Slashdot Mirror
New Solar Panel Technology Gaining Momentum
jessiej writes, "Even though copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS), a newer type of solar panel, is less efficient than its silicon counterpart, millions are being invested in manufacturing. From the article: 'CIGS panels use far less raw material than silicon solar panels and the factories themselves cost less to build,' $25 million compared to $230 million in one example. These types of panels could even be made into a t-shirt logo."
A debian logo on your shirt powering a small bewulf cluster of wearable computers computing Pi to many, many decimal places. What a talking point! How will the girls resist!
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
I thought silicon was abundant ..
Wincopy
If manufacturing of these panels also costs less energy to produce the panels then this is undoubtedly a better option. Currently, I believe a typical setup takes around 2 years best case to start producing power rather than just paying back what it cost to make.
.. you could have 'Solar Panel for a sex machine' on your T-Shirt and not be lying.
From Wikipedia:
Iam not sure about where Wiki got the figure from though.
Wincopy
In related news, a Norwegian company promises cheaper high-purity silicon:
International Herald Tribune: Norway's Orkla group to build new plant to produce high-purity silicon for solar cells
Aftenposten: Orkla goes solar
First they measure the factory's output in megawatts per year, presumably because a 1m^2 CIGS panel is not the same as 1m^2 Silicon panel (reminds me of a time when it started dawning on CPU marketers that Mhz wasn't a good selling point when your CPU could crunch more numbers at a lower speed than your competitors).
Then they use megawatts as a measure of how much power a large coal plant could produce in a year.
Why can't they just stick to libraries of congress? Eg the unit of measure would be that released by burnt all of the books (and furniture) in a library of congress.
There you go. Just stay out in the sun.
Where were you when the voynix came?
As an EE, when TFA uses phrases like "[...] 500 megawatts a year.", it gives me that warm fuzzy feeling that the writer really knows science and engineering. (Sarcasm intended) It makes me wonder how good the rest of the information in the article is.
For those who are honorably ignorant of what I'm splitting hairs on (honorably in that you're not trying to write about something you don't know about): A 'watt' is already a rate of something per unit time. If the energy produced was to be quantified in units per year, it should be joules per year.
The whores get mad when the sluts give it away for free.
Or Universal Studios might go after you! Seriously, this is a wonderful innovation. In the past, making a new roof out of solar cells was so prohibitively expensive that states such as California had to offer homeowners incentives in the form of buy-down rebates, tax breaks, and so on--basically footing part of the bill just to get them using the technology. With the advent of CIGS, these kinds of environmentally-conscious bribes may not even be necessary. Cheap solar technology will now be far more accessible to people, companies, and governments. That is a Good Thing[tm].
You dont actually need that much material for solar cells, if you produce them the right way.
The whole concept of those thin film solar cells is that you can get nearly perfect absorption of the light in less than 5 um thickness. Add a base layer, a tin-oxide contact layer on top, and some surface protection, and its entirely possible to make a cell 0.1 mm thick, only 1/10 of it using potentially rare materials.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
- The land is already available
- An industry already exists for keeping it cleared
- Roads already extend to most places where people need power
- Electric cars could be charged, and "gas" stations could service them. Same for electric trains.
- Roads would become revenue producing
Make a difference: move to a swing state.
I'm fighting this battle all the time. But in this case it is correct.
:-)
Watson Ladd is right. "100 Megawatts per year" means "solar cell capacity corresponding to 100 megawatts leaving factory each year", which makes perfect sense.
For geeks: it is an acceleration, the rate of a rate, like metres per second squared
OTOH you are right too -- TFA busts it with coal plants: "A major, coal-burning power plant can churn out about 500 megawatts a year" is, of course absolutely bogus, since the coal plant produces power and not "devices which produce power".
Grrr.
I can tell you're a "big picture" kind of person. But in regards to this technology, I think that the more doable implementation would be to line roads with it--perhaps finally allowing for road markings that light up at night and improve driver safety.
If you deploy too many solar panels in one place you could use up all the sunlight. This has already happened in nothern Scandinavia and during part of the winter they now are in total darkness.
