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Printable, Rollable Solar Panels Could Go Anywhere
Al writes "A startup based in Toledo, Ohio, has developed a way to make large, flexible solar panels using a roll-to-roll manufacturing technique. Thin-film amorphous silicon solar cells are formed on thin sheets of stainless steel, and each solar module is about one meter wide and five-and-a-half meters long. Conventional silicon solar panels are bulky and rigid, but these lightweight, flexible sheets could easily be integrated into roofs and building facades."
Isn't it amazing how all of these advancements show up when given a little push?
Regular Solar Panels are not bulky. It is the structure that is bulky.
1. Miniaturize the solar panels.
2. Make adapters for them so they can be used in everyday devices (phones and such)
3. ???
4.Profit!
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
We all heard about how great Nanosolar is, but it's not actually possible to buy any. Will this stuff be any different?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...where /are/ they going to go?
This sounds like a great idea, but it probably isn't the breakthrough that the summary might otherwise suggest. The efficiency of the resulting solar panels, even with triple-junction cells, is still only 8% at most (as stated in the article). At that level of efficiency, the manufacturing process will have to be very inexpensive for these to make sense for the average consumer.
Getting tired of Slashdot... moving to Usenet comp.misc for a while.
Building integrated photovoltaics (BIPV), especially rooftop applications, would be the biggest market for flexible PV technology, Boas says.
Roofing is a significant cost in a residential structure. Being able to integrate the roofing material with the solar panels can help make photovoltaics cost-effective.
In Las Vegas, for instance, roofs are made of expensive (and heavy) clay tiles, mostly for aesthetic reasons. These run anywhere from $30-$50 / m^2.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
dupe this when i can buy it at HomeDepot or Lowes, Mkay? Thanks
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Tell me when it actually gets into stores. A few years ago the news came out about sliver cells. (site: http://www.originenergy.com.au/1257/Photos-of-SLIVER-modules)(story transcript: http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s1865651.htm) They are bendable and even transparent, with a similar efficiency of traditional cells. (http://www.originenergy.com.au/1234/About-SLIVER - down near the bottom of the page). Could someone please tell me where to buy a sliver cell?
kers at the wrong moment What happens when you catch stock tic
The article poo-poo's the cells a bit by hashing over the fact that these cells are only 8% efficient, whereas "some crystalline silicon modules on the market" are 20% efficient. (Although the 330 W vs 740 W comparison gives a ratio more like 8% to 18%.) But who really cares? If the roll-to-roll manufacturing can make them even 3 times less expensive, you can just install 2.3 times as many!
My understanding of the limitations of PV solar is the cost, not the available locations. Even houses with PV installed rarely cover the roof with them. Not because you can't, but because the things are so darned expensive. If the roll-to-roll manufacturing fulfills it's promise, we can have more solar power installed than we ever would have with some 30% efficient cell, just by increasing coverage.
This is all assuming that the manufacturing process makes them less expensive per square meter. If that's not the case (perhaps due to their multi-layer nature), and the process is still cost-comparable to conventional crystalline silicon production, then the issue is moot. Unfortunately the article doesn't mention cost comparisons.
...but we all know they AREN'T going anywhere, just like all the other dozens of solar tech breakthroughs "ready for production" that have popped up here the past 3 years. Where did they all go? Where to buy them? Mhm.
The CEO mentioned carrying the sheet in a backpack. I wonder if they could be used as the outer layer of a tarp or tent - just think, you could recharge your mobile electronics gear and maybe even cook w/o a fire.
Big sheets of PV are wonderful when you have big open expanses, but real world roof surfaces have vents, pipes, drains and the like. Rather than play tetris with rigid panels, or even with flexible panels, I'd love to be able to cut an opening in the PV material for each opening and get maximal use of the roof surface.
Is anyone working on that?
No need for them to produce those cells any cheaper, any time soon, either...
What we all want is an affordable solar array, of our very own...but that most likely doesn't square with the business models of either Nanosolar, or your local utility...nobody has a real market incentive to make that happen...
And so can my flying car. I'll believe it when I see it. No, actually I'll believe it when I can buy it.
Solar Power, it's the safest form of nuclear power.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I was just thinking, what a great replacement for papers, you roll with the solar panel and expose the tip to light, and bingo! Flame!
No more lighters needed!
But does it run linux?
In the last 18 months we have seen numerous announcements regarding solar power generation.
We've seen advances in
-Manufacturing speed.
-Toxic material reductions.
-Efficiency boosts in rigid cells.
-New products like this flexible.
