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Nanopillar Solar May Cost 10x Less Than Silicon
Al writes "A team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a new kind of flexible solar cell that could be far cheaper to make than conventional silicon photovoltaics. The cells consist of an array of 500-nanometer-high cadmium sulfide pillars printed on top of an aluminum foil — the material surrounding the pillars absorbs light and releases electrons, while the pillars themselves transport the electrons to an electrical circuit. The closely packed pillars trap light between them, helping the surrounding material absorb more. This means the electrons also have a very short distance to travel through the pillars, so there are fewer chances of their getting trapped at defects and its possible to use low-quality, less expensive materials. '"You won't know the cost until you do this using a roll-to-roll process," says lead researchers Ali Javey. "But if you can do it, the cost could be 10 times less than what's used to make [crystalline] silicon panels."'"
"10x Less"? Is that like "twice as cold"?
Another major breakthrough for solar power. Especially if they can mass produce it, but even if not, I'm sure this sort of thing will just lead to further developments down the line. In addition to making it easier for a home user to purchase and have installed, think of a reduced cost for mass deployments either in power plants, or in space exploration uses such as on a permanent moon base.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
for last 5 years same shit gets posted over and over again - Cheap solar panals
5 years later - in some cases panels went up in price
Look at the toxicity of cadmium and all the environmental regulations that come with it. It's regulated to 1/10th the level of mercury in the EU RoHS (Reduction of Hazardous Substances in Electronics) legislation.
"the material surrounding the pillars absorbs light and creates electrons."
Wow, creation Ex Nihilo or from other subatomic particles? That is powerful technology.
Don't tell me. It'll be ready for mass production in 3 to 5 years. Somehow, I seem to remember stories like this from more than five years ago, and still, nothing happens and the solar cells are more or less the same as always.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
I thought we needed to pass the massive cap&tax bill before we saw any innovation in green technology! How can this be?
Once you install these on your roof you will only need to wear your tinfoil hat when you are outdoors.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
"May cost 10x less"
How much less did the Silicon ones cost (compared to some third, unnamed product) in order to make the difference here "10 times" less? Yes, what you meant was "May cost 1/10th as much as Silicon" but you didn't. Try again.
I've got a nanopillar for you that costs... no wait, that sounded much better in my head. Um, nevermind.
Nanopillar Solar May Cost 10x Less Than Silicon
...and then, it may not.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Come on do they really think we'll fall for printing solar cells on aluminium so we use them as tin-foil hats? We all know that in reality this is just a government plot to subvert the tin-foil hat movement and convert the hats into powerful mind-reading devices powered by the rays of the sun.
Evil I tell you, evil.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
cadmium sulfide
It's all fun and games until someone sprouts a 3rd eye.
Well I have a car that I built that gets 100000000 miles per gallon, and never needs to be filled up!!! But I have not yet tested it to make sure it works....
In short... I am really getting tired of all these "researchers" talking about them developing the thing that will change the world, but always seem to put the "yeah it might work, but we will not know until you actually try manufacturing it"..... Meaning, they annouce their world discovery before actually making sure it works not yet tested the manufacturing process to prove it. If it really was that good, then why would they talk about it after they prove the concept first... Money is never a problem if you can show it works...
Thats right folks - for every time you see the words "May", "Might Somday", "Could eventually", you get to cover a number.
Bonus if you get to catch one or more instances of "In 5 years", "with continued funding", or "commercial quantities"
It seems the only people making flexibles these days are also selling them for a huge markup, and the technology is a lot less efficient than the monocrystal cells. But at least you can buy it. Today.
I used to actually follow up these articles by contacting the companies involved, and asking when they would be able to sell to me as a consumer. I still cant buy any of their products. Any of them.
How plentiful is cadmium relative to silicon? Not so much, right? Isn't cadmium already pretty much spoken-for in other industrial and consumer electronics applications?
Leave it to engineers not to consider the ugly realities of supply-and-demand economics.
The BIG problem with micro generation is that it takes money straight out of the pockets of Big Oil.
