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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.'"
I have always been worrying the environmental impact of the cadmium. Could some one show me that the cadmium used in the photovoltaic has little or no environmental impact please?
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
a)How long do they last
b)How fragile are they
c)What temperature ranges can they survive
d)How strong light do they need
e)What environmental impact will the cadmium have
Sure, if it works all will be happy and dandy, but I somehow suspect there are some catches not mentioned here.
Cadmium... so not RoHS compliant, so not saleable at all in Europe and many other parts of the world. Oh dear.
I wonder if RoHS will be relaxed for solar energy?
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Unless they have no alternative to home-generated electricity, the cost of alternative generation systems is an uneconomic solution for most people.
I too live off-grid, in a small observatory at the top of a high mountain. Even though the cost of AC mains to the site was well-beyond my means, the only reason I could afford to generate my own electricity was because I work in the electrical industry and got the batteries, heavy cable, components for regulators and inverters, etc, for free.
The only things I had to pay for was the PV array and that was not a trivial expense, at $10 per-watt, excluding taxes and shipping.
My off-grid system works very well, but it requires a lot of on-going TLC, far more than most people I know could be bothered with providing. They want systems they don't have to think about and which "just work". Few have the self-discipline and willpower required to minimise their loads, letalone perform regular maintenance checks.
I've always been a Renewable Energy geek, but if I could have got an affordable AC mains connection to my site, I would have one. As much as I love playing with windgens and solar setups, with a wife and two kids now, I simply don't have as much free time on my hands as I used to.
Exactly! $1 a watt panels are darn expensive if they only last 5 years.
I run on 20 year old Solar panels here. I buy only used and discarded from solar plants out west and they look brown from the years of solar exposure but cost me far FAR less than buying new so I can afford more watts for the money. Decent used one approach $2.00 a watt but that is at higher voltages. and my panels will last another 30 years easily with care.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Here in Taiwan, we just had the annual solar trade show which is becoming a really big deal on the silicon island. Solar has become a huge because it dovetails right in with other semi industry players that get put together in industrial parks.
So this year there was a big dollar-per-watt announcement from Oerlikon. If you don't know who they are, they're a Swiss provider of turn-key thin film or amorphous silicon solar panel factories. They've got several partners in Taiwan already including, most recently, some of the large-scale optical media manufacturers who already use similar techniques and equipment and have some cash to invest.
The local Oerlikon rep was saying that producers will be at sixty cents per watt within forty eight months and that this will mean actual product at the dollar a watt level. Hey, I'm just passing along what the sales rep said. Obviously he's got a reason to overstate his case, but that's what he claimed was coming down the piple.
I think it's also worth noting that a former Slashdot sweetheart that went by the name of Spheral Solar has basically dropped off the map because they realized that amorphous silicon was going to take over.
Oerlikon bought up Excimer laser of the UK last year. One of the repeated steps in doing thin film solar is laser etching.
I'm not too sure about the tech being referred to in this piece, but dollar-a-watt PV, which is what the UN and other agencies have said is the tilting point where solar is cheaper than coal or natural gas, is already being spoken of at industry trade shows and shouldn't be seen as a wildly implausible announcement.
And it would take approximately 18 years to pay off that $8000 investment. In comparison, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gone from $2693 to $13820 between Sep 1989 and Sep 2007. That gives us a 513% return over those 18 years versus simply breaking even and that's just playing it conservatively by buying indexes.
OK, let's see if this is for real.
First, the "story" is a regurgitated press release. For an more critical story by a local reporter, see "AVA Solar enters crowded field", by Tom Hacker.
The AVA Solar web site has almost no useful information. But they have a patent on the manufacturing process, which discloses what they're trying to do. Among other things, the patent tells us that "AVA" stands for "Air-Vacuum-Air". The process is mostly conducted in a low grade vacuum, with some preprocessing in air before the vacuum chamber and some final steps after vacuum processing. The big deal is supposed to be that there's only one trip in and out of vacuum, which simplifies the production process. This patent was filed in 2000, so they've been working on this for a while now.
They're trying to make cadmium-telluride solar cells, which aren't new. The new thing is making them with a continuous process, instead of in batches.
AVA Solar has some job ads on Dice. They're looking for a plant manager, and on Dice they say "200+" employees, rather than the "500+" mentioned in the press release. AVA Solar doesn't seem to actually make anything yet, so they have to build and run a new kind of manufacturing plant of their own design without an organization experienced in doing that. That's hard.
They're supposedly building a pilot plant, to be running by the end of 2007. So wait a few months. If that works, it's worth looking at them again.
Lets see. Assume the competing cost is at present 10 to 25 cents per KW-hour. We'll use the upper end because future power prices will rise whereas the Solar panel is a fixed cost.