Yah sure solar has issues. But now given a space that may be inappropriate for wind you can now find a solution in solar.
This is all good.
Maybe one day industry will be draining it's massive power needs from the residentially power generating grid. This should be more than doable in 20 years.
( Next item we need to add to the list of critically needed tech. Water purification and desalination that can be applied in the residential markets. Imagine how much land would open up for crops, settlement, and carbon sinking if we just had cheap and easy to deploy water desalination. )
Someone's keyboard doesn't have dead keys. FaÃade. ..wait, that doesn't look right. ..Great job with the unicode, /.
What is going to replace all the existing dark colored solar panels installed in the USA, when the White Roof Law is enacted?
How is their product any different from PowerFilm's (http://www.powerfilmsolar.com/)? They have been making flexible solar panels for almost 20 years.
About month or so ago. The company also has portable rechargeable battery packs. The packs have multiple outlets and outlet types and variable voltage settings. They have enough to power laptop computers and ruggedized military equipment. For the life of me, I can't remember their name.
But with such a technology already in existence, one that is clearly capable of handling a variety of loads, why is the above story news?
The lamp in your dome light will put out light pretty reliably from about 6 or 7 up to about 15 volts and is available everywhere, and the automaker probably gets them for a nickel. The LED runs on a narrow voltage range so it needs a power supply which tends to be an IC, two transistors, and a resistor (for limiting current) as well as a PC board, and probably its own enclosure to avoid shorts.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Where are the Stanford 10x Li-ion batteries???
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/nanowire-010908.html
This ALONE will change everything. From an All day Iphone and netbook. To a Chevy Volt that costs 1/2 as much.
WHERE IS IT?
i'll bet they are just regular cells with fuck all weather proofing on them and they degrade in 6 months.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
( Next item we need to add to the list of critically needed tech. Water purification and desalination that can be applied in the residential markets. Imagine how much land would open up for crops, settlement, and carbon sinking if we just had cheap and easy to deploy water desalination. )
You live in California, don't you?
I can say with some confidence that my residential area, well over 100 miles from the nearest ocean, is not in any sense bottlenecked on water desalination capacity.
That's only because your local utility hasn't figured out that they can make plenty of money doing nothing but monitor and switch power between customers, cranking up their big expensive generators only when additional power is needed. Buy excess energy from households which produce more than they need, then switch/sell it to other households which do not at a markup. Income might take a nosedive, but so would generation costs.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Well, there is no savings. The incandescent bulb is cheap, cheap cheap. The LED is not. The power to drive the light comes from the battery, which is charged by the alternator. The alternator doesn't care. You can run over 1KW off the stock alternator. The little current required for the incandescent or bulb doesn't matter. So why put a higher cost part in the car? But wait the LED isn't 12v, it is TTL, so you need to convert from what is a 12v-14v wiring harness to TTL levels. If you use a cheap resistor, you just convert to heat. If you use a charge pump/capacitor you again increase the cost. All for something that won't matter in terms of fuel economy.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I think you've just described the other piece of what they already know is coming:
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
Let me guess... been playing a lot of Fallout 3 lately?
A Human Right
TTL?! TTL has got nothing to do with illumination with LEDs.
As for running LEDs on 12V, there's an easy solution for that: a single-chip regulator (costs less than LEDs!) and a string of LEDs in series. Easy.
You need your LEDs, a small PCB to hold it all, the regulator, perhaps a capacitor or two, and an inductor. The LEDs are likely to consume most
of the cost.
I have an off grid estate in Hawaii. Didn't RTFA but, I am still paying $139 for a 130W panel. Love to see some of this tech make it to consumers.
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
That's it. Dome lights are rarely used and never abused, so the LED's comparative advantages - long life, superior efficiency and high durability - are null unless the ability to brag about pointless overengineering is a feature (e.g. expensive vanity cars).
The Stanford Li Ion batteries aren't durable, are only 3X unless someone also figures out a super cathode to match the anode, and the development has been taken over / financed by a University in Saudi Arabia where these Stanford scientests are now allegedly working on it. I say alledgedly 'cuz I haven't heard anything since, and am wondering whether they've had a beheading "accident" yet. A place like Saudi Arabia is going to develop an automotive-useful electrical power storage that will totally ruin their oil-based economy? Those American scientists will be way lucky to get out of there alive, let alone perfect that battery. Better hope for some other battery breakthru 'cuz this one's going nowhere fast.
Yet.
