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Method for $1/Watt Solar Panels Will Soon See Commercial Use
An anonymous reader writes "A method developed at Colorado State University for crafting solar panels has been developed to the point where they are nearly ready for mass production. Professor W.S. Sampath's technique has resulted in a low-cost, high-efficiency process for creating the panels, which will soon be fabricated by a commercial interest. 'Produced at less than $1 per watt, the panels will dramatically reduce the cost of generating solar electricity and could power homes and businesses around the globe with clean energy for roughly the same cost as traditionally generated electricity. Sampath has developed a continuous, automated manufacturing process for solar panels using glass coating with a cadmium telluride thin film instead of the standard high-cost crystalline silicon. Because the process produces high efficiency devices (ranging from 11% to 13%) at a very high rate and yield, it can be done much more cheaply than with existing technologies.'"
ya, but for how long do they last
You know, $1/watt panels are good and all, but shouldn't someone be more concerned with making them useful? It doesn't matter if the panels are $0.01/watt if I still need the entire neighborhood covered in them to run the coffee maker. You need to get to the point where covering the roof of the house is sufficient to make a major impact on the power needed from the rest of the grid (if not replace it totally, a pipe dream).
if it turns out to not be vaporware, it may very well actualy make a dent in our use of coal and other fuels for generating electricity.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
The article doesn't mention how many watts per square meter this panel will produce. The cost of the panel is important, but so is the cost of the land required and the return of your investment.
Washington bullets will simply be known as the "Bulle
One square meter of land on a bright sunny day will get appx 1.6kW of light in an hour. Assuming 11-13% efficiency as mentioned in the article, you'd get just a little over 160 watts per square meter per hour.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
From TFA:
The cost to the consumer _could_ be as low as _$2_ per watt.
Anybody spot the weasel word? Then there is the $2 cost to the consumer, rather than the $1 which is the cited production cost. Also, the article makes no mention of what levels of incoming radiation these numbers were calculated for. $1/W means something quite different in Egypt than it would mean in Sweden. Is the $2/W derived from the peak efficiency under ideal weather conditions, or is it the average over a year?
Essentially, if you want a real estimate of the price of a power technology you don't want price per power, you want Energy per Life-cycle costs. So if these cells last for 10 years you want to know how much total energy they could be estimated to produce during that time, compared to the cost of the panel. Other aspects like intermittent production and so on factor in, but in any way, price per [peak ?] power output is not a very useful number from an economical point of view. For solar cells you want at least the estimated cost over a life cycle with the assumed weather conditions specified. Less than that and you can easily massage the data by making strange assumptions.
It doesn't matter how cheap and efficient solar panels become. The electric companies will do everything in their power to keep this kind of thing off the market to ensure the status quo.
"The Grid" is highly subsidized. If people had to pay the full capitol costs of bringing the Grid to their property up front they would find many situations where solar arrays on the house was the cheaper option. It's also pretty easy to save most of the electricity we use:
- efficient lighting
- 12v brushless dc motors in appliances
- use gas to heat stove, dryer, water heater
You can buy a nice solar array for the actual cost (not the subsidized cost) of bringing residential electric onto your property to the meter base and on into the breaker panel.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
More is needed, though - even with cheap and plentiful solar cells you're still up against some physical limits. You've only got so many square feet of southern exposure you can put panels on - and it's not anywhere near enough to support your current level of electric power consumption. Keep in mind that solar panels are rated at "full sun" and in the middle of winter you'll be lucky to get 10% of that on a bright sunny day.
So a good place to start is to find ways to reduce your power consumption. Not "feel good" little reductions, but serious cutbacks. Think about things like skylights in kitchens / bathrooms (free lighting), better insulation and weather stripping, and even some automatic controls on things like lighting, heating, etc. - these will remember to shut off the lights, turn down the heat, etc. even when you forget.
