 12% efficient, so a more realistic figure would be 1 KW of sunlight per square meter, equalling about
OK, since this is a solar photovoltaics post:
Someone is going to claim that solar will never be practical, because it is 10 - 15% efficient, while internal combustion, etc. is 30%+. Please, consider that you have to *buy the energy* that goes into that 30% efficienct machine, while the 15% efficient solar panel gets it all free - then run the numbers. The only cost that matters is the dollars per Watt capital cost of the cells upfront (which is still too high, but coming down.)
Someone is going to claim that solar panels produce less energy over their lives than it takes to manufacture them. This has not been true for about 40 years.
Someone is going to claim that solar panels are a toxic danger to human health. Please consider that they are manufactured using identical processes to microprocessors, are easier to disassemble for recycling, and last 20 - 30 years plus, as compared to the five year or so length for most consumer electronics.
Someone is going to claim that solar only makes sense in certain parts of the United States. Keep in mind that, for instance, Albany, NY gets 80% of the solar radiation of Reno, NV. Since you pay twice as much for electricity in Albany, solar panels actually make more sense there. (Remember, most solar panels go on rooftops and spin meters backwards - you get retail price ($.08 - $.15 / kWh,) not wholesale ($.02-$.04) like a power plant.
Someone is going to claim you would have to blanket the desert with solar panels to make a workable power plant. Is this what you do with a distributed, smart, resource, that can occupy unused roof space anywhere? Did we take all of our microchips and assemble them into one giant supercomputer in the desert? Solar panels belong in a distributed network of generators - at the end of the wire, and putting them there is cheap and practical.
Someone is going to claim the solar industry can never meet real-world power demands. Check any industry publication for an interesting statistic - in 1996, 100 megawatts of solar were manufactured. Jan - Dec. 2004 saw about 1100 MW (about $ 6 billion worth) manufactured. Still pretty small, but an amazing growth rate.
What does solar cost now? About 1/20 what it did in the 1970s, but still about twice as much as grid electricity. Once you buy the panels, and finance them with, say, a home equity loan, you're looking at $.18 - $.25 /kWh. Getting closer every year, but still not quite there.
Finally, a comment on the article. Yeah, Nanosolar is pretty neat, but I think that Konarka is quite a bit further along - and doesn't share nanosolar's tendency to overpromise. Here's what needs to happen. Their efficiency is fine, don't care - a 5% or 10% efficient cell, as long as it's less than $1.50 / Watt, the world will beat a path to your door. However, their longevity is not there. A normal silicon solar panel lasts at least 20 years, these things last more like 5 right now. Hence their strategy of putting them in consumer electronics that have about that lifetime anyway.To be a real power generation source, they need to get that lifetime up by a factor of 4 - doable with the right encapsulants, some chemistry, getting rid of liquid electrolytes, etc. I bet one of these poeple will be at $.10 / kWh in five years - but the conventional silicon cells can probably get there in about 8, with manufacturing and scale improvements. So it's a real race...we'll see who pulls it out.
First, by "manufactured by printing", they don't mean a roll to roll process like a printing press. They propose to deposit materials with an inkjet-like mechanism.
Second, what they call "nanotechnology" is surface chemistry. There are ways to make semi-regular structures by bulk chemical means, and that's what they're doing. They did throw a reference to "bioengineered self-assembly" in, but that's not how they do it. The processing looks much more like processes you'd do in a wafer fab. There are common fab processes like electrodeposition, chemical removal of support substrates, and heating in an inert atmosphere.
The basic idea is to address the reasons that solar cells are inefficient. In bulk materials like silicon, only a small fraction of the photons do anything useful. Most of the photons are at the wrong wavelength. And many of the photon interactions that do occur don't result in an electron being delivered to the output. They're trying to fix both of those problems.
Their policy seems to be to shut up until it works. It might work, or it might not. They're not selling stock, and they're not issuing press releases. They have VC funding and some money from DARPA.
