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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.
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 I do wonder how many of these orders will be withdrawn; though I'm sure it won't be enough to slow Solyndra's production at peak capacity.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
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?
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.
Ten big trucks running off that, that tube, and what happens to your own personal tube? I just the other day got... a tube was switched on by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday. Why? Why? Because it got tangled up in a big ball with all the trucks going on the tube commercially.
They want to deliver vast amounts of power from the tubes. And again, the tubes is not something that you just dump anything on. It's not a big internet. It's a series of wires. And if you don't understand, those wires can be filled and if they are filled, when you switch your lights on, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts onto that wire enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
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.
In essence, solar costs about $.30/kwh. http://www.solarbuzz.com/SolarPrices.htm Location is important. Costs more in Germany, less in California. http://www.solarbuzz.com/statsCosts.htm. This competes against under $.10/kwh in the US for other sources. But there are variations around the world and even within the US http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
If you've already got 1.2 billion dollars in orders, you can probably throw a little bit of money towards automating your production line. And while I don't know much about the specifics of this particular product, solar panel manufacturing is generally a fairly high precision activity, and often involves raw materials that aren't the most healthy substances for humans to be around. A nice, clean, automated production facility is ideal for solar panels.
This isn't a couple of guys who started a business out of their garage last week. They've already done the bulk of the messy design work, and they're moving on to mass production. They're probably still doing more of the hands-on design work as well, but it likely happens in a whole separate building from their factory.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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!