Pick up a small watt meter; something like the "Kill a Watt" can help you discover where the power is going. You'll find that a lot of it is pure waste and easily eliminated. Use task lighting instead of lighting up the whole room / house, look for more ways to reduce consumption.
You'll have to make some concessions and adjustments to live a low power consumption lifestyle - it's up to you to determine how far you can comfortably go. But if you can cut your consumption by 50% or more (very possible) then you're getting to the point where those solar panels can supply enough power to keep you going.
And you're going to need some kind of backup generation for those dark and dreary winter days. House sized generators are usually NOT cost effective, battery banks are expensive and troublesome. Grid-tied systems are clean and easy - but get the facts from your local utility before going this way. Some are very reasonable, some want to pay you their "generated cost" (less than wholesale) for the power you put into the grid - but charge you peak rate for the power you pull from the grid. This can wipe out your solar savings; be careful. Choose which ever of these best fits your needs and hope you never need to use it.
I don't dispute that there's a big pile of assumptions there. The thing is there is geometric rate of increased consumption in power and we are not building new capacity at a parallel rate. As consumption curve starts to hit the production cruve the cost of power which has varied little for decades is going to go through the roof. 25 cents per KW-hour will seem like a pipedream in 2040.
/year. That's a drop in the GW/day bucket.
Since this may seem implausible consider this. The world is on track to double its energy consumption by 2040. To reach that point in a linear fashion--not geometric one--would mean bringing on line three gigawatt class power plants every day from now until then. Right now the figure is about 10 GW plants per year because we are in early long tails of that geometric growth curve.
About now your jaw should be dropping as you ponder the implications.
Thus what has to happen, other than permanent blackouts in most of the world and carbon poisoning of the planet, is that the growth rate must be stifled. And that is going to happen when the price of electricity hits ~$10/KW-hour and all then people will economize and buy energy saving appliances.
I did not make up those numbers. read the 2030 report from the department of energy.
So I was being generous assuming 25 cents per KW-hour grid rates.
Of and by the way, note that the plant for solars cells will produce 200MW
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It is more efficient than burning coal/oil/natural gas to produce heat, converting that heat to electricity, transmitting that electricity for several miles, and converting it back to heat. However you are correct - there is no dryer that is anywhere near as efficient as a clothes line.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
Yes.
And after they place the condemnation notice on your front door, they'll kick your dog.
Seriously, what makes you think that the engineers building this thing are so incompetent that they haven't considered the possibility of hail falling on your roof? They actually do run tests like that. Second to last paragraph here.
I also find it very interesting that you didn't mention the dangers of actually living in a poison-dusted home, but only the danger that the EPA might deny you your God-given right to live in said death trap.
Tell you what, when serious people who actually know about the toxicity and regulatory requirements of cadmium telluride start telling me that this solar technology may present problems, then maybe I'll start worrying.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
What is so bad about lead acid batteries? They are 100% recyclable. The lead can be re-used for new batteries.
I live in Colorado and I find this story interesting in relationship to another story about a year or so ago about a man in Colorado who installed a roof's worth of solar electric panels which gave him juice to spare. The spare electricity was fed back to the grid, causing his electric meter to spin in reverse. When the local power company found out about it, they installed a "special" meter that would only spin in one direction (in their favor, of course). I think we need some legislation to require power companies to buy back any excess generated power. CB
You do realise that he was right? The green revolution along with declining birth rates in the western world has ensured that we have enough food - but starvation is a reality elsewhere.
That's the thing about many, I won't say all because I consider myself one, environmentalists don't and won't consider, as people improve their economics they have fewer children. Up until recently the countries with the highest population growth were China and India. However now that their economies are booming their population are leveling off. A concern in China is that in a generation or two there won't be enough working adults paying for an aged population. Whereas now there's something like up to 10 people working for every retired person then there will be only 3 workers. Where population growth is now a concern is in Africa which due to conflicts and politics is doing poor economically.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Here's the thing. It always seems like solar cell wattages are not average, but rated assuming a sahara desert level of sunlight. So, you'll rarely see 1watt out of a 1 watt panel - and if you did, it would be for perhaps an hour or so on a july day, and not much more. On average, you would get a curve going from zero to something like a fraction of the watt, and from there, you can extrapolate that you'd need a lot more solar cells to actually power your house.