So let's see the solar panels are 100000 cents per KiloWatt. if the last 4000 then that's breakeven. We'll assume that the power is available 10 hours per day. That's not realistic for individual use but perhaps with batteries, and selling back to the grid this could be done. So 4000 hours is 400 days. Or about 1 year. Not too bad.
Now that ignores the efficiency of either pushing back to the grid or battery storage. Let's assume 50% loss. Then this is 2 years to payback on the cells. But now we also have to payback on the batteries. Let's assume the batteries needed const aout the same as the solar cells. That would double this payback to 4 years.
Finally this is assuming capital is free. Assume one borrows at 8 % interest. Then this another 5 months to payback.
So the whole operation needs to run undegraded for 4 to 4.5 years I estimate for break even.
That figure could be cut in half if one could sell back to the grid rather than batteries. ( Fine--as long as there is a grid and every one does not do that!. )
If the cells were down to 50% effiency after 4 years then this extends out to ~7 years to payback. If one cannot get that watt for the full ten hours then this gets even longer.
It sounds to me, roughly speaking that at 1 dollar per what things are in the ballpark for breakeven.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
with conventional solar pannels the cost per watt is around $3-$5. so the $1 per watt price isnt that impressive, what is impressive is the scale at which they can produce these new panels... they could sell self install kits at wal-mart and still have no problem with inventory..
conventional panels have always been restricted by the amount of pure silicon that can be produced, and with microprocessors using the same pure silicon its been tough for solar panel makers to have enough supply to meet demand. in fact the major tech companies have multi year contracts on 99% of the pure silicon being produced world wide.
btw this technology does not cheapen solar power to utility electric rates.. according to a website about solar energy Around 59% of world solar product sales installed the last five years were in applications that are tied to the electricity grid. Solar Energy prices in these applications are 5-20 times more expensive than the cheapest source of conventional electricity generation, although they may only be 3-5 times the electricity tariff that utility customers pay. By contrast, PV can be fully cost competitive on economic grounds in remote (off-grid) industrial and habitational applications.http://www.solarbuzz.com/StatsCosts.htm
so cutting the solar panel cost to 1/2 of what it was before makes solar a preffered method of off-grid electrical applications, and brings the total consumer cost down to levels (15cents/kwh) that they would actually pay for electricity. still not ideal, if they can bring the cost down further with economies of scale, then this will start a revolution for earth-friendly consumers who will be able to take out a loan to buy a $10k system that cuts their electric bill by 25% (to fully power a house with typical energy usage would run about $40k with these pannels, or $80k with normal solar pannels) which means the pannels would have to last at least 34 years to recoup the cost invested in installing a solar system. (theyd have to last for 68 years with normal solar panels) now if youre using a grid+solar setup you can probablly keep using those solar panels as long as theyll crank out energy, but of course they do degrade over the years, producing less energy... and widespead solar power adoption will cause winter energy spikes, but if they have to have coal fired plants that they only run 3 months a year, because of widespread solar adoption... well itll be an improvement.
$1 per watt is frankly about 10 times more expensive than we need to get solar energy for solar electric companies to adopt the technology without government subsudies/regulation.
this is why companies like excell energy are turing to wind turbines to meet the 20% renewable energy production mandate minnesota has put them under by 2020.. wind turbines are ALREADY produced around the COST per kwh of coal fired plants. (theyre sold for more obviously though)
wind energy is a natural byproduct of solar energy, and with the new tidal stream generators it is possible that the uk and scottland could see more than 10% of their total electrical consumption produced entirely from rapidly moving undersea currents.
tidal projects obviously have less problems with home owners that wind farms, and since areas with high tidal streams tend to be far from good scuba diving sites there should be little complaint about installing tidal stream generators.. in the handful of places where they are genuinely viable.
its nice to know that more californians will be able to afford a basic solar install, but this isnt something so revolutionary that were going to stop building coal fired plants because of it.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Well, you could install it on poles to the south (if you're in the northern hemisphere) of your house with a passive single axis polar tracker. This, if installed with it in mind, would give the added benefit of shading your house during the hot summer months, as well as gaining better efficiency per panel. Of course you'd have to space them a bit so you don't shade a panel with another panel, and keep your trees cut back, but in areas with few trees and or which experience severe droughts (say Arizona, New Mexico, parts of Colorado and Utah) it would be very attractive. Add in a small motor and timer so that can preposition the panel and you don't have to wait for the system to 'wake up' in the morning.
For most installations http://www.zomeworks.com/ provides some of the better passive trackers.
Add to that in the sunnier places (southern US, CA, etc) you don't care much about heating, but you care a LOT about cooling.