I thought that was going to take the world by storm for precisely the reasons you give.
This is such an incredible package of benefits that you'd think people would be actively pursuing it.
In particular, "Roads would become revenue producing" is the bit that ought to be attracting the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.
It's a terrific idea, even better than piezo-electric power generation in roads from passing vehicles (most roads are empty most of the time, after all, so piezo would be inefficient).
This solar energy story combined with previous gratuitous use of the "enlightenment" icon all point to one conclusion: Our own kdawson has gone granola! Make love, not wars, man. Peace in the Middle East! :)
I used to know one of the guys who went to work at Miasolé. He was a sharp guy with a lot of experience in CIGS and related materials.
Slashdot has had a habit of posting the "next big solar breakthrough" which, in the fine print, is not so big yet but will be RSN. CuInGaSe2, on the other hand, has a long track record and previous commercial attempts have produced some solar panels with usable efficiencies (not great, but usable).
CIGS has the advantage of being a direct band gap material, but there are some limits to how far you can push it in efficiency as a single layer device that have not been overcome. One serious advantage is that this material has a fairly wide tolerance on relative elemental composition - different ratios of material in the film will still produce a working cell within a fairly wide range. This is important because industrial process control has tolerances, and wider tolerances mean less expensive production. CuInSe2 and related compositions have some rather interesting electrical properties with respect to defect behavior that allow them to work in this fashion. Anyone with a real interest in this should look at some dense but extremely interesting work by Zunger at NREL.
The biggest problem with CIGS as a production material is probably that it can't "piggyback" on the industry built up for the computer industry. I know that sounds strange, since its lack of reliance on that source of material is also its advantage, but tools to work with CIGS have to be developed more or less from scratch. That's expensive, and the reason that these initial investments are important. The process must be bootstrapped.
CIGS of course doesn't address other problems with solar adoption, such as durability over time, public acceptance and investment, etc. But CIGS is a real material with real potential, and not simply IPO vaporware.
Also of longer term interest is the idea of multijunction solar cells, which use different wavelengths of light on each layer and thus can push efficiencies much higher. Unfortunately they are also an EXTREMELY difficult practical challenge for production. However, there is a lot that can still be done. We REALLY need more funding for solar research in this country, and more basic research in general, but that's another post.
Good luck to the Miasolé team!
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
If you look at road surfaces, you will see that they are "clean" only in the sense of being free of large scale obstacles. Tire marks, dirt, oil, and other random stuff is all over the road surface.
Solar panels need optical transparency in their protective layer. Keeping roads clean enough to provide that level of optical clarity is just not going to be workable, except possible with nanotechnology.
When we get self rebuilding roadbeds then solar roadbeds might be practical, but for now roofs are much more practical as targets - most are slanted, don't have cars running over them, and get rained on periodically to help with self cleaning.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
The unit of weight of the media, the Volkswagen, is much more appropriate
By using a resistor, of course.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
It is not the efficiency (W/m^2) that needs to go UP in order to make fixed solar generation facilities common, it is the cost ( $/W) that needs to come DOWN.
I'll argue that for a typical small house (1500 sq-Ft) there is more than enough roof area to generate all the electricity for the house, even with 6-7% efficient solar panels. Unfortunately, buying current solar panels, this much energy would cost you >$35,000 !! (And that doesn't include batteries, tracker, inverter.... etc)
If these guys can make lower efficiency panels that also have lower cost/Watt, it is a winning situation for everyone. Where do I buy their stock ?
Of course a company called "Nano Solar" would get funding.
In the US try putting panels on the backs of or mounted elsewhere on billboard signs.
Also, the signage on bridges could be used for power generation as well.
The only problem, if the stuff is recyclable someone will steal the materials.
All rest areas should have solar powered facilities, or at least augmented.
I think you are using the right of way that freeways have incorrectly. We could use that same right of way to put panels on poles down the centers of freeways or on the sides. The only issues are causing distraction, but that would amend itself as people would become accustomed to them. The other problem is accidents. Poles tend to do a lot of damage.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Right so 25 million dollars gets you 100mw a year. So build 15 billion dollars worth of factories and you get enough panels every year to provide about 10% of the United Kingdoms annual power use. In ten years your entire country is solar powered. Sounds suspiciously cheap. How much does each panel cost to produce? Somehow I suspect a lot.