Those with a vested interest in current generation techniques will not spend their money investing in technologies which give "Power to the People"
I for one expect to see more headlines like this:
"BP has shut down its alternative energy headquarters in London, accepted the resignation of its clean energy boss and imposed budget cuts in moves likely to be seen by environmental critics as further signs of the oil group moving "back to petroleum" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jun/28/bp-alternative-energy) Guardian Newspaper
There is a massive world-wide technology complex driving the optimization of silicon based manufacturing technology. The amount of capital invested into silicon manufacturing process and tools is measured in tens of billions of dollars per year, if not hundreds of billions. If the conventional process improvements is able to achieve 20-25% cost improvement per year, in five years, the cost of panels based on conventional panels would be down to 25-30% of today's cost. A few hickups in the development of the new technology like yield or reliability issues can easily delay the mass deployment by a few years which will negate all cost benefits. Not to mention the possibility of cadmium prices going up if the volumes are picking up...
And don't forget the cost of capital investment, which is already funded due to other "useful" applications in the silicon case. Most other technologies that tried to compete against silicon lost so far, not because of fundamental technical issues but because of the economics involved.
I am not against developing new innovative technologies to achieve substantial improvements in the solar power area. However, it is best to keep the optimism about new and unproven technologies in control until they reach at least beta production stage...
the only things worth talking about are consumer products
You forgot about celebrity antics.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
It really is meaningless.
If you mean it will cost one tenth as much, then say so.
I don't even know what "ten times less" means. Ten times less than WHAT?
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
The cost of solars cell is low enough that infrastruture costs are a significant portion of the total installed cost. The quoted efficiency, 6%, implies that these cells would take up more area than silicon cells, and structiral support costs are proporional to area (I did see the text about possible doubling of efficiency). Another disadvantage to low efficiency cells is increased thermal loading.
Most of our electricity is used for the creation or movement of heat. Which is spectacularly dumb and inefficient.
e.g.
http://ducts.lbl.gov/calducts.htm
Solar thermal panels can be up to 90% efficient. The vacuum tubes work in cold and cloudy climates. The energy they displace will directly reduce electricity generation costs, reduce CO2 emmissions and they are far far far cheaper than photovoltaics.
For cooling look at evaporative cooling or simply pumping the heat into a local river or ocean... Most of California's cities are sited near the Pacific... Yet air conditioning is the single largest consumer of electricity, by far.
Deleted
If they even remotely resemble anything alive you can just bet a bunch of loonies will start protesting everytime you want to cut down a few of these pillar thingies...
Typical Democrat/Liberal tolerance as long as its their way and silence or kill those who disagree.
Does anyone know how I can contact this company? I am a collector of solar power patents and I simply MUST have this one! = )
3A 4E 22 05 C1 83 0B 7A
It's random, but my posting it here is probably considered illegal to someone.
"Hey baby, who needs cheap nanopillars when you can have my megapillar for free?"
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"But if you can do it, the cost could be 10 times less"
Apparently educated people make these statements. Emphasize the word "apparently". This is political talk, not science talk.
Had he stated, "We can build these sheets at one tenth the cost of current solar panels" then his statement would have meaning. Then, we could investigate the accuracy of his statement. But, the statement has no meaning, so we can never establish accuracy.
Phhhht.
Get a clue people. I hate grammar nazis, but there comes a point where blabbering idiots fail to communicate their idea because they don't comprehend the most basic rules of language - or math.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
If you are not a Democrat then you are ALWAYS some sorta Neanderthalish Fundamentalist thug who wants their wife barefoot and pregnant.
How DARE you even disagree, you should be euthanized for being so stupid!
Not dealing with the limited resources problem == suicide. If you don't want to intelligently deal with survival issues, fine. I have no problem with you taking your own life. But if you want to continue to deplete our limited resources at an insane rate don't be surprised if you run into severe conflicts with those of us who would prefer to have our species continue.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
There is demand for them. In colorado someone stole them off a public building near aspen.
Since the 10x is a BS estimate anyway, why not just go for a total Spinatap'escue title?
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
Your children will bask in a society powered by cheap solar electricity that you are funding right now, just as you benefit from the electrical power infrastructure built by your parents.
We'll see. Orbital solar can get 20x the power of land based. Needlessly cluttering up our landscape with hundreds of thousands of square miles of ugly solar panels is ridiculous.
Is cost represented on a linear scale? What does cost really represent? Would the cost vary by nation of manufacture? What point in time was the cost estimation created?
Maybe a more accurate title would be:
As of the writing of this article, the monetary manufacturing cost in the US, including labor and materials, of Nanopillar Solar may be lower by a factor of 10 than that of current Silicon based solar technologies.
