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Solar Panels Reach $1 a Watt
ZosX writes "An article over at Popular Mechanics announces that, for the first time, solar cells have been manufactured for the much sought-after figure of $1/Watt. They also talk about a new study of the cost of the particular raw materials used in different manufacturing processes. The conclusion is that the company that just achieved the $1/W milestone, using cadmium telluride technology, may not prove to be the long-term winner capable of meeting demand when it rises into the terawatt range."
I'm not sure what my peak load is at home, but at $1/Watt I imagine I could generate all my own electricity for less than $10,000. Assuming my roof has sufficient room for it, that's really awesome. My current electric bill is around $65/mo. which means that in 153 months this would be paying for itself, or about 12 years. Of course, figuring in things like maintenance, repairs, and so forth makes this harder to gauge, but that's pretty good. Now the consumer electronics industry just needs to convert everything over to run on DC and I'm all set. How soon can I put in an order?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Here's something for you, that I didn't realize: apparently it costs MORE to install and set up a set of solar panels on your home than it does to manufacture them. It made me think, "wow, I'm going to install those myself for half the price!" but attaching stuff like that to the power grid is probably not a DIY project. And it isn't just a day labor job either. It's going to take a trained electrician, at $30-$60 an hour putting that stuff in.
So, their goal is to get the cost of manufacturing down to about 60-70 cents a watt, and the cost of installation down to $1 a watt. I didn't realize the hidden cost of installation was so high.
Qxe4
Volume production will outstrip the world Tellurium supply in the near future so this isn't going to be a cost effective technology for long.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
20cents per kWh, one kilowatt used for one hour, whereas this is $1 per watt of capacity, i.e $1 will allow you to generate 1watt, which will generate 1kWh in 1000hrs.
This sounds like the classic solar is not a renewable energy source tale because of the non-renewable materials in solar cells. You do realize that once the cells are built, that they continue to work until damaged or otherwise decommissioned, and that the nonrenewables are not consumed in the process? Also, there are alternative materials to use, and alternative places to mine what there is.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
What are the desert sands but another form of solar collector?
I hate to break it to you, but nearly everything is toxic at some level. The ugly truth is that we're not going to get to a green utopia without some exotic materials that'll probably kill you if you look at them funny. Coal and oil are very safe, non-toxic materials - as is any reasonable concentration of CO2 - but the reality is that they're not green overall. The "green-ness" of a material is in its overall impact, not in its intrinsic properties. We can engineer around the fact that handling them is toxic - it's just a process and plant design question.
We aren't going to build a completely renewable energy infrastucture out of rainbows and ponies. It's going to take some very strange stuff, much of it not good for you. We just have to manage it well.
Well as long as they're using rare earth metals, they will never become available. Their supply is much too limited.
Cadmium may not be that expensive, and not that super-rare (though calling the supply abundant would be a stretch), there is barely any tellurium supply.
From the wikipedia page :
Tellurium is extremely rare, one of the nine rarest metallic elements on Earth. It is in the same chemical family as oxygen, sulfur, selenium, and polonium (the chalcogens).
And the reality is ... of all the atoms in the universe (and "more or less" on earth) you have the following relation, for every ton of gold in existence (on earth), there's about 100 grams of Tellurium available.
It's not expensive, because no-one's using it. But if you start mass-producing anything with tellurium in it that cheapness will disappear sooner than you can say "exhausted supply".
It would probably be a very good investment to buy (right now) a ton or so of tellurium and put in your basement. Perhaps a bit unorthodox an investment, but before 20 years pass it will be many times more valuable than gold or platinum. Right now it costs between $70 and $100 per pound. You can reasonably expect that to become at least several thousand within the next ten years.
None of the elements being discussed are rare earth elements (which are indeed all metals). Cadmium and tellurium are not, and neither are copper, indium, gallium or selenium. This is too bad actually, since despite their name none of the rare earths, except of course for promethium, is very rare.
Tellurium is fairly common for an element of its atomic weight in the Universe. On Earth it is quite rare, but instead of 1/10,000 as common as gold as you would have it, tellurium has about one fourth the abundance of gold in the Earth's crust. See this abundance table.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
You mentioned that solar only works half the time, but you seemed to dismiss it as irrelevant.
Total capacity is a very misleading metric to measure power stations by, and is meaningless without information about it's utilization.
Obviously solar panels only generate when the sun is shining, just like wind plants only generate when the wind is blowing. A very good wind farm will get 40% utilization. A very good solar farm will get maybe 25% utilization.
And that's not the whole story either. It's also interesting to look at the demand weighted generation. This is a way of accounting for generation being more useful when demand is higher. In general, solar panels have a higher DWG in hot climates (air-con when sun is shining), and a lower DWG in cold climates (heating when sun isn't).
Current installed prices are about $5/Wp, and I'd be suprised to see %1/Wp before 2015.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
We aren't going to build a completely renewable energy infrastucture out of rainbows and ponies.
Shut up! I've got a three billion dollar energy department grant proposal for my "rainbows and ponies" study, and loose talk like that could blow the deal!
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It's not too much of a worry. Concentrating solar power costs have been falling quickly as well, and they require nothing more exotic than reflective surfaces and mineral oil.
Also from the Wikipedia page: "Recently, researchers have added an unusual twist - astrophysicists identify tellurium as the most abundant element in the universe with an atomic number over 40." Which disagrees with the thrust of your objections, but hey, it's Wikipedia. Who knows if it's thinking straight today. The tellurium page also says that cosmic abundance is far higher than terrestrial.