Why just tell us the factory cost? Without know the production costs its meaningless? Grr irritating.
The nanosolar people claim the panels can be done in a web-press like machine. (Web presses, the way all thoes unsolicited catalogs you get are made, so buying in bulk from the Chinese makes it cheap!) They claim a 20+ year lifespan. And they would be WAY cheaper than the Ovonics Uni-Solar products.
The only 'problem' is the back-end electronics are still "expensive" and will remain so, even if panels drop from the present price of $5+ per watt to $1. The panels will just be the cheapest part in such a system. Now, if you were powering, oh say, 48 VDC or 12VDC computers, the interface electronics could be as simple as a diode.
I find it amazing that given the enormous potential of solar power, there is so little money being invested. When it comes to fusion, governments invest billions in international programmes, yet invest virtually nothing for solar research. Why is that? Is it due to lobbying from oil companies?
1) Can these solar panels be made in quantity effectively and without environmental pollution?
2) Are the materials in these panels toxic, requiring special disposal (like batteries)?
3) Are the materials in these panels toxic, being dangerous to have near the skin or risk leakage?
4) Are they long lasting (how many years of use)?
5) What is their efficiency? How much better are they than traditional panels?
Do you think a culture where the rich and powerful put an end to wind farms near Martha's Vinyard would allow acres and acres of land to be covered with solar panels?
Although it would probably be worth it to put a few tens of thousands of square miles of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona under solar panels just to see how it would cause the heads of ecofreaks to explode.
Hey, if we could contain those exploding heads we'd be able to get even more energy!
There are other promising techniques of harvesting sunlight, to only give a small sample: this one uses buckyballs and gets 5.2% efficiency, and something sort of similar using pentacene has similar promises, and this one uses the all-famous carbon nanotubes to convert it directly into hydrogen (but for now it only works with UV-light)
If this keeps up, we'll probably have a choice from a whole range of efficiencies, and more importand $/watt.
There already are companies out there that sell solar shingles. They're not economical yet for most applications, but it's starting to come.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Great, does this mean we can cover the already flat, already ugly roofs of most commercial buildings with them? Can attractive "solar shingles" be made with them? Can them make up for less efficency with wide scale adaptablity/adoptiblity?
We are all just people.
But will the t-shirt sized solar panels power a Linux tablet pc?
\
I've seen the Miasole production facility and had a chat with the CEO and one of the engineers at the end of the summer. There're a few interesting things that TFA doesn't mention. First, Miasole claims the low $25M price tag for a 200MW factory because they build all of their equipment from scratch. When I was on the floor, they were building a single 25MW line which they turned on for testing last month. That cost them a grand total of $4M (in parts) to build. E.g. they've already done one, so the pricing is reasonably accurate. Subsequent lines will be cheaper. This will give them a huge cost advantage over other similar companies.
Secondly, their production process is cheaper not only because material costs are lower, but also because they use a "reel-to-reel" process in which the semiconductor material is deposited on a sheet of steel which unrolls into the line, and then rolls back up on a reel on the other side. The steel sheets can then be cut and woven into a vinyl enclosure which can be rolled out on your roof like regular roofing shingles. Cool stuff. (They're probably going to attack industrial markets first though...)
Third, the management team comes from the disk drive industry, and built the Seagate facility that is responsible for ~30% of the world's hard drives (could have the percentage slightly wrong, but is in the ballpark). Hard drives use a similar thin film deposition process, and they have built several other manufacturing systems based on thin film processes. This is why the are able to get such a low cost on their equipment: they have the contacts and expertise to build from scratch.
For the record, I have not talked with their competitors, so I don't know the whole story, but Miasole seems very well positioned, and their facility is certainly real.