By catching and holding much of an areas rainfall, and extracting water from rivers you prevent it from replenishing the underground aquifers and the water table drops over time. One day, a field you didn't have to irrigate goes dry. The Columbia river is a shadow of its former self due to demands for irrigation and potable water.
So be as smug as you like, it will catch up with you.
Companies have been manufacturing and selling thin-film, flexible printed to roll solar panels since at least a year ago.
For example, check http://www.uni-solar.com/ and http://www.firstsolar.com/
The things to keep in mind with this technology:
- Cheaper manufacturing, partly because the print to roll technology is much more scalable that the processes used to manufacture traditional solar cells, but also because of high silicon prices (traditional solar-cells use a silicon substract just like integrated circuits and thus compete for the same raw materials: before the recession silicon production was insufficient for both needs, so silicon prices where making traditional solar cells more expensive).
- Lower efficiency (around 9%) versus traditional solar cells (around 15%). Note that some recent advances are likely to increase the efficiency of traditional solar cells even further.
- Better at generating energy under low light conditions (e.g. in the shadow) than traditional solar cells.
- There are some questions about the long term viability of some thin-film solar cell technologies since they use rare elements: their price might go higher as production increases since that will also increase the demand for said rare raw materials.
The alternator doesn't care, but your MPG suffers every time the alternator spins. You can get quite a few more useful HP out of an engine if you remove the alternator completely. And if the rest of your claptrap were true, manufacturers would not be using LEDs in tail lights, dashboard instruments, turn signals etc etc. Less demand means smaller alternator, means more useful power to the wheels, means more MPG.
As for TTL, bollox mate.
http://www.rapidonline.com/Electronic-Components/Optoelectronics/Miniature-Lamps/Sixcess-LED-Lamp-12V-white-E12/75832/kw/12v+led
http://www.rapidonline.com/searchresults.aspx?style=0&kw=12v+led
9.64 on OSX
It's hard to understand why the Slashdot dev's can't just try out any changes on Firefox, Safari, IE and Opera.
i wish i could stop
While printing on film is fairly cheap, this is actually a somewhat dated techbology already. TFT technology is older than I am, and a couple of years ago, Danish researchers prooved that they could actually PRINT (using a normal printer and special ink) a solar cell.
Again, it suffers the same problems that this cell does, that the efficiency is very low. At the same time, the print would ofcourse decay/fade over time. This problem at least seems to be resolved by printing on thin film. Production of the Danish invetion is expected to hit the streets pretty darned soon.
Normal cost of solar cells is measured in $/WP, and at best you'd get about $6-8/WP for a monosilcate or poly silicate cell today, and that's for the really inefficient ones that takes up a lot of space. The new tech will (well, it SHOULD, but likely someone will claim return on investment and hike up the prices the first couple of years) put current prices below $1/WP, but take up even more space than before. This means that it will be cheaper to get cells than buy power on the open market (at least given the prices in Europe), ofcourse dependant on the lifetime expectancy and diminishing returns of the cell. Plus you still need to have enough space for all those cells. Today a 1 Kw base takes up about 60 square feet, and this tech pretty much tripples or even quadrouples that space requirement, but makes the investment affordable.
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
Nope live in Aus.
Just have a gander at the globe. You see all that brown land. It's a fare chunk of the land surface. If even a hair of that was made habitable by the simple application of fresh water.
Just think North Africa could easily become the bread basket for Europe and Africa if it had fresh water. Australia could grow enough potatoes to feed all of the Irish and put Vodka in all of the Russians on the planet.
Cheap easy to implement desalination would be possibly the most important thing for man kind since the discovery of antibiotics. Fresh water is the single most important component in the implementation of organic carbon syncs. Fresh water is the single most important factor in the prevention of disease. Without Fresh water you don't have cows or wheat.
P.S. 100 miles is NOTHING when it comes to distance for a pipe. Good old Reagan proposed once to pipe water from Canada to CA so people could fill their pools.
Because these panels are flexible, this means you could easily cover round or curved surfaces, like flag or telephone poles. Imagine a wind generator whose support pillar is itself covered in solar panels for a green power double whammy!
Maybe, but we don't care about any non-nerd-browsers!
PS: Get off my lawn!
I could swear I read a story here on Slashdot about this same technology about 1-2 years ago...
I'm sure they're busy figuring out how to charge 10x as much.
No bollox.
At $9.50 each, you have a very expensive part... Which has integrated electronics to lower the voltage. Just because you can screw it into a 12v socket doesn't mwan its 12v.
Standard bulbs here are about $3 for a back of two..
