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Silicon Valley Startup Prints $1/watt Solar Panels
GWBasic writes "A Silicon Valley start-up called Nanosolar has shipped its first solar panels — priced at $1 a watt. That's the price at which solar energy gets cheaper than coal. While other companies have been focusing their efforts on increasing the efficiency of solar panels, Nanosolar took a different approach. It focused on manufacturing. 'The company [has developed] a process to print solar cells made out of CIGS, or copper indium gallium selenide, a combination of elements that many companies are pursuing as an alternative to silicon.'" The outfit also happens to be backed by Google, a fact that's getting some attention at tech media sites.
From the article: "Roscheisen said the manufacturing process the company has developed will enable it to eventually deliver solar electricity for less than a dollar per watt"
Nowhere in the article does it mention the price of the first run of panels. I'd imagine they are much more expensive than $1/watt.
They have a 25 year warranty, so hopefully they'll last at least that long.
They are printed on aluminum instead of glass so yes, they are flexible.
It is a rather safe formulation. That's one of the reasons why it's more popular among new companies than cadmium telluride cells.
Nobody can "put their money where their mouth is" and "snatch these up", because all of their capacity is currently being eaten up by a 1MW german PV installation. And, one correction to the article: they're not being sold for $0.99. The company has stated that they can turn a profit on them selling them at $0.99. But as long as there's a glut of demand and shortage of cells, it seems unlikely that they'll hit that price. What it *does* mean is that Nanosolar never has to worry about money again. Venture capitalists will be throwing money at them if only Nanosolar lets them. They'll have no problem scaling up production; we just need to be patient.
We should start dealing in those black-market beagles.
You have to clear the snow off of it, it only works when the sun is out so you need a crap-load of batteries or $15-20k worth of automated switching equipment which allows you to be simultaneously connected to the grid without electrocuting the lineman who is working on your pole and thinks the power is off, you probably need to multiply your number by at least 4, because you need to generate power for the 75% of the time you're not getting good sun in the 25% of the time that you are, and you need some pricey inverters if you want to run devices designed for 110V AC...
Additionally, they're not actually $1/watt. That's the theoretical cost if they are able to ramp up production as planned. If you had $1 for every startup that failed in that phase, you wouldn't care how much your solar panels cost.
In hotter climates people use solar roofings already, especially for electric water boilers. But with sufficiently cheap and available coating, people could make entire roofs covered with solar panels. You'd also of course have to think about things like durability and waterproofing.
/. troll will point out), it'll grow on its own.
(Up front, I apologize to all the yanks for being an insensitive clod that doesn't use imperial measurements).
Earth's surface is absorbing ~90 petawatts of electricity any give time (Wikipedia), and with 510 million square kilometers of surface area, an incredibly rough generalized calculation says that each square meter absorbs 175 watts (this is a 24-hour average, even though obviously it's all absorbed during daytime). Of course, not all or even most of it can be converted to electricity, but still, that's a huge resource tap. I'd estimate an average home to have a roof surface area of about 50 square meters, which means that on average the sun sends 8kW on your roof. Next, the average American household uses 8900 kWh/year, which produces, again, an average usage of about 1 kilowatt per household. If you tile your entire roof with solar panels, you'd need to be able to convert 12% of heat/light energy to electricity in order to be fully self-sufficient.
An extra bonus is that the more you absorb the sun's energy as electricity, the less of it is converted to heat which dissipates around the planet, and that in and of itself reduces the effect global warming. So you are being twice as productive - not rely on heat-trapping coal, and reduce the amount of heat that saturates on the planet in the first place.
Of course, this would have to be done on a truly massive scale to have any effect, but every bit helps, and if the industry can make it profitable to the consumer (and of course overcome the interests of evil megalomaniac neofascistliberal Big Oil corporations, as any
Quite a few problems with that. :)
For one, I can't picture production capacity catching up with demand enough to lower prices to that level for at least a decade, and even that would take a trenemdous expansion rate. There's no way Nanosolar is going to *sell* at $0.99/W when the current market price if $5.80/W and they don't have enough production capacity to meet supply. They stated that they can *turn a profit* selling at $0.99/W. They'll sell for $5.70/W, $5.60/W, or whatnot -- whatever's the most they can charge and move all their capacity. They're not idiots. They're going to earn every last dollar they can, and pump it into new production facilities. Only as the market becomes saturated will prices drop.
Secondly, global warming is going to happen even if all killed ourselves today. There's too much inertia behind the problem. What we effect today is what things are going to be like in 2050, 2100, not the next decade or two.