One person commented about Indium in the Flat Panel Display (FPD) industry. It is true that it is used in all LCD displays in Indium Tin Oxide (ITO), a Transparent Conducting Oxide. The industry has been searching for a replacement, since it is expensive and constrained, but has been expensive. My credentials: I worked for a company which made the machines to coat ITO on glass for the LCD manufactures (one of the hardest steps in the process).
Another article which mentions capitalisation of a new technology, but for which the editor has not done any homework on the current state of trends in silicon development. See here http://www.csgsolar.com/pages/technology.php?lang= en and http://www.originenergy.com.au/environment/environ ment_subnav.php?pageid=1233 for announcements of factories already in production of variants of silicon technology.
What are you picturing?
1000 third world workers pumping bellows while the smith hammers on the silicon?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
As a point of amusement, you should look into just how much energy it takes to just purify raw ore into something usable. Abundant? -Yeah. Usable? -Not until you blow more energy on it than the solar panel might collect in 7 or so years of average daylight. Sucks.
100 megawatts of panels is 100 MW peak.
Unless all are in the same longitude and weather they won't see co-incident peaks. So there will never be an actual increase of 100MW.
Using average gen would be much lower.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
IIRC it's about the Mason-Dixon line in the USA (of course it's not a straight line).
South of there the system is built to handle the summer daytime AC load.
North of there it's built to handle the winter nighttime heating load.
It's a good thing that southern areas are where you'd sensibly put the solar panels.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It costs $500 for 1 square foot of land in most of the world. Compared to the cost of open space, the cost of the solar panel is nothing. It's far cheaper to use more expensive and efficient solar panels than printing enourmous amounts of money for more land. In terms of the raw materials, the energy required to make a solar panel, and the land to store it on, you're better off still using natural gas and dumping the solar panels.
While solar energy obviously won't produce power for you at night, without either storage or some amazing round-the-globe distribution system, it's still a major win, because most electrical usage is in the daytime, for air conditioning and for business uses. If you've got time-of-day pricing on electricity, you'll see it's more expensive in the daytime than at night, because if supply-and-demand issues. So at least for reducing peak loads and improving overall capacity, solar just wins. Additionally, production can be fairly decentralized - you'll make more power in LA than in Seattle, but you'll probably be using more power there as well, and you can add lots more power to the system than the amount of carrying capacity you need to add to the grid.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Fortunately, peak electrical demand is in the daytime, so solar actually does help. Most of it's for air conditioning and for business use, and it you've got time-of-day pricing for electricity, it's more expensive in the daytime when the demand is high. And the places that get the most sunshine are generally going to use the most electricity as well, so you get extra slack on your distribution system capacity. So until solar makes up a large enough fraction of our total electricity usage, the fact that it's daytime-only isn't a problem. For now, that coal plant probably wouldn't be running at 100% of capacity all day - they'd probably run it at some fractional capacity at night anyway.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
On the other hand, $25M is the cost of the plant - there's also the cost of the materials they use, which are presumably some reasonably high fraction of the cost of the panels. You're going to amortize the cost of building the plant over a few years, especially because it's probably most of a year before you're getting full production rates, and the cost of the research and development also gets amortized.
And the economic return of the system as a whole is different from the economic return to the owners of the factory itself- that's going to depend on how much margin they can make on the sale price of the panels compared to raw material costs, though the sale price *will* be driven by the fact that it looks like a big win for the purchaser.
It still looks like a big win.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It would be nice if we could use fusion to generate power, though there are still radioactive waste issues because used reactor parts and containment domes are still likely to get hit with neutrons and therefore become radioactive, but there'd presumably be less of that that with fission. But that's not what most of the research is about.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Wikipedia says the price of indium has gone from $94/kg in 2002 to $900/kg in 2005. Is the price of indium a signifcant bottleneck for CIGS solar cells?
This technology supposedly produces panels at much lower cost than competing silicon processes. Therefore, at least financially you'll have paid off the purchase debt much faster than the 5 years you're talking about. How much of that manufacturing cost translates to energy debt as opposed to toxic-waste debt or other kinds of ecological problems is TBD, but it's likely to be a much better deal. And once you're producing power from the panels, you're not only paying off the energy debt of the coal/oil/etc. that you're displacing, you're also reducing the other environmental damage from their production as well.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
On the other hand, if you're trying to decide about investing in the factory, a big issue is the granularity of the cost of producing factories (including the initial R&D). $25M is an amazingly low number - lots of investors could fund that, and assuming that the marginal costs are cheap enough to get customers, the technology should bootstrap nicely - more easily than with $100M startup costs. (I assume that some of the R&D gets paid off by licensing it to other investors.)