That said - insulation is a better investment in almost all houses, IF it's possible to add without reconstruction - and in some types/ages of house, it isn't.
A 2 foot by 2 foot chunk of window glass in the store is $17.40 at Rona. A square meter is 10.76 square feet. So a 1 meter square piece of glass would cost $46.82 at these rates.
Even the cheapest solar cell should be expected to cost more than plain glass since it includes at a minimum plain glass.
Next.
Solar constant is 1300 watts per square meter in space and max 1000 on the surface of the earth.
One can expect on average 12 hours of darkness. Then we can expect only 50% of this max because most of the time its not high noon. One actually has to integrate the sin curve.
So we can say 12 hours at 500 watts average maximum collection and at best we can hope for about 50% of this. This 50% discount takes into account rainy days and snow blowing on it and maybe it gets a little dirty because people don't wash it often enough.... there are lots of things that can go wrong here. So I pick 50% out of the air as a practical fudge factor to convert to what is theoretically possible to what one might expect.
This is 3000 watt hours per day falling on the panel in a useful way, and the efficiency of the panel is say 10-13% so I'll use 10%. We can expect to get say 300 watt hours per day per square meter. This is 0.3 kwh which in worth say about 3 cents at a rate of 10 cents per kwh. This is still 25 watts per square meter for 12 hours and this is what a mini florescent draws.
But from the article - they say $1 per watt so I assume they mean per watt peak capacity.
This would be 100 watts per square meter since we have 10% of 1000 and the 1000 is peak. The duty cycle is at best 1/4 of this. Nevertheless, $1 per watt * 100 watts is $100 per square meter.
Thing is $100 per square meter is only 2x the cost of a plain glass windowpane so its actually unreasonable to expect they will be able to sell these panels at anywhere near 2x the cost of plain glass. A complete window assembly is in the order of a few $100 bux. Maybe we get the complete panel retailing at $200.
What should we expect to really get out of a $200 panel in terms of energy?
At best, 25% of max and this is about 25 watts per square meter and this is over 12 hours. Hence one should expect the thing to capture at most say 300 watt hours per day.
As I calculated before this is about 0.3 kwh = 3 cents worth of power. $0.03 * 365 = $10.90
Invest say $200 in a panel when it retails and get $10 per year from it in electricity. This is a 20 year pay back not counting installation, maintenance, and so forth. At a 5% interest rate (cost of capital) it has a ZERO Return on Investment (ROI).
Now the real issue. Suppose everyone does this. It will have the effect of destabilizing the grid because it puts the power company in the position of standing by ready to supply energy at night and when the sun doesn't shine but meanwhile when the sun is shinning their expensive infrastructure sits idle. So long before this gets deployed the rules get rewritten.
The thing is that we can already capture solar energy passively and build houses that will save way more than $1000 per year in energy and do this for a capital investment of less than $5,000. All we need to do is put R50 and R70 in the walls and ceilings. We can do a LOT more than this. To capture say $1000 per year with say these high efficiency panels will cost 100x$200 bux = $20,000 of capital and this does not include the control systems.
Starts looking a little worse once you figure install costs - another $1-1.50/watt, generally speaking
Add another $.50-1/watt for the inverter and miscellaneous, and you're up to $3/watt of capacity.
10k hours, figuring 8 hours a day, 365 days a year would be 3.4 years for raw payback on the panels. If you're not that optimum, it'd stretch to 4-5 easily.
Figure in the cost of the inverter and installation, and it jumps to 12-15 years easily, before any cost of capital expectations.
They not only have to make the solar panels cheaper and better, they also need to work in the install costs and make inverters a lot cheaper. Or start producing DC appliances. Though you should heat water mostly with a solar water heater, much cheaper and more efficient if you only need to heat water, not produce electricity.
I don't read AC A human right
Air conditioning is ridiculous. That said, using a vapor compression cycle is the problem. Evaporative cooling, adsorption chillers, and desiccant dehumidification (latent heat is more than half the AC load) can by accomplished with solar thermal technology (heat water with collectors on your roof, use low delta T to drive low COP AC equipment). It's not only possible, but it's been around for decades.
That rule has always annoyed me, since it removes the incentive to use your roof's insolation to the extent possible. I wonder if there is some way around it, perhaps by going co-op with your neighbors (e.g. so that if you overproduce, your bill goes to zero and your neighbor's bill is reduced by the extra amount... then at the end of the year your neighbor send you a check for the difference, or some percentage thereof)
Well, I can dream of a world where the rules make sense, anyway....