The amount of current contained in one turn of the alternator is enough to light the bulb for quite a while. Your own driving style, inflation pressure and fuel grade will affect your mileage more than the bulbs in your car.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The price of the LED's largely dominates current LED lighting systems.
Usually the LED driver or driver controller will require an inductor, a sense resistor, an input and output filtering cap, and if it's a controller running a lot of LEDs, a FET that's doing the switching. Add 2-3 small resistors and a cap for soft-starting, tying unused dimming options to ground, stuff like that. Most drivers will end up having half a dozen to a dozen parts associated with the driver circuit.
But the nice thing about a dedicated driver, in addition to getting 80% - 95% efficiency, is that you can wire up the LEDs any way you want: in parallel, series, or a combination, and have them running at just about any voltage you want. One big benefit of wiring them up in several parallel strings with a comparatively smart controller is that they'll keep working even if a single LED dies, rather than the whole light dying. (We've dissected a number of series-LED strings driven by crappy diode-rectifier-big-cap-resistive-divider supplies, just about the worst supply possible, where a single LED has died, killing the whole ludicrously overpriced bulb and making another consumer think LED lighting is a bad idea. In this case, 95% of the price is LED.)
Generally you'll be looking at twenty cents to maybe a dollar for the controller, about the same for the discrete components, three to twenty dollars for the LEDs, a dollar for the PCB, and about two to four dollars for the heatsink the LEDs are bonded to, and another two dollars for general hardware/assembly stuff to make it all UL compliant.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I have been reading about new photovoltaic technologies and manufacturing techniques that promise to improve efficiencies and lower costs by a factor of 5 or more, for years. Where are they? When will we see them on the market?
The factor of 5 is important. It would reduce the costs to the consumer so that a typical system would pay for itself in 4-5 years, instead of the 20-25 years it typically now takes. When you change the pay-off like that, the economics of solar photovoltaic systems change dramatically, which should also increase their use dramatically.
Isn't it amazing how all of these advancements show up...
But they don't show up. Of all the hundreds of news stories of amazing technologies that have appeared on Slashdot over the past ten years, how many can you just go out and buy at Target or Home Depot?
None.
Maybe one or two. probably not.
Any announcement of an amazing technological breakthrough that appears on Slashdot generally stays that. A press release of an amazing technological breakthrough that's going to solve a major problem. How much of this amazing technology actually becomes purchasable product? Next to none, if not none.
Sad but true. Most of the stories that you read on Slashdot about amazing technological breakthroughs are just bullshit. Pipe dreams. Fantasies of techno-nerds hallucinating from watching too much Star Trek and fed to gullible but lovingly stupid media people.
Here in Florida we have plenty of sun available. However, one prohibitive problem with solar panels is the occasional hurricane. If you have large solid panels installed on your roof, a strong wind will pick them up like a kite and tear them (plus a good chunk of your roof) right off.
I like the idea of something cheap and flexible because you could either have a system of rolling it up when a storm approaches, OR let the storm have it (like pool screen enclosures) and install a new one afterwords.
Vonnegut was right: Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been."
The power to drive the light comes from the battery, which is charged by the alternator. The alternator doesn't care.
I don't know where you get this from. Electricity is really expensive in cars; small internal combustion engines running at variable speeds just suck for making electricity. If good LEDs were available, cars would switch to them almost instantly.
Alas, LEDs in the 60W-equivalent range are hard to come by (unless you use multiple LEDs, and that's hard in a dome light).
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Maybe it's patented already, and the Saudi royal family bought the rights to the patent.
There have been battery tech patents bought by some oil companies in the past, already, so I am not only joking.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
There are lots of companies that have been doing this I believe. It is more efficient. Costs less and could provide enough solar panels to coat houses, cars, buildings... Heck why not coat the sidewalks out of this stuff and power our street lights. It is all very cool technology.
This really depends how much rain you get. The US Northeast is not having aquifers run dry and the region's population isn't growing much anymore. Big parts of the region are more than 100 miles from the Atlantic.
And what about the EESTOR battery? Has this been debunked as myth yet?
Incandescent headlights take up 100+ watts and as a rough guess are on 1/3 of the time the average car is driving (except for the daytime running lights folks, obviously then it's 100%). They're actually worth trying to save on (though a lot of people get LED lights for the aesthetics and at first the novelty). I'd wager my dome light is about 2 watts and is on about 2 hours a year, if that. I don't care how much power it takes because I never use it, my only concern is that it is as cheap as possible.
I'm having the same problem too. Latest noscript, FSDN allowed.
Anyone know what's wrong?
If the technology was patented, then you would be able to find it with a simple patent search.