Slashdot Mirror
Bigger, Cheaper Solar Cells
Phenombecile800 writes "First Solar, a start-up from Arizona, is making photovoltaic cells at a fraction of the usual cost. Their secret: increasing the light-catching area 'from postage-stamp to traffic-sign dimensions,' reducing the manufacturing time to 1/10th of the competition's, and thinning the active element to 1/100th the usual thickness over a glass substrate, which enables the production of large panels. IEEE Spectrum provides some technical details about the production process. 'Glass is placed on rollers and fed into the first chamber, where it is heated to 600 C. Then it is transferred into the second chamber, which is full of cadmium sulfide vapor, formed by heating solid CdS to 700 C. The vapor forms a submicrometer deposit on the glass as it moves through this cloud, after which a similar process in a third chamber adds a layer of micrometers-thick CdTe in about 40 seconds. Then a gust of nitrogen gas rapidly cools the panels to 300 C in a fourth chamber, strengthening the material so that it can withstand hail and high winds.'"
On the other hand, that's not the only criteria for using solar power. The upfront cost of the physical plant is significant of course, as are maintenance costs and the payback period. However, if widespread use of solar reduces overall environmental impact and lowers petroleum consumption it might still be worth it, even if the cells themselves are expensive.
What everyone seems to be waiting for is a cost-per-watt that is low enough so that ordinary people will decide to start buying them in large quantities without government subsidization. Suppose you're having a new house built: if you could install a ten or fifteen kilowatt solar plant and inverter for ten grand, you might figure it's worth it to borrow a little more money from the bank. I think we'll see more of that as our distribution grid continues to deteriorate and utility power becomes less and less reliable.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Oil is yesterday. McCain is so old school he can only imagine increasing the supply of oil. What he and the GOP don't like is the obvious need to encourage commuting by bicycle and public transit--as we have here in NYC--so that people like me can gleefully sell their cars and live without one. This style of low-impact life, where you're not always dragging around a big metal car with you, does not offer as many profit opportunities. Corporations don't like a low-stuff life because they can't take as much of our money away, then.
Maybe it makes sense to have a solar powered solar panel plant.
So how much cadmium is needed, and how much leaks during the manufacturing process? Given that the opposition to nuclear power worries about toxic materials that decay with time, one would imagine there would be some concern about carcinogens that remain a danger forever, and cannot be destroyed.
It's probably unanswerable, but I wonder how much energy it takes to make these cells, and how long it takes for them to offset that?
From my understanding, current systems (with tax rebate) pay for itself in 10 years at current prices from the end users standpoint.
However, if say conventional energy prices double again in the next 5 years, then solar panels will have payed for themselves in a much less of a time frame even without the rebate.
I think its a misnomer about how much any energy it takes to make something because the price of energy itself fluctuates with time. Lets say it might take 10 barrels of oil to create one solar panel that produces 1 barrel of energy a year saving which will pay itself off in 10 years but if oil costs $100 last year and $200 in the next 5, then your $1,000 system now is worth $2,000 and your system is creating the equivalent of $200 worth of energy saved a year therefore paying itself off in 5 years.
Hope that made sense. I'm sure the numbers are no where like that though.
Seeing that the price of sunlight is less volatile than the price oil or coal, one could really gamble that peak oil will make any investments into solar pay for itself in short order in the next decade.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
And all that is going to happen WHEN? As others have pointed out a lot of these technologies haave been "any day now" for 20 years. Wind is certainly ready now but you know the wind doesn't blow all the time (and it has to be fairly strong to move the blades) so that power source is not going to consistent and high levels. We can have oil from additional offshore drilling in a couple years, maybe less (California for instance..they know it's there as it was explored in the 1970's). And don't forget China is drilling in Cuba which is only 90 miles offshore! Until we get these pie-in-the-sky alternative technologies going full steam we need to find a way to get more oil & natural gas.(How do you think they fire those furnances to make glass for those solar panels?) I've never seen McCain to be against alternative ideas, just a realist who knows it takes time to get this stuff to market, and in the meantime we need to ensure our supply is strong of oil. What we NEED is more nuclear power but interestingly enough thats not an option according to Mr O. He admires the European model of Government so much why doesn't he see they were wise in using nuclear power? As for commuting by bike or rail or subway, that option doesn't exist for many cities in the USA. You obviously have never been to places like Dallas, Denver or Atlanta where mass transit is only somewhat available. And what about those people who don't live in the city? Are they supposed to ride a bike 30 miles to the big city to work? If you look a bit you"ll find carpools in many places where there is a large suburban workforce so conservation is occuring as is practical. It has nothing to do with corporations or anything like that. It's just the way things are. So quit your NYC psychobabble Obama spin, get outside the city and look at how the REAL world works and has to live.