Too bad the title line is only 50 characters. And I still made a lot of assumptions even there, there are still a lot of leaps to be made regarding cost.
Maybe you just don't realize how many assumptions you are making even by saying "1/10 the cost". That one more assumption to say "10x less" isn't really that much of a leap. Or better yet, maybe the title of an article isn't supposed to explain the entire article, it's just supposed to tell you what it's about and get you to read it.
Cadmium is one of the "toxic heavy metals" {insert music pun here} and because of this, no matter what amount is used and to any degree of value, it will be shot down by the enviro-namby-pambys who took lead outta my solder.
Jeff Goldblum's estate?
Did he die again?.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
10x less = One tenth original value
5x less = One fifth original value
5x more = Five times original value
10x more = Ten times original value
The analogy to "cold" doesn't match: "Cost" is a positive value with a distinct zero point ($0). "Cold" has no distinct zero-point.
As far as I have understood the problem with Solar ( and Wind ) is not so much the cost of the generation itself, but rather the costs associated with storing the energy to account for varying production and demand. At the moment there are only two options that are even remotely close to being economical and that is pumped hydroelectric storage or simply keeping a traditional power plant ( typically hydroelectric or natural gas ) on standby and ready to go when the renewable one does not produce. The problem with the former approach is partially cost and also a limited number of locations where you can do it. The problem with the second approach is that if you are going to build a whole second powerplant to allow for redundancy during periods of low wind / insolation then you might just as well use it all the time and save the cost of building the renewable one (this is less true for plants where fuel costs are significant , like gas, and more so for plants where it is a small fraction of the energy price, as it is for nuclear and hydro ).
Basically with capacity factors around 30% at best ( for wind ) the renewable energy sources would have to be substantially cheaper than nuclear, hydroelectrics and coal before it would make economic sense to use them. You could tax the other forms of energy generation to level the playing field but it is hardly an ideal solution. Basically barring dramatic improvements in energy storage technology I don't think renewables will be able to dent our fossil fuel use unless their price per kwh drops to at least half that of traditional energy sources. Parity on per kwh of generation is not enough unless you can overcome the variability.
PS: No in most areas thermal solar is not good enough because even if it takes weeks for the output to drop you would still need other plants as backup just in case the insolation goes low for a month ( as can very well happen ). Note that thermal solar ( in contrast to photovoltaic ) is very sensitive to clouds, and that it is not practical to store thermal energy for much longer than a few days at most (especially not at several hundred degrees). Also it is not necessary for output to drop to 0 for the variability to be a problem. A powerplant losing half its output in a few days will also require some sort of buffering to keep a stable supply.
If the old method costs 1 dollar to make per unit.
And, the new method only cost one tenth as much.
Does to new method cost
A. 10 cents
B. 0.10 dollars
C. 0.10 cents
D. A and B
E. B and C
F. None of the above.
Tim S.
you are a fool.
it is quite simple.
A is X times less than Y simply means A is 1/X times as much as Y.
Just because you anally refuse to accept this meaning does not change the fact that that's what it means.
The common reason for fools to get anal about this is that they are mixing it up with stupid statements like this:
X has 1/2 less blah than Y does
when it should be X has 1/2 as much blah as Y does,
or Y has twice as much blah as X does
or X has 2 times fewer blahs than Y has
or Y has 2 times more blahs than Y has
or X is 2 times less expensive than Y (blahs are discrete items, expense is not.
or Y is 2 times more expensive than X
Anyone with half a brain or two times your brain capacity should know that saying "B is ten times less than the cost of A" means "B is one tenth the cost of A"!
Just like someone says "A is ten times more than B" you know they mean "A := B * 10".
Your just too literal minded ScanMan/RainMan ScentCone dude. English is a flexible language. Take you math nerd hat off for a change and a challenge in comprehening what others are saying to you rather than imposing your New World Order unto them.
Now all you need to do is to ask a clarifying question to make sure your "translation" into your narrowly focused math-nerd version of English meets your perfect way of talking. If they go yeah, that's what they meant then you've passed the primary Powel Janulus [who spoke over 80 human languages and was fluent in 50+ of them] test of communication, understanding others need not require perfect speach! You then become less of a math nerd to the outside world ScanMan/RainMan ScentCone. Good luck learning your new found social skills.
... it has been banned from electronics in the European Union. Solar panels go onto roofs. One nasty hail storm and you potential have a cadmium contaminated yard. Thanks but no thanks.