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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
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.
There are several houses on my area in Northern California that have photovoltaic installations that produce more electricity than the homes consume. The excess goes to the power company for a credit against future use. These are homes with air conditioning and people that don't live austere lives. Their installations cover less than the entire south facing slope of a conventional roof. The problem is that they wouldn't come close to paying off without big fat gumnt subsidies. At $2.00/Watt they would be economically feasible without subsidies.
Assume the panels are 1/2 the cost of the system so the total system costs $4/Watt, or $8,000 for a 2 kW system. Assuming 6 hours a day generation, that's 4380 kW-hrs a year, or at $0.10 kW/hr that's $438 worth of electricity. 438/8000 = 5.4% tax free return on investment. If you live in the US with a decent income, you would have to earn over $700 to have $438 for your power bill after taxes.
If you don't like my numbers feel free to substitute your own.
Note that it's very hard to be green with an off-grid system. Off-grid systems tend to use batteries, and for proper operation you don't want to discharge the batteries too deep, and so quite often you overprovision your cells and you end up throwing away the energy from the cells into mostly full batteries a lot of the time. You can try to live greener (more efficient appliances etc.) and that's almost a must off-grid, but the off grid electricity itself is very expensive.
On grid, every watt generated by the panels goes somewhere and does something, because you feed it back to the grid, where it reduces the demand for fuel-burning electricity.
So living off the grid can be rewarding for those who want to be very non-urban, but it should not be confused with being green, energy wise.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
"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
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!
I would mod you up for that if I could. I try to not think about places that require AC at night
FWIW, this area has around 30 days over 100 per year. Nights are usually comfortable and the daytime humidity is low.
Shit, durring the summer in TX we're lucky if it gets below 90 at any point durring the night. Last night around 3am it got down to 87, and the AC was off for more than 15 min. AC units pretty much run 24/7 may-october here and a $350 july or august electric bill isn't at all uncommon ($.11-.13 per kw/hr here in Dallas). Temps typically only fluctuate 8-10 degrees between highs and lows here. I think solar would be a great argument here durring the summer...
moox. for a new generation.
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.