I'm all for alternative energies, but the problem is rather the unrealistic views some (especially the greens) have of it.
It's not as much a question of *IF* it helps when their is alternative energy available, but rather the amount it can replace - at least, when you are diosmantling (as happens in my country) nuclear powerplants that provide about 60% of the total power. This was due thanks to the pressure of the greens. No-one seemed to have wondered at that time, where that energy should come from in the future - apart from some nonsensical crap about windmills and the lot.
Ofcourse, it's plainly obvious that those won't do by a long stretch, so then it DOES become important to know how much it can replace. Solar can't do it, not even a tenth of the required energy. Neither can wind. Or hydro. Or geothermal. Or biofuel. And all taken together, they STILL wouldn't replace more then half of what is needed today, let alone in 5 years, when nuclear powerplants are shut down.
In fact, from your entire list, only two CAN have a reasonable chance of providing enough energy now and in the future; and those are nuclear and/or coal.
I think that's what ppl mean, when they say alternative energies are not real options as yet. Sure, anything that helps is welcome, but in any realistic viepoint, ALL of the above mentionned energysources - apart from nuclear and fossile fuels - even combined together will NOT be make more then a drop in the ever power-hungry ocean, at least in large parts of the western world.
I think the only real solution is fusion. But untill that because viable, the use of coal will rise, alternative energies will remain largely a fringe activity (at least on large scale demand) and closing down nuclear reactions without providing real alternatives remain political idiocies without equal in a socio-economic sense.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
As always, take these claims with a dose of salt the size of the Hope Diamond.
Slashdot
Hearsay for nerds. Stuff that never happens.
This sounds like the kind of mistake made by somebody who's used to working with the metric system writing down the wrong name for unfamiliar foreign antique measurement systes, rather like most of us tend to misread things measured in pecks per square furlong or whatever.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
We're talking about less than 1/2 of 1% of the total ocean area. Did anybody consider what would happen before we altered 25% or more of the total land area, or before we started harvesting 90% of the population of various ocean species? Why the sudden interest in side effects?
If the worst case global warming scenarios are correct and a lot of glaciers melt, the size of the oceans will be altered by much more than 0.5% anyway.
Here's my viewpoint: If you put collectors up over 0.5% of the ocean, you create side effects with that order of magnitude. If you release CO2, it continually accumulates in the atmosphere, and it hasn't been determined if natural processes will remove it in any reasonable amount of time. Some scientists predict that its level will double over pre-existing levels; that's a 100% increase in an important climactic variable. The side effects from our current activities will likely to be much greater than anything that would happen with solar collectors.
Will it not become a burden to the sea-routes and a danger to ships?
That's why it's good modern technology has brought us GPS, radar and RFID.
Who would be legally responsable? What if they are layed in international waters?
Some treaties would probably have to be created. Since they would involve something constructive, they would have a more positive tone than the proscriptive Kyoto treaty, and people would be more willing to participate. (We'll see if anybody actually abides by the Kyoto treaty when push comes to shove, or if it's all just talk.)
What is the cost of maintainance? How many will get wrecked by storms? Will it be economical viable?
Those are good questions. There are similar questions about fossil fuels, like would it be economically viable to dig thousands of wells from floating ocean platforms miles into the earth's crust. People did the hard work to find out, and the answer was yes. If people had given up just because the questions existed, we wouldn't have any energy supply today.
You mention wind power and wave power a lot. I agree that they won't ever add up to a large fraction of total energy supply, and that's because there is a limited supply of windy land area and shorelines. Solar collectors don't need to have that limitation. I'm all for fusion power too, but IMO its technical feasibility is currently even more questionable than my "crazy" proposal.