WE just had a spill caused by human stupidity and penny pinching [oil tanker in the Mississippi that leaked all that heavy oil after a barge hit it] and so I have no faith in the Prince-William-Sound fouling oil industry to not have major accidents and ruin our common coastlines and all the wildlife and environments that live there. You're missing the point entirely. Oil is not a long-term solution. Why waste another dime on trying to extend the supply. We have clearly had something change in our weather patterns. We know oil is a fossil fuel that is destined to run out. Look at them flailing in China to clean up their air in time for the Olympics. Oil is just bad all around. So, according to your view, it is the best choice to direct our attention towards squeezing out those last few drops of oil, which--according to the 80-20 rule--will be the hardest, most expensive and lease safe of all? You're short sighted. To use an analogy that would be understood by all the slashdotters, you're the guy whose advocating that we rebuild our company's systems in COBOL rather than Java/.NET/ or whatever newer. Coal and oil do not need time or attention wasted on them. They are dirty, and only enrich a few people at the top of coal companies. We need diverse and varied sources of energy that are renewable. We need to try several things and let the marketplace choose which ones are the best. The real problem is that the oil industry is allowed to dump a byproduct of their commodity into the atmosphere and the waterways without accounting for that damage. If you accounted for the damage oil is doing to our environment, and made oil companies sell their product while paying for that damage, we would all see that the current petroleum-oriented economy is terrible. Anybody who roots for more oil drilling is just some deluded troglodyte who really doesn't care what happens to this world as long as they can get rich in it, and "have theirs". Well, we've had enough of people who are willing to get theirs even if it means they have to go out late Saturday nights and tip over a 50-gallon-drum of toxic waste into the local creek. If it saves them some money, they're all for it. We've had enough of that type of bastard.
Currently you can expect a home solar panel installation to pay for itself within 7 years (here in southern Ontario). If you combine it with wind turbines you can get your money back sooner, and if you spend the extra to be able to sell electricity back to the grid, you can get a payback much sooner because Ontario hydro (the power company here) pays you more than it would charge for the electricity (no distribution fee).
Ideally you want the installation to last for 10 years or more without significant failures, though.
Often "thinner and cheaper" translates to "more easily broken" and "less reliable" - for example, when the units flex in high winds. So my main worry would be about the expected (and achievable) lifetime of the units. Maybe if they gave a five or ten year warranty I'd be OK with it.
Live barefoot!
free engravings/woodcuts
How much energy does it take to maintain an oil platform in the North Sea? How much energy did it take to build Hoover Dam? We're not going to get a magic machine that gives us energy and costs none to build. Even if the answer is "years and years," the point is that we're trading dirty energy for clean energy, so it's worth doing.
I piss off bigots.
The reason none of these things have gone on line is because of the attitudes of people like you. There has been no concerted investment, ala the Manhattan Project. In lieu of any concentrated, directed effort to achieve a goal, nothing gets accomplished.
The sun shines reliably for a large fraction of the day--why not invest in that?
I find it curious how your standards of acceptability change: in the case of the alternatives available: switch grass, solar, wind, you play the pessimist. In the case of oil available off the coasts, suddenly you're an optimist. The US Department of Energy [you know, the one with all the Bush appointees in it] has said that 1.) offshore oil will not enter the supply chain for ten years minimum, not "a couple years" [implying 2], as you allege.
Next you toss out the red-herring [meaning irrelevant] point of the Chinese drilling in Cuba--a claim which has been shown to be false so clearly that former GOP Candidate Rudy Guilliani himself uses future tense to describe this alleged problem, which is still a red herring. Do two wrongs make a right? [China allegedly drilling around Cuba and the US drilling off Florida?]
