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Solyndra's Thin-Film Solar Cells Draw $1.2 Billion In Orders
SolarSells writes "Solyndra makes funky-looking cylindrical solar cells that resemble compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Their products are meant for office buildings, and are made from a thin coating of copper indium gallium diselenide on glass tubes. Although they might not be able to fill them till 2012, the company has already received $1.2 billion in orders. Their manufacturing tricks make the cells so cheap that they may be competitive with other forms of power even after solar subsidies are phased out."
Look like fluorescent lights? Great, just install one next to each lamp and it can power itself. Oh, hang on, that won't work, will it? DOH!
Smivs on the intertubes!
So a good hailstorm will demolish your solar array?
It's good to see that people still invest in alternative sources of energy. $1.2B in pre-orders can't be bad and (I think) shows a great sign of faith in these technologies.
"What Gronet envisions is solar panels installed on your average Home Depot or Ikea, generating a substantial percentage of the company's power needs right on site."
This is the best possible outcome of the energy crisis: an efficient, sustainable, and most importantly decentralized power infrastructure. Let's hope these technologies really do take hold.
If Gronet and his team can work out the manufacturing challenges and navigate the difficult financial waters, their unique design and tightly focused business model could lead them to profitability, even after government subsidies in Europe phase out.
Hey, that's great. Good luck with your company and all. But there is way too much "maybe" in this story to make me jump up and down with excitement.
Aside from hype about "competing with other power sources" (it's old hype... I can't quite give a damn if it's for real or not this time), I wonder what the distribution of their clients is... (mainly by nationality)
And I'd bet this number predates the economic crisis... I do wonder how many of these orders will be withdrawn; though I'm sure it won't be enough to slow Solyndra's production at peak capacity.
Obligatory link to manufacturer.
"He may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Duck Soup
Can I use a series of these tubes to power my big truck?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
While were slashvertising, let's not forget Nanodsolar which also does thin-film copper indium gallium diselenide trick. But it seems that instead of tubes, you can just get a sheet (on what appears to be a Mylar substrate).
I wonder about the cylindrical shape, this would seem to block 50% of the surface area, where the sides and underside would produce less electricity than a flat sheet of the same area.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
They're letting valuable light past. They're getting a little of it back on the rebound. The round design means some of the cell is always straight on to the sun, but it's a VERY small part.
Wouldn't a flat roof of the same material be much more efficient?
Nice to know that these "may be competitive with other forms of power even after solar subsidies are phased out."
Any idea what the unsubsidized cost per watt is today?
-- Should you believe authority without question?
The Solyndra tubes have me puzzled.
First, they're round, with the active surface uniform around the tube. So only a fraction of the active surface is doing much. Unless they can make active surface far cheaper than anybody else, this is a lose.
The claimed advantage of this approach is supposed to be that the units can be mounted flat to the roof. But you can do that with flat solar panels; it just costs you about 30% of the output because you're not getting max sun input per unit area. Solyndra is paying a bigger oblique penalty than that; they're probably losing 60% over a flat panel pointed roughly at the sun.
Their web site has no numbers on prices, costs, efficiency, output per unit area, or third party test results. That's a bad sign.
one word: hail
We already get our internet through a series of tubes. Do we want our electricity the same way?
I just the other day got, a solar cell was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the roof commercially.
So you want to talk about the consumer? Let's talk about you and me. We use this solar cell for power and we aren't using it for commercial purposes.
We aren't earning anything by going on that solar cell. Now I'm not saying you have to or you want to discriminate against those people. The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says "No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the solar cell". No, I'm not finished. I want people to understand my position, I'm not going to take a lot of time.
They want to deliver vast amounts of power over the solar cell. And again, the solar cell is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.
It's a series of tubes.
And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your power in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of energy, enormous amounts of energy.
There has to be some way to tie together "Solyndra" and "green" and "is people". Step up the puns here, people.
I keep trying to pick fights, but I can't shake this Excellent karma.
Right, so instead of designing warehouse shops with skylights to let light in, they make sure they have opaque roofs and build them extra strong to carry the extra load of all those solar panels... to power the lighting units inside the warehouse shop.
Great! What will they think of next.
I don't know if it supplies all the power needed, but some big-box type places do have solar setups - like Kohl's:
http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/621/
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_/ai_n27971502
disclaimer: I work in Kohl's IS dept.
So, basically, this power source is a series of tubes?
If you read the article you might get a positive impression about these guys, but when you look at their picture gallery, it is clear these guys have had waaaay too much money to play with. Robots everywhere, it looks like a car manufacturing plant. Autonomous vehicles that transport the goods around? What is wrong with their hands, are they all engineers afraid to get their hands dirty? Robots may look very cool, and may be cheaper than humans in the long run. But if you are just starting up, won't real humans be much more flexible?
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
I hate to nit-pick, but here it goes:
When I hear "compact fluorescent lightbulb" I think of a small spiral shaped tube.
When I see these solar cells, I think of a long T12 fluorescent lamp.
NASA has hundreds of PhDs and they did a bang up job on Skylab and Mars probe.
But I agree with you for the most part.
I'd think that metal tubes would make it hard for the light to reach the active coating on the inside. Their tubes doi have metal end caps, though...
Their manufacturing plant is a former hard-disk factory. Which makes sense, since much of the coating equipment and the material-handling equipment would be similar. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that some of their equipment was pulled out of storage from the former factory owners for pennies on the dollar.
Some of the robots might be strictly for the gee-whiz factor, but given that they're trying to make a new technology economical, automating production as much as possible is just good sense.
ALON (otherwise known as aluminum oxynitride) is an aluminum ceramic that has the curious property of being transparent while also being almost as strong as steel. It's being tested by the military for use as transparent armor. Check out http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=481 for more info.
Seems Scotty knew what he was talking about after all!