Another thing to keep in mind: one of the reasons so little tellurium is mined is because nobody has had much use for it before. Also, if tellurium becomes a limiting factor, we should be able to get more energy out of each ton by using concentrating reflectors.
As for the "put a ton in your basement" strategy, it may be sound. But Wikipedia advises that it is mildly toxic and should be handled with care.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
There is a lot going on in Thermal Solar right now as it has the greatest potential to meet base load power needs when coupled with molten salt storage.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
What do you mean - Promethium very rare? Wikipedia says: "It was calculated that the equilibrium mass of promethium in the earth's crust is about 560 g due to uranium fission and about 12 g due to the recently observed alpha decay of europium-151"
So, not only is there a pound of that stuff in the earth, but it is ALWAYS there. As soon as you take it away - BAM - another pound.
[A re-post of a comment from a few months ago] Guys -- you all seem to be neglecting the recent developments in solar financing. (Disclaimer -- I do work for SolarCity http://solarcity.com/ [solarcity.com] [solarcity.com], a leading installer of residential solar arrays in the SF Bay Area and beyond. We do use First Solar panels, in fact we're the only company using them for residential-scale projects in the US. I won't make a totally shameless plug here, I'm trying to be fair to the other good and clever solar companies out there. A rising tide lifts all boats!) By bringing in a 3rd party commercial owner via an Operating Lease or Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) structure, the customer can save money from solar on Day 1. The 3rd party (an investment fund, or perhaps the solar company themselves) owns the system and claim the full range of available incentives. Commercial owners can take accelerated depreciation on the system, and can utilize the full 30% federal tax credit , and they also get whatever state/local/utility incentives are available as per usual. The customer would have ZERO down-payment, and makes monthly payments over a period of ~15-18 years. There is no lien on the house. The tax investor receives a reasonable return on their investment over time, the installer makes reasonable margins on the installation, and the customers can save money from Day 1. Everybody wins! So to use the parent submitter's house as an example of what we can do -- For a $400/month average bill in Sunnyvale, CA, we might recommend a 7.7 kW DC system. Assuming the customer had decent credit (720 FICO), we would require no down payment, and then charge monthly lease payments of $216/mo, for 15 years. The monthly payments do go up at ~3-4% per year (we could alternatively have 0% escalation, but of course that would require a higher starting payment and so it's harder to show savings right away... there are many possible variations here. Also remember that local PG&E utility rates are increasing at >5% per year on average). With this 7.7kW system, they might expect their average monthly bill to go from $400 to $99 per month. Add the $216/month payment, and their new average monthly electricity cost is (216 + 99) = $315/month, for immediate savings of ~$85/mo!! [As a point of information, virtually all residential solar systems are grid-tied, so that when the panels are active during the daytime, the meter is often "spinning" backwards. This is how the utility-bill-savings part works.] The installers offering these plans usually include full service/maintenance for the life of the lease, including replacement of the DC/AC inverter if necessary. The customer is given the opportunity to purchase the system after years 6/10/15, or if they have to move or sell their house. The panels are warranted by the manufacturers to last 25+ years at 80-90%+ kWh output, so a long-term buy-and-hold strategy is solid. Or, if the customer looks around in 15 years and sees a better/cheaper technology, or just doesn't wish to renew or buy out), they are free to end the lease and we'll remove the panels at our cost. The customer who understands Net Present Value (NPV) calculations can easily demonstrate that this offers far superior savings compared to either a) doing nothing, or b) purchasing the system for cash. So before you all roll your eyes about solar being a poor investment with a many-year paybacks, please consider such alternative financing approaches.
"So, not only is there a pound of that stuff in the earth, but it is ALWAYS there. As soon as you take it away - BAM - another pound."
What you are implying is that promethium is the result of a process subject to equilibrium processes. Radioactive decay is not an equilibrium process.
I have no idea the natural abundance of promethium, but if you take away a pound of promethium, there is no "BAM - another pound".
I have decided, for the purposes of acquiring tellurium, that there should really be more of it available on the Earth. I have updated the Wikipedia article to reflect this. Hopefully this update gets pushed to the Earth so we can get some cheap solar panels.
Tellurium is extremely rare, one of the nine rarest metallic elements on Earth. It is in the same chemical family as oxygen, sulfur, selenium, and polonium (the chalcogens).
In a previous life I worked as a Metallurgist for a copper refinery. One project I worked on was refining / recovery of Tellurium from our anode slimes. From a technical point of view it wasn't difficult to recover. I was able to easily get > 99.96% purity in the lab.
At the time we had around 10 Tonnes / year of Tellurium in our slimes. Considering that the total world production is < 40 Tonnes, that was significant.
Even at > $100,000 / tonne, it just wasn't worth our while to go to the trouble of recovering it.
In the end we sold our slimes 'raw' and took the price hit for the impurities (included Copper and Tellurium)
It's not expensive, because no-one's using it. But if you start mass-producing anything with tellurium in it that cheapness will disappear sooner than you can say "exhausted supply".
It would probably be a very good investment to buy (right now) a ton or so of tellurium and put in your basement. Perhaps a bit unorthodox an investment, but before 20 years pass it will be many times more valuable than gold or platinum. Right now it costs between $70 and $100 per pound. You can reasonably expect that to become at least several thousand within the next ten years.
That price is still > $200,000 / Tonne
If the demand (and then price) really do go up, many of the refineries (or the precious metals companies that purchase their slimes) may be induced to actually recover their Tellurium, thus increasing supply.
NB. The major use of Tellurium is currently as a free machining agent in steel (it makes it easier to drill / machine)
Ever stop to think
..and as soon as it's synthesized, it surrenders.
AT&ROFLMAO