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
central montana, refrigerator, freezer water heater and stove where natural gas, house was heated with a wood/coal fired furnace that was later replaced with a gas furnace. so true, it was not powering what one would consider a "modern home" but honestly, i'd rather have a gas stove and water heater any day. true, you would need a MUCH larger array if you planned on running a electric water heater and stove, but i know you can get full size fridges from GE that use the same amount of power as a normal lightbulb. not to go off onto a diatribe or anything, but people forget that electricity is the most ineficiant way of heating water, powering a stove, or heating a house.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
I think the most important question is what would mass adoption of solar power due to our power grid. Non-solar generated electricity would go through the roof, for starters - causing the adoption rate to increase - again causing rates on non-solar energy to increase - until at some point the power companies wouldn't be able to afford to operate their grids anymore.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for using the most abundant, pure, and untapped energy source available to us -- but slapping a few panels on a house and calling it a day is just where it will start. One can't help but wonder what bumps will be on the road that follows. Industries would collapse, the economy would struggle to balance itself, communities and governments would struggle to maintain their grids.
Sounds like a real mess to me, one we seem to be destined to encounter (or perhaps face another worse should we not).
Maybe it's just me, but I think the impact of solar energy being cheaper than grid power is going to be a bigger concern than how long the cells last - eventually (and soon, no doubt) it's going to be much cheaper to go with solar power - yet there doesn't seem to be much discussion over such issues.
You know, it kinda makes me wonder how that increase will happen.
... In which case people buying energy-saving appliances will make almost no difference to the total.
... In which case they can build their own power plants, thank you very much. Electricity can't even be transported over _too_ large distances, so it's not like more space heaters in India will cause brownouts at your power plant in Florida.
Will it be mostly in the industrial sector for example?
Will it just mean more energy used in currently third world countries?
I'm saying that because, alarmism be damned, I just don't see that kind of increase in what people use electricity for. If I look at what I have around the house these days, vs what my parents had back in 75 (to use the same time interval back as what you propose forward to 2040), I'm not sure I actually use more energy than they did. E.g.,
- they had big ol' fashioned 100W lightbulbs all around the house, I have 15W CCFLs. Their (admittedly large) living room alone had 5x 100W light bulbs lighting it, I only have 2x 15W in mine.
- they had 1 fridge, I have 1 fridge. I think mine has better insulation, because, well, people discovered stuff in 30+ years.
- they had 1 washing machine, I have 1 washing machine. Theirs used a lot more power, I think. (When they bought a particular washing machine, we quickly discovered that the breakers kicked in when the washing machine's water heater, fridge and god knows what else, all kicked in.) Plus mine is rated for pretty high energy efficiency, while way back the notion wasn't even invented yet.
- for washing, there's only so much you can save, you know. (Short of stopping washing. Then again, looking at one particularly stinky co-worker... please, please, please don't. Saving the planet be damned, go take a shower;) Heating 1 litre of water by 1 degree has a lower limit on how little energy you can use, because, you know, it's just physics. Plus heating it was always as efficient as it gets: converting electricity to heat, we can do with 100% efficiency. It's only converting to other stuff that starts to be inefficient. The only thing that works differently is the insulation, and I think that's getting better too.
- they had 1 TV, I have 1 TV. You could keep the room warm with theirs, way back. Literally.
Etc.
The only thing that comes to mind as more energy used these days is my computer. Let's say that's, oh, I don't know, 200 or let's say 300W total. Just the lightbulbs in the living room cover that difference comfortably.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
In theory the one child per couple policy in China has been going on long enough that those children are marrying and each of those couples will be expected to look after 4 parents in later life. Worse still the couple's single child will marry and have 4 parents and 8 grandparents to worry about eventually.
I pay about $0.05/kilowatt here. Assuming I spent $1000 for 1Kw worth of panels, they would have to generate 20Mw worth of juice to pay for themselves. I average 700Kw/month, or about 8.4Mw/year. So if 1Kw worth of panels could entirely offset my electrical bill (sell back extra in the summer, buy back more in the winter), they would only have to last 3 years to make a profit. Who cares if they only last 5-10 years, at $1/watt they'll be a net gain for the consumer before they burn out. Even if they can only cut your annual costs in half, you are still hitting a ROI after 5 years. Factor in the tax incentives and your ROI is probably closer to 3 years.
Unfortunately though, my house is in a designated historic area. I don't think the city's historic preservation committee would be so keen on me installing solar panels on my roof.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Less demand shouldn't cause the price of electricity to increase. A reduction in the amount of expensive peak power should improve the situation a good deal.
We'll still need the power grid to give us power at night, or after whatever batteries we have run out. The first thing that will change is the laws that give you credit for the excess electricity your solar panels generate. With mass adoption of solar the grid will have to stop acting as a free battery (i.e. buying power from you at the same retail rate it sells for).