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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
From Wikipedia:
Iam not sure about where Wiki got the figure from though.
Wincopy
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.
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].
- 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 think they intended those measurements to mean they are capable of manufacturing an aggregate number of solar panels capable of generating X megawatts in total annually. In other words, they're stating the total amount of power output they can output in a year. The confusion arises when the writer attempts to equate the annual output by a CIGS factory (measured in megawatts of power) with the annual output of a coal power plant (measured in megawatt-hours of work). My guess is that they are really stating that a coal power plant can produce 500 MW of power. Of course this indicates a deeper flaw in the discussion in that a coal power plant can continuously produce 500MW of power (presuming a constant supply of coal). Whereas a solar plant can only produce 500MW of power for half the day.
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 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 ?
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.
No, producing solar cells requires a huge amount of raw materials, chemicals, and energy- which in the US, likely means it will come from coal and the release of a large amount of emissions.
The solar panel needs to run around 5 years to produce enough elecitity to make up for the electricty used to make it, and several more years to make up for the emissions produced in transporting, installing, mantaining, and disposing of the device.
The total emissions released in the entire lifecycle of an energy source, divided by the energy produced, is what you have to look at when comparing the environmental impact energy sources. And in those meaures, current solar and wind technology is not particularly attractive, especially in comparison with hydroelectricity or nuclear. Significant breakthroughs are needed before solar energy can be a viable energy source, and as the original poster said, this technology looks like it will significantly reduce the energy requirements to produce solar cells, and thus reduce its enivronmental impact.
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.
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