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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?
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.'"
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"
Welcome to the 80s, where I thought I was cool for having a solar powered calculator.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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?
Solar Power, it's the safest form of nuclear power.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Well you know, it's not the same panel. Hell, they don't even have a commercial product yet. Closest is the United Solar Ovonics panels, which aren't available through Home Depot. The Home Depot panels are BP solar. The United Solar panels are the same damn technology as the "new" tech espoused in the original article, by the way. Point was, although it's not the tech under discussion, Home Depot does sell solar PV systems.
Not really, Typically you're going to cover all of the roof, or at as much as the tracking system will allow. If you're limited to doing a third of the roof due to cost considerations then that's feasible, otherwise you're probably going to have to make due with less electricity.
That being said, having even that much is a help, it's more likely to come down to durability than capacity and every bit does help. If they're of comparable durability, then there's definite potential.
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. )
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?
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.
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.
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.
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."