A detailed plan for generating electricity in the Sahara already exists. The technology is called Concentrating Solar Power or CSP and has already proved itself on a large scale in the Mojave Desert. The details have been worked out by TREC, the Trans-Mediterranean Energy Cooperation. See http://www.trec-eumena.org/
The results of the EU ECOSTAR CSP program have just been released at a workshop held last thursday in Brussels. The 140-page report can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.dlr.de/ecostar. CSP power stations occupying an area the size of France in the Sahara, using available technology, can produce the current total energy consumption of the whole world.
Any study which shows that solar cells take more energy to produce than they make in their lifetime must have been written in the 1960's because solar cells have been net efficient for a LONG time. The problem has been that they weren't COST efficient. With rising fuel prices and increased efficiency we have known for some time that the balance would tip in favor of solar. The problem is that solar has to be significantly CHEAPER than the utilities on a per unit basis because you have to make back both the cost of electricity AND the oportunity cost on capital. Btw central NJ is barely cold in the dead of winter, try Northern Ohio, Minnesota, or parts of Canada for cold. I'm not saying passive solar heating is bad, it's very good, but it won't supply enough BTU's for heating even a moderate sized home in colder climates.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
First off, despite what Enron did, the State of California dug itself into a hole because of NIMBY. There was little or no plant construction in California during the 1990s, a time when the population boomed. It was impossible to get permits for new plants and most new construction was tied up in courts over environmental issues. When the crunch did happen, Enron and others wrongly exploited California, but not at all in the way that has been oversimplified by the press or even the idiot Ralph Nader types.
California, because it had not built enough power plants, was importing power from other states.
In order to import power you have to have your own power system suitably balanced. It's not like you put electrons on trucks and wheel them in. To do this, you offer financial incentives to buy or sell power at various points on the grid. To this day, PJM does this on the east coast and you can actually check it out here PJM LMP pricing
Also, you have to adequate transmission rights to get the power in.
So what Enron did was rather clever. First, they had better software than the California ISO for determining grid imbalances and so they scheduled power deals to manipulate the grid. Import power in the north, export it in the south, boom there is an imbalance, and you can sell the power you exported back to the state for a lot of dough. Then, they would also go and buy up transmission rights into the state (which is actually pretty cheap), and then play games at peak times.
The amazing thing about the whole thing is that gaming California's stupid grid managers WAS LEGAL. That's right. Enron didn't do -anything- wrong by screwing the state of California. The state made its rules for its market place and Enron exploited them, but California should not have made those rules to begin with. To cap it all off, California deregulation stripped utilities of the ability to pass variable costs to consumers. So, if the price of electricity shot up, it should have shot up for consumers as well, and guess what, people turn their air conditioners down, and there is no power crisis. But oh no, California made it so that the utilities could not recover the costs and so they had to sell power at a loss, and all the utilities in California went bankrupt, and Enron made a mountain of money, legally.
The thing that got Enron into trouble was that they were lying on their financial statements, and for that, the company is now bankrupt, her executives are either on trial, and the accounting firm that certified those statements no longer exists.
This is my sig.
Guess what is by far the largest sources of domestic electricity consumption in cold areas?
/ index.ht m
Heating.
In hot areas... Cooling.
Neither of which require much electricity to accomplish. It's just easier and we're lazy and stupid.
My hot water tank has an 11kW element, the storage heaters in each room are 3kW each. I burn electricity to make heat.
On the other hand, solar thermal systems are far cheaper than photovoltaics, they're basically black pipes in a glass case. They are also far far more efficient, capturing around 80% of the energy incident on them.
They can produce decent amounts of heat even mid winter in the UK. Enough to heat up my hot water tank to scalding, a few more panels on the roof and I reckon a gas central heating boiler may not even be required. The result is a truly *huge* decrease in the amount of gas and electricity consumed in the home...
You still have a heating element in your water tank, and a gas boiler in your central heating but they spend most of their time inactive.
Big problem? Cost, even though thermal systems can be 80% efficient and are a small fraction of the cost of photovoltaics, the payback period is still 5-10 years.
Good intro:
http://www.galeforce.nireland.co.uk/solar
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.