Again, when you address the oil industry, it's all solid to you. When it comes to alternatives, it's "pie-in-the-sky". What are you, an oil-industry flack? You reluctant to learn new things or something?
Though Nuclear does have the benefit of no greenhouse gases, it still has the same fundamental problem that oil does: it's business model is predicated on NOT dealing with its wastes! We STILL doe not have a solution to the incredibly toxic wastes we've been generating for decades. The only solution is to hide the waste. You think this is a viable alternative? Or, are you a Nuclear Energy devotee who has some business interest in that industry. When you advocate dirty technologies, how can we take you seriously?
By the way, I lived in Houston and there is mass transit which I used while working for HP
. And the solution is not--duh--biking 30 miles, it's moving closer to your work and downsizing your stuff.
As I can re-iterate: I have lived all over the United States and this model in NYC is the only one I see as being viable. I've lived and commuted in Omaha, Phoenix, Houston, Cincinnati and Salt Lake City. I always chose to live as close as possible to work.
Such name calling as labeling environmentalism "psychobabble" is convincing fewer and fewer people, my friend. The babble is coming from you fools who seem to prefer fouling your own nests.
You know, in this case you may be right. Depends upon how tolerant the process is of power failures. Plants producing silicon wafers really need stable power, but this process might be different. If nothing else, lower power requirements might mean that solar could be effectively used to offset utility costs.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Oil IS yesterday, and energy savings are good if we can obtain them in a painless way such as insulating our attics or improving the efficiency of our cars. But it's not just the corporations that see no profit in a low-impact life; ordinary people see no pleasure in it either.
I'm tired of installing overpriced compact fluorescents that give dim, ugly light. I'm not going to bring a week's worth of groceries for a family of four home on my bike or on the bus. I'm going to keep my house at the temperature I like rather than feel hot and sweaty all summer and cold all winter. The world demand for energy is not going to go down through self-sacrifice -- we can put that notion out of our heads right now. It might make you feel superior; it would only make me feel like I've moved to a Third World country, at a time when the Third World is working its butt off to become First World, and that means consuming more energy.
Improve efficiency, fine. Improve production, fine. Cut back expenditure through self-denial? Screw that. Life is too short for it to be unpleasant as well.
I piss off bigots.
That's to be expected, selling to commercial or retail buyers allows them to sell in much higher quantities, plus those buyers are more likely to need larger ones as well.
Ultimately, whomever they sell to, if you're living in an area where the panels are being installed you're still going to be getting benefits from the advance, even if it's a small reduction in the price of electricity and pollution.
There isn't likely any reason why somebody couldn't buy in bulk to provide to home owners, it looks to me far more like a disinterest in direct marketing than a wish to not allow small scale sales.
And that is exactly what you need in countries that don't have a subsidization program. In the USA, I can see some of the more "green" states like California providing subsidies, but the current federal government seems more inclined to support the petroleum industry. How much change Obama would bring remains to be seen.
So a cost-per-watt that doesn't need subsidies will be an important step forward in making solar power widespread. A deteriorating distribution grid will also do its part, especially if the cost-per-watt-hour of batteries decreases. Here I guess that new Li-Ion chemistries will do their part when more manufacturers make them and competition kicks in.
C - the footgun of programming languages
The POINT is not the PRESENCE of the oil but, rather, the POLLUTION of the oil. When they find a batch of bad commodity--a freighter of moldy wheat, a herd of steers with Mad-Cow Disease, they don't decide to finish them off. They discard them. To complete the analogy (for those of you who were not paying attention), we recognize that petroleum is poisoning the earth. We need to get off this stuff as fast as possible. I want a president who is NOT beholding to the oil industry, like John McCain is. I want a president who is closer to understanding that oil is bad shit.
China may indeed drill for oil outside Cuba but, again, how do two wrongs make a right? We see that oil is not good for us, considering the air, groundwater, geopolitics, funding of oil wars, creation of excess plastics, ad infinitum.
(Slashdot is one of my news sources, Mr Steeped in Stereotypes.)
Fair question if I am a flack, but I am not. I am just irritated with the big lie we have been sold.