Third, this doesn't address vehicles. Still have to take care of that gorilla in the corner. It also doesn't address industry CO2 pollution unrelated to power demand, such as steel production. Still, it's a great start.
Fourth, you don't need to cover a big expanse of desert at all. There's more than enough rooftop space in the world to meet demand. Example: China has 32521 square kilometers of urban area. Assuming 11% efficiency on these cells and 25% of that urban area being able to be coated in cells, and assuming an average insolation of 200W/m^2, we get a total power production of about 180 terrawatts. Current *world* demand is only 10 terrawatts. See where I'm going with this?
Fifth, ultracapacitors are too expensive for power storage currently. We're still going to need baseload power production until a cheaper method of storing power can be found. One concept that I find interesting relates to electric cars. To charge a car quickly in your garage, you're going to need a home charging unit. Your house just can't deliver power nearly fast enough for a five to ten minute charge. The idea I read is to use those for power balancing: have them charge themselves when there's a glut of electricity and discharge into the grid when there's a shortage. In exchange, utilities would give consumers a significant discount on their power bill.
We should start dealing in those black-market beagles.
Yes, it is cheaper than coal power, almost everywhere in the US. You can run the numbers for yourself. The problem with coal is that once you burn it, it's gone. The problem with traditional solar is that the capital costs are so high, you'll never catch up with the interest. When you cut the capital costs on solar significantly, it wins hands-down.
We should start dealing in those black-market beagles.
1 kWh = 3.61 x 10^6 J
$0.07/kWh = 14.3 kWh/$ = 51.6 x 10^6 J/$
solar panel = $1/W = $1/(J/s)
3600 s/h, 24 h/d, 365 d/year --> 31.5 x 10^6 s
51.6 x 10^6 (J/$) / 31.5 x 10^6 (J/year/$) --> 1.64 years (producing at full capacity) makes it cheaper than coal. Even if you only run at 25% capacity on average, taking into account varying daily solar intensity, the investment pays for itself in 6.5 years.
Of course, your other points are valid; burning coal is bad, at least using the current technology. And that $1/W number is still theoretical, so if they're selling at $4/W, then it would take 26 years to be as cost-effective as coal (given constant energy costs; but that time would be much shorter if we have an energy crunch and prices spike--or another Enron-style price-gouging scam, for that matter).
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
The calculations are a lot more complicated than that. You can check the source for the calculator (linked earlier) to get an idea of all that needs to be taken into account.
The reported wattage of a panel is typically the amount of power it will produce when given 1000W/m^2 of sunlight and with the panel maintaining a constant temperature of 25C. 1000W/m^2 is basically your best-case situation here on the surface -- bright, crystal-clear sky on a summer day with the panel facing straight at the sun. Overall, the panel will average produce far less than its rating, but the exact amount is very complex to determine and depends on where you are and what your setup is like, so panels are rated in standard terms. Beyond that, there's also the "derate factor", which is the losses in your system apart from the panels -- wiring, terminals, etc, but most importantly, the losses in your inverter. 0.77 is a good derate factor. The derate factor drops with age. Panels also produce less power with age, but this effect is often overemphasized.
Secondly, you're confusing watts and watt hours. Watts are a unit of power, while watt hours are a unit of energy (a Joule, another common unit of energy, is a watt second). If your panel is producing 1W, then it's producing 1 Wh every hour -- i.e., 8.8 kWh/year. But if it's simply a panel that's rated for 1W, and isn't on a heliostat, you'll probably get something like 0.5 to 1.5kWh/year, depending on where you are.
We should start dealing in those black-market beagles.
Actually, you'd be surprised. They have a patent on their *specific* process, but they don't have a patent on CIGS cells in general, and there are quite a few companies pursuing them. I doubt anyone will be able to hit Nanosolar's price point because not only is Nanosolar ahead in terms of commercialization, but I think their tech is the most promising CIGS cell tech. Even still, the competitors should be able to at least approach Nanosolar's prices, and -- here's the big deal -- since it'd be a decade at best before Nanosolar could sate the market's demand enough to lower prices to that $1/W level, its competitors production should help the prices fall faster.
We should start dealing in those black-market beagles.
How do you explain the cooling trend in the 70s? You guys are the same tossers who were out there in the 70s claiming the Ice Age was coming,
Not really.
the same alarmists who were warning that everyone would soon burn up because of the ozone hole (which is now smaller, but the hole has always been there) in the 80s
Not really.
But, hey:
Don't try to educate me on the science
Finding the sand comfortable around your head, eh?
We should start dealing in those black-market beagles.