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Building Your Own Solar Panel In the Garage
jeroen8 writes "A Dutch guy was able to build his own solar panel in his garage using materials that were a third as expensive as the mass produced solar panels currently available on the European market. He bought his solar cells on eBay and used them to create his own panel. His output price is only 1.20 Euro per Watt Peak (Wp). This makes you wonder if we are paying too much for mass-produced solar panels, which should, in theory, be a lot less expensive than something you create in your garage."
If they aren't brand new the reason why it's cheaper is because someone else has paid for much of it.
Only cheaper if your time is worth nothing. Still, very cool. But not particularly novel or groundbreaking.
The main costs in solar array manufacturing are manpower, raw structural materials, and the solar cells. Remember that the prices for single solar cells are fairly constant, given that they're mass produced already. Same for the structural materials. That leaves (Cells + Materials) on the hobbyist's side and (Cells + Materials + Labour) on the mass production side. It's not surprising that a hobbyist can construct a panel for a competitive price if he doesn't count his time as a cost.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
The author bought damaged solar cells from eBay, selected the good ones, then soldered those together. Then he jury-rigged his own waterproof casing and electrical connections. Used goods are cheaper but that does not mean new ones are over-priced.
Let us know how long his cells last outside before insinuating all the solar cell producers in the world are selling overpriced gear.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
...but you've only paid for the parts, not the labor or the engineering or the rent etc.
The point that the packaging of solar panels is expensive is not lost on me. There's a local firm (Tucson) making thin-film cells which ought to be packaged as plastic-laminated roof shingles to keep the final cost down.
But I admire his fortitude in building a panel. I have a stack of cells in my workshop that I don't see how I'll ever turn into a panel, since it requires lots of glass and care and sticky tape.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
three times less expensive - is that the same as a third of the cost?
I'm not being a grammar nazi, just doesn't make sense (its morning here after a late night, so maybe the synapses haven't whatevered).
I am fairly (95%) certain that these Cells have been stolen, probably by a person working at a solar cell manufacturing plant.
Getting an 'uncounted' batch of 'mixed quality' just screams 'stolen'.. and then the price itself is also cheaper then the raw manufacturing
But they are 'new', extracting Cells from used panels is not cost effective as commercial panels are laminated and string soldered which is very hard to take apart without breaking most of the cells.
Also, when you buy good quality Solar Panels you usually get around 25 years of warranty and the knowledge that they have been throughly safety tested (and designed) so that they won't burn down your house when one cell short circuits or your getting a bit more sun then imagined. I would think that's worth something by itself.
Sorry, of course the US would never subsidise alternative energy sources. It's only evil socialist Europe that does that.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
This insane amount of state intervention spawns corruption in the production and supply of the solar panels, which explains such high prices.
[citation needed]
Really, I know that "state intervention == inefficient" is a popular meme in the US of A, but is there any scientific proof of your assumption?
The summary is bad.
1. He bought damaged solar cells from a one-time vendor. There isn't a supply of them for anyone to make. They might have been stolen, they might have been a shipping write-off, whatever. They aren't new solar cells.
2. He scrounged materials, like glass, for free. Manufacturers can't do that. Most people don't have that opportunity.
3. He used wire that he "happened to have" (quoting the article). He bought it at some point, or found it. Again, not something you or I could normally do.
And so forth. Comparing the cost of doing something this way to buying a new cell is invalid and misleading. The summary is bad. And the Slashdot editors are responsible for validating and endorsing the summary, suggesting that they were asleep at the wheel.
Sheesh, can't we get some decent editing here? Has the entire field of news reporting gone to the dogs?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Right, he complained about the cost of the glass the panel manufacturer's use, then he uses cheap window glass pulled out of a trash heap. It's not tempered. It's not anti-reflective. It's not matched to the absorption spectrum of the cells...
There's nothing to see here. Let me know when someone figures out how to make the cells, cheap, in their garage workshop.
Power density costs money, but is it necessary? Maybe his panels do get only 25% the watts per square meter as an expensive panel. But they get something like 3x the watts per dollar. To get the same wattage, you do need 4x the area with his cheap panels. But since solar power in the Netherlands is about 100W:m^2 average across the year, a 1KW home gets in 10m^2 sunlight its consumption (before cell inefficiency, and using inefficient storage/retrieval HW). If he's actually getting 62W:m^2, he needs 16.2m^2. If that gets averaged by day/night, and is close to the average daylight (he posted 2 days before the equinox), and accounts for weather, then maybe he needs 200m^2 (that's 5% averaged annual efficiency). That's only 14x14m, about the size of a home that consumes 1KW.
When roof space costs more than these cheap cells save, they're worth the higher cost. Or if the generated power can be sold back to the grid, then the higher density can be worth the higher cost (especially over time). But sometimes, cheap low density can be worth it. Which is why dye sensitized and other cheap, (relatively) inefficient generating materials are interesting. If they can generate power long enough to pay for themselves (including their lifecycle energy cost), they can make "hay" while the Sun shines, even as we make more dense cells become cheaper.
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make install -not war
So he really didn't build anything, he assembled something. Come back when he actually builds the cells too.THAT would be news worthy.
---- Booth was a patriot ----