This is my sig.
Balls. The sun produces about a bazillion gazillion megagiga superwatts, and about a squazillionth of that actually goes into drying your clothes. That must be the least efficient clothes dryer you could possibly imagine, unless you try and dry your clothes from a more distant star or mabe by bouncing sunlight off the moon.
This idea was invented by Shampoo.
as opposed to all that, but instead of applying the sunlight directly to the clothes, absorbing the light millions of years ago with trees, so that the light falls on the leaves, the trees photosynthesise, and store the solar energy as cellulose, then burying and preserving those trees and then compressing hem for millions of years to process them into coal or oil, then digging into the ground, sending people down to mine the coal out with huge drills and cutters, or pumping the oil out, often at sea on huge floating platforms and carrying the coal in trucks, and pumping the oil through pipelines, so a place where it is burned to heat water, which tuns turbines, which turn big magnets which move electrons down wires,which turn other magnets and heat bits of metal, so that fans attached to the magnets can punch air over the hot bits of metal, and other magnets can turn a big drum.
nah, I think the sunlight directly onto the clothes is more efficient.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
This is exactly why rooftop panels are so popular. It's area that already needs covering with something. Getting more panels then roof size, though, comes to a trade-off of what else the area could be doing, like growing crops or forests.
I for one am a big supporter of earth-berm homes for their efficiency and ground-source heat pumps as well. Put a greenhouse on your southern exposure above ground, and use the heat from that in the winter. Eating more fresh fruits and vegetables grown locally cuts down on cooking energy and transport energy. In short, making smart choices for how to live with the land instead of separating ourselves from it so much can make a big difference.
Of course, in a 40-story high-rise, it's a little difficult to do many of these things. It's also not like we're going to get everyone to switch to a rural lifestyle. Mass transit, green rooftops, and light-colored exterior surfaces are some steps in the right direction in cities. It's an architectural challenge to make the interior rooms on the middle floors of a skyscraper passively heated, cooled, and lit. Yet it's not like we want all that vertical space to sprawl out horizontally either. This is tough stuff to figure out, and I hope some very smart people are working very hard on it.
Hmmm...well, let's try a different tack. According to my electric bill, I used 929 kWh this month. If I spread that energy usage out evenly (assume 10 hours a day you are consuming energy like you did above), that's 929/720 = 3.1 kW of continuous consumption. To put up a solar panel that will meet these requirements, it would cost me $3, whereas my bill for this month was $165.
I think something was lost in your unit conversions because the cost you calculate seems too high. But mine also seems too low....
So after the first child, you keep killing until you have the other gender?
878659 - yep its prime.
Also there is perceived value in the "status" derived from such a purchase, and the value of "feel good" has supported many causes. :-) To the extent that you can classify motives as rational and nonrational, I've also noticed some nonrational reasoning by people who could get a PV system, but don't. They do the math, and figure out that they can get a guaranteed 5% ROI over 25 years, and possibly much higher if electric rates continue their historical upward trend. (Of course the ROI depends on a lot of factors -- which way your roof faces, how much shade you get, etc.). They then compare with what they're hoping to make on the stock market, or what the stock market has returned in a good year, and conclude that PV is a bad investment. I think people respond well to any investment that offers them the possibility of daydreaming about getting rich quickly with no effort. A risk-free 5% return, with the possibility of being significantly higher, is actually a much better investment then government bonds, but people don't think about it that way.
It's true that the feel-good effect was a factor in my family's decision to get photovoltaics. As far as status, you actually can't see our panels very easily from the street, so I don't think most of the neighbors even know
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