When I lived in Iowa City, I rode a bicycle to and from work daily. In Houston, I did have a car but I took the bus. In Salt Lake City, which is building light rail, I drove and rode a bicycle. It is so ridiculously easy to go long distances daily on a bike that I find it interesting you even make the argument.
As for your dire situation, having bought a house way the hell out in the Suburbs... Well, I believe there was a line in "Animal House" that sums up your situation in the suburbs. "You fucked up. Live with it." Aren't you Conservatives so hell bent on giving sway to the market? Well, here's your market: you bought a big house out in the middle of East Bum Fuck Egypt, and now that has turned out to be a stupid move... And, again, tell me why your mistake is my problem? Would you be on the edge of your chair to help me if I had made a mistake that cost me a lot of money? I don't think so.
> Given that glass beer bottles cost a few cents each, a square meter of glass probably takes no more than a few dozen kWh....
This isn't beer bottle glass though. Beer bottles are generally blown out of recycled glass, while panel glass is produced by floating clear glass (generally not recycled) floated on molten zinc. Point being that the process is considerably more energy intensive than an equivalent number of beer bottles.
Now, they probably could get away with cheap recycled glass (i.e. brown, like beer bottles) and use a low power continuous vapor deposition system if/when these get mass produced, but in their current state I'd wouldn't be surprised if the break-even point is around 1.5 years.
The IEEE Spectrum editors had a blog post related to this article that the poster missed:
"To take another example, First Solar, a relatively young company based in Tempe, Arizona, has suddenly been getting a lot of attention with claims that it has figured out a way to make PV material at an installation cost of $1 per wattâ"though the global average for solar installations was in the range of $6 or $7 per watt last year. How plausible is that claim? Well, itâ(TM)s hard to know, because as a feature article appearing in this monthâ(TM)s IEEE Spectrum magazine points out, âoeThe company does not talk to reporters. Not at all.â"
The take-home point here? Be wary of companies that make extravagant claims without details. Especially if the best they can do now is $3/W.
Now I do like First Solar more than some of Slashdot's other favorite snake-oil salesmen (anyone remember EESTOR?), but I'm still suspicious.
Though Nuclear does have the benefit of no greenhouse gases, it still has the same fundamental problem that oil does: it's business model is predicated on NOT dealing with its wastes! We STILL doe not have a solution to the incredibly toxic wastes we've been generating for decades. The only solution is to hide the waste. You think this is a viable alternative?
Yes.
Solar and wind power cannot provide base energy requirements for the vast majority of the nation. We could continue harvesting power from fission reactors using breeder reactors and refinement for thousands of years with no adverse affect on the environment. The difference between combustion reactions and nuclear is that the waste from nuclear is containable.
Also, note that each step requires energy generation itself, therefore forming a recursive chain (i.e. it takes energy to produce energy). Since many of these don't terminate at renewable energy, at least for now, you'll have to factor in the contribution of the appropriate fossil fuel, nuclear, & natural gas energy production chains.
I have always wondered that engineers design systems that expend energy to heat and then to cool things during the manufacturing process.
Why? I mean I was discussing water purification the other day with someone and they mentioned the restrictively high energy cost of using the distillation process as a means of purifying / desalinating water.
Why is that? I mean once you have high temp water and you need it to be low temp water, and you have more water that needs to be high temp water why not transfer the energy from the now distilled water to the needs to be distilled water. Energy requirements in that case are equal to energy lost to transfer efficiency constraints.
This is just one example, and one that is easy to demonstrate, but examples of these kind of energy losses exist everywhere, and I've never quite understood why. Why don't we capture all that heat energy and put it back into the system, with energy costs being what they are, it has to be cost effective to do this.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
True, I just figure that creating a solar furnace that meets 70% of your daily needs, plus some sort of alternative heat source would help ensure the best performance at lowest cost.
By having a backup, you don't have the cost of the thermal storage, plus the capability to operate even in less than ideal circumstances. Like a week of heavy cloud cover, for example.
I don't read AC A human right
Why don't we capture all that heat energy and put it back into the system
Nope. It costs less to burn more fuel than it does to improve the process...
HTH.
