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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.
i was reading their webpage the other day and they only seemed to sell to large corporations or utilitiy companies. when will they start offering a consumer version.
Of course coal also works at night.
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
Once they get their manufacturing up to speed, prices will most likely get even lower.
Too bad they're already sold out for the first 18 months of production, because at those prices, you could make a typical house solar for about $1500-2000 for the panels, plus another few grand for installation and hookup. At that price, it makes a lot of sense.
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.
I don't really know whether global warming is real and dangerous. Now just maybe I don't have to care.
Can we conver Arizona with these (and use ultracapacitors for night power)? Please?
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.
Will they last, are they durable, is it flexible or rigid? Lot of questions left to answer on the solar front. However, if I can shingle my roof with these things, all the better!
If you are going to shingle your roof then "are they fire resistant" and "do they release toxic fumes when burning" should be two more explicit first questions.
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.
It's not just the cost of the panel that matters, but the anticipated life of the panel. Traditionally, it has taken more energy to make a panel than that panel will return to the grid. That's not as big a deal if you're truly off grid - say in the boonies, or in space - but it matters if you want to make it viable in a business sense. And it can't just be equal, it's got to be a significantly low fraction. Otherwise you're creating an energy storage medium (and a very limited one in the case of a solar panel) instead of a power generator.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This stuff is already hard to come by. We won't all be covering our houses in this stuff!
In Soviet Russia you own your cat
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.
Watt is a unit of power, not energy. So its watts (presumably, in some specified lighting conditions), not "watt/hour".
Assuming it was average output per 6 hours of usable time a day (which its probably not, its more likely the peak at the best conditions), and presuming also that surface area limits are not an issue (which they may well be), and that $1/watt was the current cost, rather than an estimate of what the technology would eventually provide, yes, $1000 would get you panels that would produce ~$180 kW-h (not kW/h) per month.
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