Getting to high volumes would crank up the demand for indium, so the marginal price of materials would probably go up after a while, but the costs of the manufacturing technology would go down with increasing volume.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The going rate for electricity at the wholesale level is
about $35/MWh. More in some areas, less in others but 35
is a reasonable ballpark for calculations. This is also
the rate at which the power company will buy back any
excess power you produce with those panels (if you are
doing the grid-tie option as opposed to storage on site)
And yes, the power company is marking up the price
significantly. To their credit, they also have to install
and maintain all the equipment necessary to sell retail
electricity to the "market" and these costs huge.
The real advantage of photovoltaics is you can use it in those areas where it is difficult to get in another power source or where it is just handy to not have cables everywhere - like portable equipment. Other possibilities will become apparent as well - I can see the advantage of treating it as part of a big UPS in areas with occasional power dropouts. A lot of commercial operations only run in daylight anyway and don't care if they lose power at night. In this case these photovoltaics are not competing against the base load stations - they are competing against the cost of getting fuel to small diesel generators and the ability of these generators to start up in time and complications such as maintainance. This form of solar energy has an expensive capital cost per MW but you have an extra advantage in that you don't have to plan for the future - you get enough panels for your current requirements and then just put another panel on a roof later if you need it. Thermal plants are complicated, take a long time to build and it is hard to increase capacity - build them big and they give you a low price per MW but you had better be thinking at least 10 years ahead and put them where fuel is cheap to ship in and water is plentiful. When I was in the power industry a lot of people were hoping for rain to avoid having to shut down a 2.6 TW coal fired plant which was using untreated sewerage for cooling water (there are two loops - highly treated stuff in the boilers which continues to cycle through and dam water in the condensers which evaporates in the cooling towers).
You also have to remember that a lot of that price for electricity is for the transmission network and the losses - something you don't have to worry about at all if you have your power source on site.
You're right. I'm way off on my calculations. And you're right about the other stuff. I thought that they were talking about a 25 MW solar plant not a factory for making 25 MW of generation capacity per year (ironically I corrected someone else for making the same mistake with respect to the original story). Sigh, this doesn't sound that interesting any more.
I thought this produced a slightly different form of green energy :)
Well, son of a beach!
This figure of $500 for 1 square foot of land "in most of the world" simply does not match reality. If so, then the 25x40 plot of land under a modest house (1000 square feet) would cost $500,000 just for the land. That's not counting the parts of the land not covered by the house in a typical lot, which would drive the price to well over a million. Maybe in Manhattan, high-rent districts of urban areas on the east and west coasts of the U.S., and in certain other high-density areas of the world, land could reach this price, but to claim this is true for most of the world is ridiculous.
This article has an overview of the companies doing R&D on solar panels and the VC firms that are funding them.
Make a difference: move to a swing state.
From an older posting:
. "
"One manufacturer of solar cells even claims 0.85 years with their "Dünnfilmtechnologie" (is flat film a suitable translation?), see on page 3 here (Energierückzahldauer = amount of time for energy payback)
This is thin film technology (which btw is the correct translation) as well.
Btw, the time in years is not what really matters. Much more interesting is the simple ratio of energy you need to produce to the amount of energy you can "harvest". Even oil needs oil to produce, to refine, to transport, etc. I don't have numbers, but I guestimate that you lose 20-30% of the energy until the gas is gobbled by your car.
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
I think you're using the classical "here be dragons" with further silicon purification, referring to national security. It's not really a secret.
First, silicon is reacted with hydrogen chloride to given chlorosilane, which is a gas, and is distilled. Chlorosilane is reduced with hydrogen to give silicon. Silicon is crystallized into a large crystal, about 10 cm thick.
Zone melting is used.