Deleted
Why is that? I mean once you have high temp water and you need it to be low temp water, and you have more water that needs to be high temp water why not transfer the energy from the now distilled water to the needs to be distilled water. Energy requirements in that case are equal to energy lost to transfer efficiency constraints.
The principle is well known and called "regeneration" - you pass the incoming fluid through a heat exchanger with the outgoing fluid. For instance it's mentioned here in connection with the important Haber-Bosch ammonia process. It's also used by penguins to keep them from losing heat from the bloodstream through their feet! If the engineers are not doing it, they are really really poorly educated, or they have some decent reason. I suspect mainly the latter...
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
It's not poo-pooing. If a cell takes more energy to create than the total expected output in life, then the first batch of cells can't supply the energy to create the second batch. Some analyses claim this true of small residential wind turbines, for example; it's also historically been true of solar cells. If that was the case with these cells they'd be basically useless. They'd be an energy sink, not an energy source.
For example. If the company wasn't selling anything, but just building panels for itself, say it takes 12J to build a panel that yields 10J over its entire life. For the first batch they burn 12J worth of coal for energy. For the second they use the first batch's energy plus 2J more worth of coal. And every subsequent batch requires 2J-worth more of coal to be burned. And this is a company that's producing nothing. If they're selling each time also to a consumer that will get 10J out of it, they'll need to build two panels per batch, requiring 24J of energy. Since they're only getting 10J from the ones they keep around, they'll need to burn 14J-worth of coal per year -- more than the 10J the consumer would have used if not for the cell. Better would be the company just burning coal to make its cells and then selling them -- only 12J of yearly coal burned. Better still would be the consumer just burning 10J-worth of coal.
That's not moving forward. If the company can sell the product for enough money to cover its expenses then it can survive doing this, even though this means the consumer is probably making a cost-ineffective decision when buying it (unless energy is a lot cheaper for the company than for the consumer, which, in different areas, is certainly possible). If the government subsidizes a company operating as an energy sink it may become a cost-effective option for consumers, and consumers with good financial sense and lots of space will buy tons of them, making it a gigantic energy sink, with much more coal burned than before.
Given that these cells are cheap, maybe they've found a way to make them an energy source instead of a sink. In that case, all that stuff you said works.
I would hold that the Exxon Valdez incident argues FOR drilling ANWR. Just about everything that could go wrong did. But today you could wander that area and never realize anything untoward had ever occurred.
You wouldn't notice anything unless you were a fisherman who had his life destroyed by Exxon Valdez. More than 10 years later (this from 1999) the fishing industry still hadn't recovered. People in Alaska are still (wrote this February) waiting for compensation, 20 years later. So far the fishermen haven't seen a dime from Exxon. Even today studies are finding wildlife is still adversely effected.
If you think everything is the same for those who had to live through Exxon Valdez you're obviously living in your own fantasy world.
Oil is not a long-term solution.
Agreed. But it IS the only short term solution anyone is proposing.
Drilling for oil off shore is a short term solution? Yea, while people are talking about it, not one of them has said anything about how long it will take before the first drop of oil pumped will end up in someone's gas tank. I surely doubt that will happen one year, forget one month, after exploration starts. The "Wall Street Journal", which is not an environmentalist group, says offshore drilling "won't affect physical supplies of oil." Here's an iteresting quote from Fadel Gheit, oil and gas analyst with Oppenheimer & Co. Equity Capital Markets Division: "If we were to drill today, realistically speaking, we should not expect a barrel of oil coming out of this new resource for three years, maybe even five years, so let's not kid ourselves". Oh, and don't blame Democrats for the offshore drilling ban, as president George H.W. Bush imposed an executive ban in 1990.
Why waste another dime on trying to extend the supply.
Because we need energy NOW.
Yea, right, if we start drilling now we can pump oil now. HAHA!!! See above quotes.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Is the solar cell industry more "bloated" than the oil industry? The US government gives somewhere between $15B and $35B in subsidies to the oil industry. That doesn't include indirect benefits like our half-trillion-dollar-per-year military guaranteeing shipping, keeping some countries oil off the market for years, and then paving the way for American oil companies to break into distorted markets. Is it any wonder that solar "can't compete" with fossil fuels?
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain