Cheap Solar Panels Made With An Ion Cannon

MrSeb writes "Twin Creeks, a solar power startup that emerged from hiding today, has developed a way of creating photovoltaic cells that are half the price of today's cheapest cells, and thus within reach of challenging the fossil fuel hegemony. As it stands, almost every solar panel is made by slicing a 200-micrometer-thick (0.2mm) wafer from a block of crystalline silicon. You then add some electrodes, cover it in protective glass, and leave it in a sunny area to generate electricity through the photovoltaic effect. There are two problems with this approach: Much in the same way that sawdust is produced when you slice wood, almost half of the silicon block is wasted when it's cut into 200-micrometer slices; and second, the panels would still function just as well if they were thinner than 200 micrometers, but silicon is brittle and prone to cracking if it's too thin. Using a hydrogen ion particle accelerator, Twin Creeks has managed to create very thin (20-micrometer), flexible photovoltaic cells that can be produced for just 40 cents per watt; around half the cost of conventional solar cells, and a price point that encroaches on standard, mostly-hydrocarbon-derived grid power."

Comments

Ion Cannon

[necro81]

And here I thought ion cannons were only useful for disabling Star Destroyers. Now we can use them to disable the evil Oil Empire!

Re:Ion Cannon

[stevegee58]

Only from Low Earth Orbit.

Re:Ion Cannon

[FatdogHaiku]

And here I thought ion cannons were only useful for disabling Star Destroyers.

Now you can blast them into environmental friendliness. The occupants, not so much...

Re:Ion Cannon

[Chris Mattern]

Nonsense, they're great for incernating Nod terrorists from orbit, too!

Re:Ion Cannon

[ZackZero]

Precisely my experience with the term "ion cannon" - whole lotta good it's done against Kane himself though (KANE LIVES IN DEATH)

Re:Ion Cannon

[operagost]

To be sure.

Re:Ion Cannon

[nigelo]

To be sure, to be sure.

Re:Ion Cannon

[toddestan]

It's an okay weapon for when you're just starting out, but I'm more of a fan of the neutron pellet gun myself.

Hegemony, schmegemony

[Scareduck]

Wake me when you have the problem of energy storage solved. #kthxbai

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[rolfwind]

Even with the losses, I always though hydrogen would be the way to go for excess energy stored up through the day. Of course, on a large scale, I wouldn't be using photovoltaics but perhaps some type of concentrator and steam electrolysis. Molten salt may also be a way to go at that level.

On a small level, how problematic would hydrogen be to store if used for things like heating a house? I realize it wouldn't power cars at its density level (natural gas already takes up too much space).

Another solution may be storing the energy as compressed air.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[dgp]

Agreed. Electrolysis of water to release hydrogen is easy to perform and well understood. Getting electricity back out with a fuel cell is a bit harder.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

Flywheels, the most efficient means of energy storage we have. Large ones, in sealed units, buried underground like a septic tank, that remain there 50 years or so, and can power your house for week or two in case of outages.

Several companies are working on exactly this.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[tmosley]

Eh? Deep cycle batteries work just fine for my solar set-up.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[rolfwind]

Do they use magnets to get the energy back out of flywheels these days somehow or mechanical linkages?

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

If they could make flexible solar panels, the first place they go into are laptops and tablets, one on the outside, and one under the screen display surface. Like literately, if they could make LCD screens also be solar panels on portable devices, you've just solved the "how do I get rid of large batteries" problem.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[otis wildflower]

Hydrocarbons created by energy from renewables or thorium LFTR power, using atmospheric CO2 (or coal) and water.

You're welcome.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

You want electricity, right? If so you need to convert kinetic->electric somehow.

If you just want to heat your home, you could just use friction, but....

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[jasno]

Well, here in California we pump water uphill at night and let it go down during the day.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you wake me up when you have the problem of fossil fuel depletion solved. Finite resources such as gas and oil are going to be around maybe 50 more years. Coal maybe a few hundred. What are you going to do then? How will you make petrochemicals? What kind of life will we have without this stuff?

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Fallingwater]

I was thinking flywheels too. They can't easily be adapted to automotive use, but if you can dedicate a whole room to a flywheel system size and weight are no longer a concern. However, they'd have to be more underground than the average basement, so if a flywheel breaks apart the resulting destruction doesn't bring the whole building down. Tons of potential kinetic energy stored in such a small area makes for a spectacular show if released all at once.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[GameboyRMH]

Hey you could go kinetic->thermal->electric using friction and thermoelectric materials XD

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[rolfwind]

I'm asking because I disassembled my magnetic resistance excercise bike recently and seen that they use a flywheel along with magnets that come move closer or farther to vary the resistance, and just wondered if that is how they generate the electricity from an industrial level flywheel these days or if a generator is mechanically attached.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

There's some work being done in Denmark where the energy is stored in low-pressure plastic bins inverted over water (the water column supplies the pressure). The low pressure makes the storage safer as the energy density is so low.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[englishknnigits]

If only we had such devices: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_generator

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[LanMan04]

Position them vertically, and you won't have to worry about destroying your basement when it fails.

I must be missing something here, that solution is just too simple... ;)

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[adavies42]

yes, ideally bonded to medium-length chains of carbon atoms for stability, ease of transport, etc.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Nadaka]

But then, everyone would have those cell phone clips on their belt so they can soak up sun instead of keeping it in their pocket. How will we be able to tell the douche bags who already have those cell phone clips from normal people?

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Artraze]

I might be misunderstanding your question, but:

Normally a flywheel is spun by a motor, which can also be used as a generator. So you (super basically!) just wire the flywheel motor into your circuit and when you have excess power it accelerates and when you have excess draw it decelerates.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Scareduck]

And so what?

The combination of storage costs plus manufacturing/deployment/maintenance costs will kill solar.

It's the hidden costs that are terrible, and why I wouldn't bet on solar taking over for anything except very niche markets.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[gorzek]

Pumping water uphill is a surprisingly effective energy storage technique. This isn't practical for most people's houses, but on a large scale it works very well.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Dasher42]

That's not an issue. A smart grid can use solar, wind, and wave energy as available and needed and balance it out. Concentrated solar thermal and laddermill-style wind generators which go far up enough to where there is always wind can supply baseload. It's more efficient to produce energy in smaller amounts near the demand when on demand than to store it long-term.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[necro81]

The energy stored in a flywheel is I * omega ^ 2. With the materials we have available now and the size you want to allocate to such a thing, manufacturers have found it works best to have a flywheel with a modest moment of inertia and crank the rotational rate way up high (100,000 rpm for starters). To keep the flywheel from spontaneously shattering, high speed flywheels are mostly made from carbon fiber. And with the flywheel spinning so fast, the only way to keep them from losing energy to friction is to have them spin in a vacuum on magnetic bearings. Then you add in a high efficiency motor/generator, with some serious power electronics to commute the phases at ~kW power levels. These are all proven technologies (see Beacon Power), but compared to a bank of lead acid batteries, it isn't an affordable solution for a home.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[essjaytee]

Flywheels, the most efficient means of energy storage we have. Large ones, in sealed units, buried underground like a septic tank, that remain there 50 years or so, and can power your house for week or two in case of outages.

Several companies are working on exactly this.

There's also advances in battery technology. I'm interested in this:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/liquid-batteries-0214.html

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[jklovanc]

Costs are still a bit high for flywheels. Here is a quote from this article; "Costs of a fully installed flywheel UPS are about $330 per 15 seconds at one kilowatt." So to supply 1kW for a week it would cost 330*4*60*24*7= $13.3m.
Flywheels are great for instant power to level output but not yet viable for long term storage. A flywheel to give power overnight would even be $800k.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Errtu76]

FYI. adding hashtags to anything but twitter is useless. A colleague of mine does that in e-mails. Highly annoying. Much like my complaint is to you, probably.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[randomencounter]

Make posts when the sun shines.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[istartedi]

Peak power use is during the day in many areas. Think office air conditioning. That alone is a killer app.

Of course there's no silver bullet for storage. Pumped storage exists in areas with water or underground caverns that can hold air pressure. If you charge electric or hybrid car batteries during the day that's storage too. Production of any energy intensive product during the day is also a form of "storage". Smelt your aluminum on cheap solar power, and it takes pressure off the market for fossil fuels.

There's no need to sleep. Every little bit helps..

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you haven't, because mobile computers will still need batteries. Do you really think that all uses of tablets and laptops occur in direct sunlight?

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds more like eddy current braking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_current_brake

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

Hydrogen? You're deluded.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-hydrogen-hoax

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[show me altoids]

Under most circumstances, yes, but not at Taum Sauk

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Knuckles]

Obviously this won't power a car on its own anytime soon, but I thought you might find it interesting anyway: http://www.williamshybridpower.com/
Williams Hybrid Power is a spin-off of the Williams F1 race team that competes in Formula One. They developed this flywheel storage for use in their F1 race car, but IIRC under the particular restrictions of Formula 1 battery systems proved more competitive. It's been used to provide power for a "boost button" in Porsche high-performance cars though, and they are teaming up with other manufacturers, like Audi.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

Your excercise bike probably just uses an aluminum disk moving past permanent magnets. This induces eddy currents into the aluminum disk, but there's no convenient place to extract that current - it'll just heat up the disk. For a generator, you'll have coils that are connected to the the gid (via inverters or whtever) moving past magnets (which can be coils as well). Either the magnets or the coils can be static while the other part spins.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

Another solution may be storing the energy as compressed air.

If only it wasn't so goddamned dangerous...

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[gorzek]

Yeesh! That one reads more like a cautionary tale in not having a backup plan, and not having a backup plan for your backup plan.

A question to ask yourself when dealing with something like this: "Could a software problem ever cause a catastrophic overflow?" If the answer is "yes," then you'd better make sure you've got a double contingency for dealing with it--an overflow spillway leading to the original reservoir (which this one lacked), and mechanical failsafes so the pumps will stop working if the water gets above a certain level. What happened doesn't sound like any kind of failure in this method of energy storage, but an utterly reckless approach to safety.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[TheRaven64]

No they wouldn't. In direct sunlight, the amount of power hitting the Earth is about 1kW/m^2. The top of my laptop is 0.09m^2, so the total solar energy hitting the back (assuming I'm sitting in direct sunlight with the back of the screen perpendicular to the Sun - and have you ever tried that?) is 90W. The most efficient solar cells ever made are 45% efficient. Most are about 10-20%. At 20% efficient, that's 18W. Still not bad, but once you're out of direct sunlight and into somewhere where you can actually see the screen, that drops to under 5W. Not worth bothering with. You can, however, get parasols with solar panels on top. These will quite happily power a laptop...

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, wake up, the 1930s called with several workable answers to your "problem".

Jesus, people, can you not do research outside oil company talking points? I'm getting tired of fielding this one.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Bensam123]

That's a pretty amazing bearing if it can last 50 years... not to mention all the other mechanical components. A septic tank is just a sealed concrete tank. Cool theory, but with a lot of mechanical things, they need to be serviced and they do randomly go bad.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

When I looked into these (granted , quite a few years ago), the rotational mass was constructed of carbon fibre thread, spooled around the axis (like a spool of thread). That way, when they failed, the thread generally dispersed in a multitude of directions, rather than releasing all that energy at a single point, like a big shaped block of C4. Imagine how much power a house consumes in one or two weeks. Now imagine all that energy being released instantaneously. Earth-shattering KA-BOOM!
The other issue I recall was that flywheels were only good for releasing huge amounts of power quickly, there was no real way to tap a little bit at a time. It's fine if you have a buffer of some sort, capable of absorbing all that energy at once, but taking the energy straight from flywheel to consumption wasn't really feasible, compared to other technologies.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[NatasRevol]

It's stored just fine. 92 million miles away.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the idea of burying them. I always find having a large flywheel around akin to a pint sized nuke. If it fails not much of your house would be left. In the ground you can cheaply bunker it on top of the casing. I've always loved the idea for houses but when it was proposed for cars it was a silly idea. Trains would make more sense. Trains are stable and only go up shallow inclines so it's an ideal mobile platform. The time a train is at a stop would be plenty to top off a flywheel. If solar cells were cheap you could line the whole train and use the flywheel to keep going through the night and on cloudy days. You could have a nearly perpetual train.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

Flywheels are easy to put onto cars?

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[F34nor]

Kinetic Battery.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[F34nor]

https://www.llnl.gov/str/pdfs/04_96.2.pdf

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[F34nor]

http://beaconpower.com/

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[green1]

We actually have one one of those plants not far from me, it appears to be a water tower at the top of a hill and a pumping/generating station at the bottom, when the local area has excess generating capacity they pump water up to the tower, and when they have excess draw they let it flow back down through the generators.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Caerdwyn]

The problem with batteries is sourcing the materials to make them.

The best batteries currently are all variants on lithium-ion. Where does the lithium come from? Much of it is in Bolivia, China, and Afghanistan. I'm not sure if changing control of a critical infrastructure mineral from the current oil producing cast of clowns to cocaine cartels, masters of corruption and religious fanatic heroin-pusher fucktards is a win. Who is worse; the House of Saud or the Taliban? Also, how much lithium is there? How much lithium would we need to replace automotive motors with battery systems? I'll leave as an exercise to the reader whether we'd run out of oil or minable lithium first if we converted fossil fuel surface-based* vehicles and homes/businesses to electric. Add up the energy capacity of the fuel tanks when filled with gas/diesel. You might not like the answer.

*Battery-powered air vehicles are a no-go. No battery technology comes close to the energy density per gram of hydrocarbon. You can move an airplane, its cargo and its fuel halfway around the globe with JP-A. Can't do that with batteries. Just not enough joules per gram of battery, plus batteries don't become (appreciably) lighter as you discharge them; spent chemical fuel doesn't have to be carried once it's burned.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

what i don't get is if their so darn useful, efficient, etc---why is the company in bankruptcy right now?

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[CrimsonAvenger]

Well, here in California we pump water uphill at night and let it go down during the day.

That would work really well in New Orleans, if the highest hill in the area was more than 15 feet tall....

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[FishTankX]

As far as I know the energy input and retrieval is still entirely mechanical, but the major advancements in flywheels have been magnetic bearings, and very high vacuums, which dramatically reduce friction losses.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[operagost]

Forced relocation of dihydrogen monoxide to higher elevations.

That being said, it's nice the panels are getting cheaper, but hasn't anyone noticed how expensive inverters (especially grid-tied) and transfer switches are? You'd think they were being made out of special 24K gold components.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Vanders]

Trains would make more sense. Trains are stable and only go up shallow inclines so it's an ideal mobile platform. The time a train is at a stop would be plenty to top off a flywheel.

It's been done.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[lordmetroid]

I also like the idea of storing excess energy by another molecule. The problem with hydrodgen is that it is a gas and hence is rather volumoues and being the smallest possible molecule one can think of, hydrogen tend to be rather difficult to contain in any container as it leaks catastrophically through seemingly solid walls. I would prefer creating ethanol from the carbondioxid in the air and water.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[couchslug]

"are working on" = "available for use".

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

And if it isn't sunny out? Won't someone think of the Inuit?

#blubber for dinner again lol same thing every night for 56 years now lol wish theyd leave me out on an ice floe and get it over with lol

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[AdrianKemp]

Lies, well actually truths. You're quite right on all points but one:

If you could *actually* pull a steady 5W from solar cells behind an LCD screen it would be entirely worth it. It would extend the battery life a considerable amount.

In reality it'd probably drop well below 1W and then you're quite right it's not worth bothering.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[aaarrrgggh]

I was talking to a manufacturer recently, and they indicated about a 20-25% premium relative to SLAB's in terms of first cost. For deep-discharge applications, you would break even in 3 years when you need to replace the batteries.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[snl2587]

But oil is consumed, and is absolutely certain to run out. Lithium can be recovered by recharging the cell, and even once the cell reaches the end of its lifetime, the lithium hasn't gone anywhere and could be recovered.

Besides, no one familiar with energy economics is pushing lithium-ion/next-gen for large-scale installations (read: grid storage), which is where the plan to use lithium-ion would certainly unravel. Once you move larger than a car, fuel cells are much more feasible.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

A flywheel to give power during peak time would even be $800k.

You had it backwards. No one needs a flywheel for power at night (yet), right now we need them during the day to offset utilities charging higher 'peak load' rates. Still, if they can get the cost down, it's an excellent transitional technology that would continue to pay off when you DO switch to solar/wind/tidal or whatever irregular source of power you have available in your geographic area.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[tragedy]

The best batteries currently are all variants on lithium-ion.

Are they? I was under the impression that, if you weren't worried about weight, which you aren't in home power storage, the best batteries were still lead-acid batteries.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[tragedy]

It might be better to combine hydrogen produced from electrolysis of water with the Sabatier process to make methane from atmospheric carbon dioxide. It would be a lot easier to store.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[mug funky]

i would love to turn sunlight into alcohol too.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[TheInternetGuy]

Do they use magnets to get the energy back out of flywheels these days somehow or mechanical linkages?

I think that typically, vinyl coating the flywheel used together with a set of Siamese cats will allow for the most efficient conversion ratio.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

Battery-powered air vehicles are a no-go.

Actually, for niche applications, they can go.

Long-duration drones are made very light and run on solar cells, of course.

But what about an airplane for people? Small single-engine (or I guess I should say "single-motor") electric planes are likely to be available soon, and have one really good application: pilot lessons. You would only get an hour or two of flight, but that's enough for a lesson.

But as for practical aircraft to carry lots of people long distances, yeah, batteries won't cut it ever.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[tibman]

You did not even read your own link.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[tibman]

You are right.. but! G+ uses them now too.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[dbIII]

The right energy source for the right place. I've heard at times New Orleans has plenty of wind.
Too soon?

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[jklovanc]

The post I was replying to was proposing the use of flywheels to store power generated by PVs during the day. Please read the entire thread before replying.

It is also bad form to quote someone and change their words. It is no longer a quote. If you want to rephrase then quote what you are rephrasing and then type out your version. Otherwise you make it appear that I said something I did not.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

What if you use aluminum for the ... anode (?)?
You would get a boost from the hydro used to smelt the aluminum.
Ship the oxide back to the smelter and Bob's your uncle.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[fezzzz]

I wonder how this will hold up in a small earthquake. Can't think that it will last.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[jaymemaurice]

If the flywhere contained magnets, could you not move a coil closer or further away to pull more or less energy from it?

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[jaymemaurice]

What about pulling somethings that are boyant under deep water... using the energy from resurfacing?

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[sincewhen]

Perhaps this is what you have.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[ryzvonusef]

I realize it wouldn't power cars at its density level (natural gas already takes up too much space)

Why not? I am not an engineer, so forgive me any errors, but I ( and millions others around me) drive cars with CNG tanks, clocking at 200 bars. Now Wikipedia (not the best possible source, but IANAE, so again, forgive me) tells me that Hydrogen is stored for consumption at either 350 or 700 bar tanks. Now obviously 700 is too dangerous, but I think 350 bar tanks would be feasible to usage directly in cars (again, IANAE!).

BTW, Isn't that what happens in Hydrogen cars Merc and BMW and Honda and whoever release?

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[rtb61]

You know how you solve big problems, you break them down into smaller problems and tackle one by one. Let's get rid of the infernal combustion engine and create smog free cities, that is a valuable and worth while solution all on it's own. Next up a distributed suburban energy generation grid, comprising batteries (having every residence with a 24 hour battery energy supply allows great load balancing), solar panels and vertical wind turbines.

This leaves larger far more efficient energy generation at power stations, nuclear, hydro, methane etc.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[BenJaminus]

The normal way in the UK would be to feed into the national grid who pay you for it. You generate during the day and consume electricity from somewhere else at night.

I wonder if this could lead to solar panel roof tiles?

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[xorsyst]

Even with the losses, I always though hydrogen would be the way to go for excess energy stored up through the day. I realize it wouldn't power cars at its density level

Have you seen this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCX_Clarity

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[gorzek]

Why go to all that trouble when you've already got gravity to do the work for you?

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[CrimsonAvenger]

The right energy source for the right place. I've heard at times New Orleans has plenty of wind. Too soon?

Too soon for what? Katrina jokes? We were making them before Katrina even hit...

That aside, and slightly (very slightly) more seriously, no, wind wouldn't work here - not enough of it, or too damn much, and the too damn much part is for very short durations very infrequently.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

Homes and Businesses are already electric. Certainly for the foreseeable future some gas infrastructure will persist simply due to inertia.

Odd you don't add Australia's production - 10K tons yearly. Same source as yours, second highest yearly production, 100 year reserve.

And in the US ( from http://www.westernlithium.com/ )
"Western Lithium's wholly-owned Kings Valley Lithium Project is located in Nevada, USA. In December 2011, the Company completed a NI 43-101 compliant pre-feasibility study which indicates a $550 million NPV(1) and 24% IRR(1) once full production of 26,000 tonnes per year of lithium carbonate is achieved. Proven and probable reserves total 27 million tonnes(2) at an average grade of 0.395%, providing a 20-year mine life."

2 lbs of Lithium needed to build the 600 lb batteries in a Leaf. The batteries have a extended life reuse case and eventually the lithuim can be easily recycled and recoverd. Do the math.

The cherry picked facts lead me to ask, are just a fan of the status quo (changing as the climate is), oil astro turfer, lead acid investor, or Fox news commentator?

Cheaper to buy astroturfers then airtime.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[wagnerrp]

In a sense, yes. These flywheels are hollow to maximize the rotational inertia (and storage) for a given amount of mass. You design the rotor with an integral "squirrel cage" built into this hollow cavity, and put a stator on the central shaft. If you want to add or remove energy, the stator sets up a rotating magnetic field that induces a complementary field in the rotor, and energy is transferred depending on the slip rate between the two. If you want to idle, you remove the frequency driver on the stator, internal resistance on the wires rapidly damps out any residual current and magnetic field, eliminating any potential eddy current losses and the need for mechanical actuation of any coils or magnets.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[wagnerrp]

Is that for the typical high current applications such as short term backup power before you engage generators, or for a more modest current unit better suited for residential operation? Everything I've seen commercially available is on the order of a couple hundred kW or better. Way overkill for anything you might need in a home.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[fgouget]

Flywheels, the most efficient means of energy storage we have.

There's an interesting post on Do the Math on the topic of energy storage, including flyweels. They seem to be workable but not necessarily the most economic approach.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[wagnerrp]

Those storage costs are going to need to be paid anyway should we ever want to improve our power grid. The US currently has around 1TW of installed generation capacity, but we only average about half that. Pervasive storage would mean we could rely on more efficient but slower to respond base load plants. Our long distance transmission infrastructure would not need to carry as much instantaneous power, meaning these is immediately significant overcapacity and redundancy in the system. Areas isolated by downed lines could operate in a splinter mode, and slewed into sync with the rest of the grid when repaired and re-attached. Excess power could be shunted into storage, rather than cause equipment to disconnect in self-protection, significantly reducing the risk of cascading failures.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[wagnerrp]

Yes. Don't bother messing around with lithium. We should build all of our energy storage out of inefficient electrolysis and large amounts of platinum.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[wagnerrp]

Costs are still a bit high for flywheels for the specific application that article was describing. They are UPS units, designed to provide high power output on the order of hundreds of kW, for long enough duration that you can start up your backup generators. Something designed for residential needs, and produced in the large volume that residential use would allow, could be made much cheaper. You also need to factor into the cost of replacement, for which a magnetically levitated flywheel will likely outlive its original owner with zero maintenance. The best battery designs typically only run for a couple thousand cycles, and would need to be replaced in 10-15 years.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[wagnerrp]

No. There are no mechanical components, there are no rubbing parts. You pull vacuum on the unit so there is negligible air friction. You levitate using permanent dipole magnets, meaning there are no bearings to fail. You use a modest amount of YCBO or some other high temperature superconductor for flux pinning and stabilization of the rotor. That leaves your vacuum pump and your LN2 chiller. You make them multiply redundant, and hot-swappable. If one fails, it throws up a warning, and notifies you to get it replaced.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

Formula 1 would like to disagree with you and present their Kinetic Energy Recovery System that they have on all of the cars now.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Caerdwyn]

Oh look, Little AC learned the word "Astroturf". Homework assignment: use it in a sentence.

All I am saying is that lithium, exactly like like oil, is largely (not entirely) sourced from hostile nations, and exactly like like oil, is a finite resource with known reserves insufficient for multi-century supply. We need to take that into account before we shove a poorly-thought-out forced-conversion law which simply trades one set of very serious problems for a different set of very serious problems. How is that "astrotufing"? I am saying that lithium batteries are suitable only for land-based transport, and cannot be legislatively be forced into being the energy storage mechanism for aircraft (one of the largest consumers of petrochemicals). How is that "astroturfing"?

Typical attempt by an AC zealot to stifle discussion with ad hominem attacks.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Culture20]

You know how you solve big problems, you break them down into smaller problems and tackle one by one. Let's get rid of the infernal combustion engine and create smog free cities, [...] Next up a distributed suburban energy generation grid,

You've just painted yourself into a corner. You need the better electricity grid before you can get rid of the internal combustion engine (unless you want to make everyone ride bicycles instead of electric cars).

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

You could do that, or you could actually bother to keep up with current research.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[FishTankX]

Quick update just found out that beacon power is working on a shaftless design which would eliminate mechanical linkages.

http://machinedesign.com/article/reinventing-the-flywheel-0811

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the idea just didn't fly.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

Can a flywheel be designed to make it through a significant earthquake without causing damage?

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[dbIII]

Actually offshore wind compressing air into underwater balloons is a pump storage option for a sea coast (water pressure means your pressure vessels are dirt cheap plastic bladders instead of big steel tanks). Hardening it against storm surges is something that still needs work though. It's probably a better option near Chicago or wherever instead of anywhere near the tropics.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[jaymemaurice]

Because you also have bouyancy :)

I was thinking that using bouyancy, you can store energy for slow release and without any land and minimal(ish) environmental impact...

Picture a large solar farm in the ocean that winches down bouys during production. At night, the winches are run in reverse as generators

Obviously I have oversimplified this and can think of dozens of technical challenges...

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[UpnAtom]

As does Diaspora and I have an Opera extension that turns them into links on Facebook.

And following this...

[Anonymous Coward]

We can expect very soon to see yet another flurry of false advertizements about "Clean Coal", and how wonderful it is.

Re:And following this...

[GameboyRMH]

Also, better hope any patents on this tech don't suffer the same fate as those on large NiMH batteries...

Re:And following this...

[tragedy]

Like models pretending to be miners to the tune of: "45 tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt."
Classic.

Just checking ...

[Compaqt]

Will a Canon Ion also work?

Re:Just checking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Just reverse the polarity.

War funding for Red Alert finally pays off.

[AuralityKev]

Take that, NOD!

Re:War funding for Red Alert finally pays off.

[Anonymous Coward]

Right franchise, wrong game.

Re:War funding for Red Alert finally pays off.

[dudpixel]

isn't it in C&C Generals? hmmm, just looked on wikipedia and apparently it is referenced in several C&C titles, including the first one.

you are correct though - there's no nod or gdi in red alert...

Cost of machinery

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the cost of the ion accelerator itself? Is it cheap enough to make this manufacturing method scaleable?

Re:Cost of machinery

[cyfer2000]

Ion implantation has been used by semiconductor industry for years. It's initial purchase cost is high, very high.

Re:Cost of machinery

[NatasRevol]

But already a sunk cost.

Re:Cost of machinery

[Gwala]

Courtesy of the modern banking industry however - sunks costs are often amortized into the production cost. So sunk costs become part of your production costs.

cue(sic)

[Anonymous Coward]

The confusion with power vs energy.

Re:cue(sic)

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you even know what "sic" means, and when to use it?

Get ready for....nothing!

[Rossman]

Man how many times have we seen these stories already - "cheap solar power discovery, will make solar pv affordable" but then years later nothing has changed.

It would be great if some of these things actually got productizd, I would set up solar pv all over my property if it was just a bit more cost effective...

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Baloroth]

Because the story comes out when the technology is still in fairly early stages of development, and then it takes 5-10 years from that point for people to work out the engineering difficulties to actually bring it to full-scale production (or it turns out not to be practical).

Also, oblig xkcd.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[sycodon]

Well, to use the common argument against drilling, if it will take more than just a few years to see the benefit, then why even bother with it?

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

The payout doesn't work. $.40 / watt manufacture means about $1.20 / watt to customer. Customer pays $.12 / watt for electricity so a ten year payout on an item with a seven year depreciation rate.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Alwin Henseler]

Yes, we here many of these stories, and then years later nothing has changed... Other than the fact that the cost/watt of pv has continued to drop a significant percentage year after year after year. If that doesn't suit one's definition of progress, redefine "nothing has changed"...

(..), I would set up solar pv all over my property if it was just a bit more cost effective...

If I'm not mistaken, pv already is cost-effective if not cheaper than conventional energy sources in a variety of places, be it with a significant upfront investment (but with cost-effective = including that investment). Any progress in the cost/watt department will simply increase the # of places where it pays to put up solar panels.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[tmosley]

Eh? Solar power has made huge strides in terms of decreasing costs even in the face of inflationary pressure. Solar used to be $5 a watt. Now it is common to find panels for $1 a watt (sunelec.com). This technology looks to cut that in HALF.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[TheRaven64]

I looked at solar panels for my house two years ago, and I looked again recently. The efficiency of the available cells has increased by about 50% for the same cost. So saying nothing has changed is a bit misleading.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

PV is affordable. I can buy retail (well single unit wholesale) for around $3 a watt.
Im off grid and I power my house with solar. I bought 4 panels for the price I paid for 1 panel 4 years ago. I just got a 55" LED TV. Spend $15,000 now and you will buy plenty of solar panels to power your house and your electric car and free yourself from oil and fossil fuels for ever.

A process to make existing cells thinner seems to be something that should be pretty easy to bring to market.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Teppy]

The prices we're seeing today are based on discoveries/improvements made several years ago. Look at how module prices have (mostly) dropped over the years: http://solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[TheRaven64]

Uh, that's not the argument against drilling. The argument against drilling is that the benefit will be short term, i.e. that it will only last 1-2 years. The benefit of R&D lasts much longer - even when this technology is obsolete, the next one is likely to be based on what was learned developing it.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

how many times do we have to listen to people parrot anti-solar crap that's 5 or 10 years out of date?? Solar is economically superior for up to ~40% of generation in about 60% of the world. Stop paying deadbeats for 0.12 $/kWh install cost and look at the real numbers, because sure as shit utilities all over the world are and they are now getting total installed system costs approaching 0.08 $/kWh. Yeah run those numbers in your "model". Make sure you neglect the comparison to other new generation because the only thing you'll find that beats this is a 40 year old 32% efficiency, non-scrubbed coal plant LOL. You also better neglect that more solar and wind are being installed than all other converters combined... Yup, solar must be a real dog. Oh right, then we can talk about subsidies. Go run a few calcs on the ridiculous profit machine that is SREC in the north east. 5-9 yr payback on a power plant with basically zero OPEX. LOL...

Call me when we get to 10% net generation by solar and then we can start to worry about storage R&D, if batteries aren't cheap enough by then. My god, the industry beats its targets year after year for ASP and production increases and still idiots beat on this drum like its 2002. Good reason why the US will just switch energy dependency from the saudis to chinese. We're idiots. The only new generation cheaper than solar right now is natural gas assuming 2011-2012 gas prices. If gas goes to 2008 or 2005, it spells doom for them too. Idiots in georgia, france, and finland promised nukes at 0.09 $/W and the latter are already 2x over budget. What a freak show. YEah show me some of that 0.09 $/kWh coal too, going to be a wonderful investments for the idiots in kansas,

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[TheRaven64]

Uh, what? Customers don't pay for power, they pay for energy. $0.40/watt, assuming 8 hours of useable sunlight per day, means about 3kWh/year. Customers pay $0.10/kWh in places where electricity is cheap. After one year, customers would pay at least $0.30, so the payback period is one and a third years, make it two years to cover installation / transmission costs and so on. In some places in the USA, electricity costs $0.40/kWh, so this would pay for itself in 4 months.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[hackertourist]

In two years, the price of solar panels has dropped by 50%, meaning that quite a few of the stories we've seen in the past years have made it into production.
If you don't want to read about the fundamental research that inevitably predates commercial improvements, go read a marketing magazine.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[jandrese]

Really, the problem is that Solar cells used to be 10x too expensive to be worthwhile for most people. Now they're only 2-3x too expensive. In a few more years they could actually start to become commonplace.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

*ahem*:
"Complete Hyperion 3 systems are available for shipment."
from http://www.twincreekstechnologies.com/technology/hyperion.html

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[cyberchondriac]

My money's on a near future story hailing cheap ultra super-efficient thin solar cells that enable cold fusion to power a perpetual motion machine that can guarantee peace in the middle east ;-)

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[MrQuacker]

The $/watt number refers to the cost of the PV chips. So it costs them $0.40 to create a chip that outputs 1 watt.

At $0.40/w you're paying $400 for a 1Kw panel. At that cost it will take 4000 Kwh @ $0.10/Kwh to pay for itself. That's about 2 years if it gets ~8hrs of sun a day. Everything produced after that 4000Kwh is "free", and since panels last for 10, 15, even 20+ years, that's a lot of "free" power. If grid electricity costs more than $0.10/Kwh, then payback is even faster. (I'm assuming perfect efficiencies to keep the math simple, but you get the point)

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[cyfer2000]

I thought customers pay for the energy (watt*hour), which is power (watt) * time (hour). And the energy producers buy machine with power, and keep the machines working for some long time.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[jank1887]

how much of that price drop is accounted for by Chinese government subsidy and market flooding?

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

As I say every time a solar breakthrough story is posted, the problem is it's always 5-10 years away. In 5-10 years, it'll still be 5-10 years away. Perpetually. Which drives me batshit crazy. Because solar seems to make the most long term sense. More solar energy bounces off the earth every day than we use. FFS, we should be single-mindedly trying to harness that energy.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[cyfer2000]

cold fusion... will be only 20 years away, always.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[TheRaven64]

With the subsidy factored in, they're actually a reasonably good investment now. The problem is that the current rate of development means that if I wait for a few years I'll get a much better system. This isn't a problem for something like a computer, because it's relatively cheap and I'll replace it in a few years anyway. Something like a solar power system I'd want to last for at least 10 years. If I can get one twice as good for the same price in two years, it's worth waiting...

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[BetterSense]

Actually, photovoltaic cells have a fundamental efficiency limit, and we are already close (well within an order of magnitude) of that already.

Also, it's more than that. Mostly, solar energy is not concentrated. People are just spoiled by semiconductor integrated circuits. Photovoltaics have been steadily improving, but the fact is solar power is not very dense...actual sunlight is not a concentrated source of energy. There's only so many watts per square meter that fall, and the sun doesn't always shine. The only way to get real gains is to set out more solar panels. So there is going to be no "breakthrough" like there sometimes is with other technologies that are enabled by integrated circuits; even if somebody invents the absolute perfect solar cell that sucks up every uJ of energy that hits it.

People set their expectations based on technologies that are enabled by integrated circuits, but fail to realize that more fundamental technologies can't be doubled in speed or cut to 1/4 the cost just be printing more of them on the same amount of silicon.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[sycodon]

Talk to the Bama.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[tmosley]

More lies. If it used more energy than it produced, you could never make your money back. Energy isn't free for manufacturing plants.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Vintermann]

Actually, the price of photovoltaics has dropped tremendously in the recent years, and with advances like these, it's not hard to predict that it will continue. The subsidies for solar power development have paid off tremendously in the way they were supposed to, by driving research that have cut prices.

For the photovoltaics industry, though, this hasn't been an unmixed blessing, since it has become so competitive, prices are now being driven so low by more efficient production that many struggle to get by.

It's completely wrong that "nothing has changed", you're just not paying attention.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Dishevel]

Wow. Really? I had absolutely no idea that most oil wells only lasted a year or two.
Look. I like the idea of Solar Panels, Wind Turbines, Tide Generators and the like. Where they work.
Where they do not I want coal or oil being used as cleanly and efficiently as possible.
But when greentards come around and blatantly spew out lies to make one technology seem better than another it angers me.
Solar has its good points. You do not have to fucking lie about shit to make it good.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats prob because we are more interested in perfecting hot fusion

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Artraze]

Well, it also doesn't hurt that when the technology comes out you get the marketing number only.

Sure, the panels are 40c/W, but put them in a box, pay the employees and overhear and then they're $1/W. Install them with a conversion system and batteries and all of a sudden they're $3-$7 per Watt much like they've always really been. (And of course, that's peak, and the average cost it probably more like $10-$25 / Watt.)

Developments like these are positive, to be sure, but the cells themselves are only part of a pretty pricy equation. Even if this tech pans out, it probably won't end up reducing the price much more than 20%. Nice, but no where near the "half" that they like to tell you.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

You can keep your solar cells. Up here in Minnesota where the average amount of sun per day is significantly less than 8 hours in the winter I'd prefer nuclear.

I've got the spot all picked out for my own personal traveling wave reactor.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

What does Nick Saban know about energy policy?

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Dasher42]

Actually, solar costs have been falling dramatically, and if we were looking at the big picture, a solar panel delivering energy on-site is already often cheaper due to cutting out losses to electrical resistance, additional conversions between AC and DC. If subsidies weren't horribly skewed to suit the Big Oil lobby, you'd see more. There's still a lot going on, and if you combine solar thermal panels and a passive solar remodeling of your home, the remaining electricity load will be within the means of a much smaller, more affordable PV setup.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

The world uses ~90 million barrels of oil a day. We have to drill hundreds of new wells a year to maintain current production levels as old ones are exhausted. We can continue drilling for quite a long time but it's likely not going to get any cheaper.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

My vaporware radar just overloaded a receiving module. Thanks a lot Twin Creek.
Particle accelerator, clean room manufacturing, ... are substantial operations.
If nothing else, "Twin Creek" has perfected the science of stealth industrial production.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[mattiaza]

We are very close to the fundamental efficiency limit of *power per square meter*. Which is a valid, but secondary concern. If solar cells are cheap enough, there is plenty of space for them in deserts, suburban roofs, and perhaps even parking lots! A manhattan skyscraper won't be able to power itself, but a 30km*30km plot of land in Nevada receives enough sunlight over 24 hours to power the entire U.S. with electricity. The important metrics for any energy source are: * cost per watt over the entire lifetime of the system * pollution caused and non-renewable materials used per watt over the entire lifetime of the system. This research improves the cost per watt metric. As soon as it is better than coal, we will see huge solar cell power stations.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[TheRaven64]

No, we're much more interested in perfecting cold fusion. We actually have a vague idea about how to do hot fusion though...

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Wraithlyn]

solar panels still never even come close to putting out energy that comes close to the energy used in manufacturing the panels

Hmm. I wonder what I'll turn up if I google "solar myths".

Myth #5: Making solar panels takes more energy than it could ever produce.

A report by the National Renewable Energy Lab shows that solar photovoltaic panels actually payback the energy used to produce the panels in 1 to 4 years depending on the type of panel. Because solar panels last at least 30 years, PV systems will provide at minimum 26 to 29 years of pollution-free electricity for your home!

Source

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Zeromous]

Hey AC, how about a mix of both using Solar to offset your "dirty power"?

>sun per day is significantly less than 8 hours

On a cloudy day maybe. I live further North than you, and it seems to work just fine for my neighbours.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the part to focus on is not the efficiency per solar panel, but rather the efficiency per dollar. You may not make a solar panel more efficient, but you can probably make it cost less. Thus, cheaper to cover an area with them.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Baloroth]

Actually, photovoltaic cells have a fundamental efficiency limit, and we are already close (well within an order of magnitude) of that already.

Really? My understanding was the efficiency limit of commercially practical models was still in the 10-15% range, while many of the research cells (from a quick check on Wikipedia) have already gotten to the 40%+ range (the absolute upper limit being 93%). Yes, that's "within an order of magnitude", but making panels with 2-3 times the efficiency would be a huge step forward. If those become commercially practical to build, solar technology would see a massive gain in practicality, since you wouldn't need huge fields to produce acceptable power. I could be wrong about those efficiency numbers, though (haven't looked into the matter all that extensively).

Now, the best solution I've heard of is solar-heated molten-salt heatsinks, which can generate power continuously (even at night) using stored energy. Even that is limited to areas where sunlight is pretty much 365 days a year (the Mojave desert, for one). But the simple fact is solar is too fickle to be practical for an Earth-based solution. If we ever get wireless power transmission or a space-elevator finished, orbital solar panels could potentially offer an amazing source of power, but short of that solar just isn't good enough to replace most of our energy needs (in my opinion, of course).

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

Which subsidy? For oil or for 'sustainables'?

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[YojimboJango]

Umm... The article was saying that they can cut 10x as many slices from the same block of silicon.

So they aren't making a panel 10x more dense, they're making 10 panels for the same materials cost as 1 modern day panel. Which (if you dismiss the price of buying and operating the frickin ion cannon) makes this price competetive with some fossil fuels.

The hope is in 20 or 30 years this tech will combine with a dozen or so other breakthroughs and we'll start to see truly competetive solar options.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[NatasRevol]

Have you seen the caloric needs of a 350 lb, 6'6" lineman!!

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Dodgy G33za]

The price is coming down significantly year on year, as others have responded. According to this report http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/New-Study-Solar-Grid-Parity-Is-Here-Today/ it has already reached grid parity.

The biggest problem for new projects is that the ROI is over the life of the panels, leading to big up front capital costs. A return based on 25 years is way too long for many investors.

The nice thing about solar is that cost per watt continues to improve, and regular stories like this indicate that it has a way to fall yet. Once it gets cheap enough everyone will have them, even if only to power air conditioning on hot sunny days.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Iskender]

Sure, solar power doesn't produce infinite power per area. But that doesn't matter. In fact, I'd argue it still produces quite a lot.

It's been known for a long time that the price of manufacturing per watt is the important thing for solar, and that goes down all the time. There is no known lower limit to prices here.

I think you're underestimating how much space there is when you say solar isn't very dense. A good sunny day will give 1000W solar input for one square metre. There are a million square metres in a square kilometre, meaning a gigawatt of solar input. That's a typical nuclear reactor's worth. But not all of that can be used. Let's assume 10% efficiency, meaning 10 square kilometres/nuclear reactor. Add half for support equipment and it's 15 square kilometres.

That's a square less than four kilometres wide. For a nuclear reactor this would be an acceptable safety zone - it's pretty small really.

There is plenty of space for solar if it only becomes cheap enough. It is already cheap enough in places like Hawaii, and it will only get cheaper while fossil fuel prices will keep going up.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Dodgy G33za]

You will only get 8 hours of usable sunlight per year if you have a solar tracker and live in a particularly sunny spot. Here in Sydney, (which is on the same latitude sun wise as LA for you North Americans) PV installers base calculations on on 4 hours at the rated value for fixed PV.

So a 200w panel costing $600 would give you 300 KW per year. At our electricity prices that is $68 a year, so paid off in 9 years and a ROI of 280% over the 25 years of installation. Sounds okay. Sounds even better when you take into account that buying grid energy from renewables in Australia commands a 40% premium on the price, and that there is a connection fee of $160 per year, and that energy prices will continue to rise.

The problem is that the cost of the panel is only about a third of the cost of the installation for home solar, even if you do it yourself. To make matters worse the batteries have a much shorter life than the panels.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you!!! Wish I had some mod points. It blows my mind that the parent to your post has a +5 insightful when there wasn't one ounce of accurate information. I happen to have grown up in an area that has oil wells all over the place (i.e. north-east utah). These wells are used for decades (let me repeat that to make it clear "DECADES") not 1 or 2 years.

I'm all for clean energy, but until the cost is anywhere close to that of fossil fuels, it's just not cost effective. I know, I know, I'm going to get blasted for being bought off by the BIG OIL COMPANIES, or claim I've bought into a big lie, but the fact really comes down to that the GP to my post only got a +5 insightful because what he said was the popular thing to say and not in the least bit accurate.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it would increase rate of return which is a factor. Taking 10 years to break even is hardly worth it for most people. Why take the effort if you only end up paying the same amount? Now, reduce that to 5 years and save money afterwords and it's much more reasonable. Currently, the investment returns are low to nil while having to deal with the hassle involved (installation hassle + periodic maintenance + uncertainty of hardware failure).

Reducing cost does help though in a gradual sort of way. People won't start installing them in droves but various people will and new houses may start installing them as they would increase the value of the house greater then the cost.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[mk1004]

Even with supposed advances, solar panels still never even come close to putting out energy that comes close to the energy used in manufacturing the panels.

I've heard that argument before. I'm wondering, however, how the cost per kWh can be anywhere near traditional power plants if that's true. Isn't the cost of the solar cells based upon manufacturing costs, which would have to include the energy costs? Or am I missing something?

Halving the cost of the cells doesn't lower the overall manufacturing and installations costs, so this advance may be moot anyway.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Dodgy G33za]

That is a lot of free power IF you get those eight hours of sunlight, and IF you get them when you want them and IF you can use the power at the output voltage of the panel. Sadly not one of those is correct for home installation :o(

You actually get an average 4 hours peak output for a fixed panel, the power arrives while you are at work, and you don't have too many devices that run off of 24v DC.

It is the batteries, inverters, trackers and installation that make PV expensive.

Of course most of this doesn't apply if you are an energy company that can chuck it out as base load for office workers. But you will still have to spin up alternatives once the sun goes down, and most fossil fuel power stations are so slow and expensive to start it is better to keep them running (hence the cut price overnight electricity to heat up household water).

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Dishevel]

How many barrels of oil are created by the earths natural processes every day?
How much oil can we pump per day and stay sustainable?
At a certain rate oil and coal are both sustainable resources. We are just using them faster than that rate right now. I think.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Mike_EE_U_of_I]

Man how many times have we seen these stories already - "cheap solar power discovery, will make solar pv affordable" but then years later nothing has changed.

It would be great if some of these things actually got productizd, I would set up solar pv all over my property if it was just a bit more cost effective...

Nothing changes???? In 1980, solar PV cost about $22 a watt. If you order a large system today, you can do that for about $3 a watt. If you take inflation into account, that 1980 number is closer to $50 a watt in today's dollars. Yes, a reduction in price of 94% is peanuts compared to what has happened with computers, but that still beats the heck out of all of all the other energy sources. For example, oil costs more today than in 1980. Coal costs more than in 1980. And so it goes.

    Solar is already cheaper than grid power in some areas. If prices keep dropping at the same rate they have been dropping (about 8% a year), within a decade, solar PV will be cheaper than the retail electricity rate for pretty much everyone in the US.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[green1]

Increased density would be nice, but isn't even required at this point. The important part now is reduced cost, and that's not related to any of what you said.

The frustrating part is that we've been reading about huge breakthroughs in the cost of making solar panels for 15 years or more now, and while prices have come down a little bit in that time, the spectacular new methods proposed never seem to make it to market.

I'm ok with them not getting any more efficient, as long as they get to a point where I can afford them.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[operagost]

With the subsidy factored in

Goody! I can have renewable energy, and all I have to do is make my fellow citizens pay for it!

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Jeremi]

Man how many times have we seen these stories already - "cheap solar power discovery, will make solar pv affordable" but then years later nothing has changed.

If you think "nothing has changed" over the years then you haven't been paying attention. As shown in the graph at the link, the price has declined dramatically in the last decade.

I would set up solar pv all over my property if it was just a bit more cost effective...

So would a lot of people, as soon as the cost of solar power becomes less than the cost of (whatever power source they are using now). For most people (barring subsidies) that hasn't happened yet, but it's looking pretty inevitable that the lines will cross for many within the next few years. And when they do, it will be largely thanks to the eventual productization of the technologies you kept reading about over the years (and other efficiency advances that you didn't read about, since they didn't make for an interesting new article).

So to sum up: quit complaining, the articles you read here are the first stage of a pipelined process, the fruits of which always lag a number of years behind the news, but the advances do arrive eventually.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[CrimsonAvenger]

A manhattan skyscraper won't be able to power itself, but a 30km*30km plot of land in Nevada receives enough sunlight over 24 hours to power the entire U.S. with electricity.

Well, no. Not really.

Only way that this would be true is if we had 75% efficient solar panels.

Last I checked, typical solar panel efficiency was in the timezone of 10-15% efficient.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

That is not really true.

In 2008 we had PV panels selling for $4/W and innovative companies claiming $1/W by end of 2012.
It is beginning of 2012 and PV panel prices are down to 83c/W.

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20120309VL200.html

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Ironchew]

How many barrels of oil are created by the earths natural processes every day?
How much oil can we pump per day and stay sustainable?

I couldn't find any estimates, but it's far, far less than our current rate of consumption (hence, why it's considered non-renewable). Since conditions have to be optimal, my guess is that purposeful burial of biomass or algae biofuel generation would easily outpace it.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[niftydude]

What rubbish. Even your typical silicon substrate based solar cell will regenerate the energy used to produce it after 5 years. This is when you include all energy involved in the process, from mining onwards.

The lifetime of Si wafer solar cells is at least 20 years. So they return at least 4 times the power used to produce them.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[aaarrrgggh]

Conventional wells last much longer than 1-2 years, but horizontal frac wells are limited to about that duration.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[aaarrrgggh]

No, you just cover half the available area now, and the other half in 3 years. In 6 years, there might be enough of an improvement to justify selling your original install and upgrading with new equipment. ...much like many conservative investment strategies.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[aaarrrgggh]

I am honestly curious on this, but the optimist says many companies invested too much in a technology that ended up being superseded by a more efficient solution.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

While I believe your overall point is correct, isn't a big part of the recent price drops due to the market being flooded with cheap panels by Chinese manufacturers?

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Dishevel]

I think you are missing the point.
I already know that estimates are hard to find. No one is even looking.
The fact is that oil and coal have a place in the plans of any real energy solution.
Oil, Coal, Natural Gas, Solar, Wind, Tidal, Dams and Nuclear all have places where they work best.
The careful and sustainable use of all would make for a healthy society.
Gas is awesome for family cars. Trucks could run on electricity stations at truck stops. The tops of trailers have a good amount of space for solar cells to increase range a bit. Use electricity for small cheap commuter cars and cycles. Small and Cheap! All electric cars as the one car in most families is impractical.
The greens hate oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, and dams.
They are out to destroy them all. Yet the truth is we can not do all we do with wind and solar. It is currently a pipe dream. An expensive one. That is screwing over all of us.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but your math is wrong. The amount of sunlight that falls on a 30km * 30km area in Nevada in a 24 hour period will not produce enough power for the state of Nevada for a day, let alone the US.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[dontmakemethink]

The $/watt number refers to the cost of the PV chips. So it costs them $0.40 to create a chip that outputs 1 watt.

Keep in mind that's the cost of _production_ of the PV chips, not the price of assembled panels to the end user. Don't mean to be pessimistic, but $0.40 is not the number to be basing calculations upon.

Also I had an eye-opening chat with a utilities employee from Ontario Canada, where it's actually illegal to use your own solar power unless you go completely off the grid, otherwise you can only sell the power generated to the utility provider for your area. Sounds crazy, but folks quickly appreciate the situation because they're paying something like $0.55 per kWh for private solar/wind installations to pump juice into the grid. Sounds even more crazy, but it actually makes sense as it was explained to me.

Ontario has lots of electricity sources that have already paid for themselves and have lots of service life left, so much of the power comes at a pricetag of under $0.05 per kWh. However, as demand has exceeded the cheap supply, additional power generation gets extremely expensive fast. No matter what type of power generation is developed, it can't be located close to where the demand is, so the infrastructure required to patch it to where it needs to go plus upgrade all regional subsystems to handle the higher overall grid capacity is a massive expense in addition to the cost of the generators themselves.

For example, obviously the GTA (greater Toronto area) is a huge consumer of electricity, and there's a nuclear power plant in Pickering about 60mi away, not the closest to the GTA, but it does contribute to the GTA's supply. When the Pickering plant was built, they didn't run primary power cables directly to Toronto, they ran them to a new substation which joined it to the grid at the nearest feasible access point. Then all substations between it and downtown Toronto had to be upgraded to handle the potential current flow.

The beauty of solar/wind is that the power sources are within the same region as the end users, plus the hours of production coincide with the hours of demand. As long as solar/wind production escalates at the same rate as regional demand, the regional substations will never require upgrading, and the system scales itself, offsetting load off the grid exactly as demand peaks. The solar/wind power doesn't even need to be stepped up to high voltage / low current for long distance transmission. That's why they're paying over 5x the rate that they charge to provide the same thing. It would cost them even more to add conventional power to the grid.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, if it's good enough for nuclear and coal, it's good enough for solar.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that someday soon (within 20-30 years) the relative cost of Solar (compared to other forms of electricity) will be low enough that Solar Cells will be used in even suboptimal locations. This means to me that all roofing material will be solar cells, and many buildings with southerly exposures will have solar "siding".

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[jeff4747]

Yeah, 'cause we're not all paying massive oil subsidies....oh wait.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[epine]

Goody! I can have renewable energy, and all I have to do is make my fellow citizens pay for it!

The great thing about hating the government is never having to think. In many situations such as this one, where society needs to navigate a large infrastructure change, the early adopters provide a public good so that it becomes possible to achieve a Libertarian price point in the fat lump of the adoption curve sooner rather than later. You can argue that I'm wrong in this case, but it requires two orders of magnitude more mental input than your original comment.

My father installed a 1st generation heat-pump technology in the early 1980s. It was hardly painless. Mostly worked pretty good, but some components were failing every 18 months, until design problems were identified and resolved.

And that's nothing compared to what we pay bankers to fail on our behalf. If my father got a subsidy, it went right back out the door on expected unexpected maintenance costs. The bankers sent their subsidies straight to Switzerland.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[tragedy]

That information, if ever true, is total bunk with modern cells. The really expensive, high-efficiency, long lived and highly durable cells only make sense in places that can't be on grid. Regular mass-produced solar cells make sense pretty much everywhere currently, but they still haven't reached the price point where not using solar is completely stupid for most homeowners. It has reached the point where it's economical in about the five year range though.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[tragedy]

I just did the calculations for myself based on $1 per watt solar panels (which work out to about $7.31 per actual average yearly watt at my location). I looked at my last few years of power bills and, based on what I would save, I would make the initial outlay back in 5 years without any subsidies and then the panels would continue to work for decades after that.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[SoftwareArtist]

Huh? "Years later nothing has changed?" Are you aware that solar prices have been falling at an incredible rate recently? See this article, for example, which points out ,"From 2009 to 2010, the price of a residential solar electric system fell 17 percent," and, "The trend will continue this year as the average cost of systems has already fallen 70 cents per watt, or 11 percent in the first half of 2011." Or as Wikipedia points out, "As of 2011, the cost of PV has fallen well below that of nuclear power," and, "In some locations, PV has reached grid parity, the cost at which it is competitive with coal or gas-fired generation."

We've been hearing stories for years about improvements that would reduce the cost of solar power. And it's precisely because of those improvements that solar power has, in fact, been getting steadily cheaper.

The not surprising result has been a huge increase in the use of solar power. From the same Wikipedia page, the total worldwide solar capacity has grown from 5.4 GW in 2005 to 67.4 GW in 2011: an increase of 1148% in just six years.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[LordLimecat]

The manufacturing plants likely dont generate their own electricity with their own panels, so your argument is irrelevant. Do you have reason to believe they do?

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[tibman]

Reducing the cost to install solar by 20% would be amazing.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[madbrain]

You don't need any costly and failure prone batteries, just connect to the grid and use net metering.
I did a solar install 18 months ago and it came to $6 per watt DC including labor, Enphase micro-inverters, and US made solar panels (Sharp). Total bill was $40k. This was before any state or federal incentives. It was $26k after incentives.
Due to high tiered electricity costs in California and the fact that I live in a large home, that cost will be recouped in 7.5 years.

The total cost to install might be about 20% less now or $8000, but if I had waited I would also have paid more than $4000 electricity costs by now .

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[dbIII]

It has changed. Compare the cost of retail solar panels today to a similar devices in the 1980s to get a clue.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[BetterSense]

The fundamental black-body efficiency limit (the Shockley–Queisser limit) for solar cells is 33%.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Baloroth]

Really? Because this graph shows research efficiencies having been achieved of over 40%.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[timeOday]

Solar has been dropping precipitously in price since at least 1978. How far back do you want to try and blame China?

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get fully installed 5kw solar systems for houses in Australia for about $10,000, $2/watt

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

I read a very good author once talking about design and how peoples perceptions limit design. Even is a design is better than the previous design, if it doesn't look and feel like what people are used to, they'll reject it out of hand. It's my belief this is a lot of what is going on with people rejecting solar out of hand.

Up till now power plants have had the same look and feel. They're a big steel and concrete building that produces an ass load of power in a small space. So coal, oil, gas, nuclear power plants all same. So then they see a solar plant with it acres and acres of mirrors or PV panels and they think it's lame and unworkable compared to conventional. Course with conventional thermal plants what you don't see is the mountain top removal that goes along with coal mining, the huge network of oil wells and pipe that go along with oil and gas. Or the hundreds of tons of earth and rock that need to be moved to get at uranium ore and the huge amounts of that, which need to be processed to get an a kg of enriched Uranium.

And ignoring that we're burning though energy resources that have been accumulated over geologic time within one human lifetime. China for instance has burned through 37% of it's total coal reserves in 25 years. It's not that current situation isn't sustainable over a few generations, it's not sustainable for even one more generation.. On the other hand a 10km X 10km solar plant of the Nevada desert will generate an average of 5 gigawatts. And a million years from now, it will still generate 5 gigawatts.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

We weren't talking about "typical" solar panel efficiencies, but ok, fine - let's just make it a 90km* 90km plot instead. The point still stands - it's still not a huge area in a big, largely-empty place like Nevada and I'm pretty certain that much unused land could be trivially found and repurposed if the political will and money were available.

Of course then you get into arguments about how to distribute all that power across an entire continent. That's a good discussion to have, but by no means and insurmountable problem.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[TheRaven64]

That would make sense if the panels were the main cost. Unfortunately, they are not. The installation is typically around half of the cost of deployment. Better panels won't alter the cost, but they will make a big difference to the payback time.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[xorsyst]

The greens hate oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, and dams.

Not at all true - Greens hate oil, coal and natural gas, sure. But many greens are pro-nuclear, and dams have their place.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your power, wherever you get it, is subsidised.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Dishevel]

Try to build a new dam or a new nuclear power plant.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[avandesande]

and we are already close (well within an order of magnitude)

LOL anything greater than 10% meets this criteria.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[amRadioHed]

Why would they be more interested in perfecting something that likely doesn't even exist? That would be a case of horribly misplaced priorities.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[AmiMoJo]

Solar thermal can hit 80%. Solar thermal over 0.3% of the Sahara would power all of Western Europe.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[AmiMoJo]

In the UK the government guaranteed to pay a decent amount of energy generated by PV panels, even if you used it yourself rather than feeding it back into the grid, for 25 years. Lots of companies started offering to install them for free on your roof, the deal being that you could use the electricity generated (and thus reduce your bills) and they got the subsidised cash from the feed-back tariff.

The scheme looks likely to end now which is a shame, because it was a good way for people to save some cash and for the UK to push solar tech.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[AmiMoJo]

That's why the energy company pays you for feeding back the unused energy you generate into the grid. Ultimately it boils down to a tonne of coal they didn't have to burn, a kg of nuclear fuel they didn't have to refine, manufacture and turn into waste or a cubic metre of gas they didn't have to ignite.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Rossman]

As someone who has been watching the price of panels in the last few years, I don't believe that to be entirely accurate.

"the price of a residential solar electric system fell 17 percent" - be that as it may, the price of panels has most certainly not fallen 17%. If anything they are marginally cheaper.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[SoftwareArtist]

Citation needed.

Here is a site that tracks the price of solar panels (rather than complete residential solar systems). As you can see from the graph, the price has been falling rapidly since the start of 2009. In that time, the average cost of solar panels has fallen from nearly $5/watt to only $2.29/watt, with the least expensive panels only $0.84/watt. That's a dramatic change in only three years.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[aaarrrgggh]

In terms of $/kW installed, it doesn't matter. If install makes a big difference, your half is denominated in kW and not area.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Rossman]

I would be interested to know what size installations your neighbours have, what kind of backup they have in place (grid tie or generator), and how often they rely on that backup.

Trying to generate enough solar to live at the same level you are when connected to the grid, requires either a backup ($$!) or to be way over-engineered (also $$!) compared to a location further south. The downside to living up north is we not only get less sunshine/day, in the winter when you really need it, it's really cold out as well, which generally drives up power demands.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Rossman]

I don't believe this to be accurate, while China has been flooding the market with cheaper panels in the last couple of years, you always get what you pay for.

If you look at the good quality panels from companies like Sharp the prices have not dropped anything like what you have suggested. The prices on them have come down, and the panels use better technology now, so you can get some bigger wattage panels which is nice, but they are still not yet price efficient for your average household (at least up here in Canada).

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Rossman]

While I would use the word "steadily" versus "precipitously", I agree.

Thanks for the chart, it is essentially saying we got until around 2017 before this shit starts getting to be realistic price-wise for everyday people.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[tmosley]

And the manufacturing facilities that produce parts for nuclear power plants run on electricity from coal fired power plants. Your argument makes ZERO sense.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Rossman]

Sure if you factor in the cheap panels from China the averages look favourable; but as I mentioned in another post if you look at the quality panels, over time the change is not as drastic.

I have personally been watching the prices of panels to buy for an installation, and the quality panels have not come down that much in any sources I have seen. Maybe I am looking at the wrong suppliers, or maybe I should just buy some chinese panels of questionable quality, I don't know.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[timeOday]

But it's a log scale. Don't you think a drop from $5.00/kWh to $0.20/kWh qualifies as "precipitous"? It's under-appreciated because it's still more than fossil fuel, but if that same curve holds for a few more years, the world will be changed.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[SoftwareArtist]

Citation still needed.

Which are the brands you consider to be "quality panels"? What did they cost three years ago? What do they cost today? What information do you base your claim that the others are low quality on? Be specific.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[TheRaven64]

You needed to be careful with these schemes, because a lot of them meant leasing your roof for a long time, which was in violation of most mortgage agreements. It's also possible to get loans to cover them - the FIT will cover the repayments and you get to keep the generated electricity.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[operagost]

Here's a bit of advice: if you want anyone to listen to you, don't start with an insult. I am aware of the subsidies for other industries, and they stink too. I am not in favor of them because they rarely improve the "public good" more than they increase corruption and pick who wins in the market.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[operagost]

How much for your inverter, charge controller, and other electrical upgrades? How much for batteries or the grid-tie hookup? I've found that these cost as much or MORE than the panels. Your ROI without subsidies will be at least 10 years.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, there is a problem with your calculations, there aren't a million meters per km there are only a thousand, so it will take considerably more space than your estimates

Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Also Awesome

no way

[Anonymous Coward]

whatever, I'm sure this was all true a year or 2 ago before module ASPS plummeted. however, these guys are now working against a commodity and china has demonstrated they are cool with 7% GM on modules. Polysilicon prices fell off a cliff and economies of scale have worked. wafer costs are 57c for the Chinese leaders now and their targets are under 50c by 2013, which means the competitive advantage of this process is zilch. This idea had legs in 2007-2008. No longer. Heck, even CdTe thin film lost its production cost advantage compared to China. Regular multi / quasi-mono cells will deliver terawatts of power. This other shit is a side show.

Re:no way

[cyfer2000]

I will mod parent post up if I have points.

Re:no way

[tragedy]

This company isn't making solar cells themselves though, they've just developed a method of slicing silicon wafers thinner with less waste. Making giant silicon crystals is expensive, so you save money with less waste. You also save money since you're now getting more slices, which are just as useful for making solar cells as the thicker ones, from the same crystal. The resulting cells are also a bit lighter and thinner (although I think only a small part of the thickness and weight of a typical cell is the actual semiconductor) so shipping costs may go down fractionally. It will make solar cells made in China cheaper along with those made anywhere else.

How much energy does the particle accelerator use?

[Anonymous Coward]

So the question is... can they run the hydrogen ion particle accelerator with their own solar cells for a truly 'green' energy company?

Great, now lets build them in China

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, now lets build them in China

Watt vs KW/hr

[Kenja]

I assume the listed price of 40 pennies per watt is a watt per hour at peak performance? So to compare against a currently offered grid tie in system at 300 watt hours this seems to be about 1/10th the price. Granted, that's comparing a full system with alternators and a tie in system to feed unused power back into the grid, but given how PG&E prices per KW/hr in a tiered system (more power you use, more it costs per watt) this seems like a good deal.

So a new excuse to put off installing solar panels for a while longer! Yay!

Re:Watt vs KW/hr

[MrQuacker]

No. The $/watt number refers to the cost of the PV chips. So it costs them $0.40 to create a chip that outputs 1 watt.

At $0.40/w you're paying $400 for a 1Kw panel. At that cost it will take 4000 Kwh @ $0.10/Kwh to pay for itself. That's about 2 years if it gets ~8hrs of sun a day. Everything produced after that 4000Kwh is "free". If grid electricity costs more than $0.10/Kwh, then payback is even faster. (I'm assuming perfect efficiencies to keep the math simple, but you get the point)

Re:Watt vs KW/hr

[silenthorn]

I assume the listed price of 40 pennies per watt is a watt per hour at peak performance? So to compare against a currently offered grid tie in system at 300 watt hours this seems to be about 1/10th the price. Granted, that's comparing a full system with alternators and a tie in system to feed unused power back into the grid, but given how PG&E prices per KW/hr in a tiered system (more power you use, more it costs per watt) this seems like a good deal. So a new excuse to put off installing solar panels for a while longer! Yay!

Right sentiment, but wrong units: "Watt per hour" or "KW/hr" is not a unit that makes practical sense. This may help clarify: Watts or kilowatts are units of power, which is an instantaneous measurement. A 40 Watt lightbulb draws 40 Watts when it's on, no matter how long it's been on. Watt-hours (Wh) or kilowatt-hours (kWh) are units of energy, which is the product of power and time. If you leave that same 40W bulb on for an hour, you've used 40 Wh, or 0.04 kWh. If you leave it on for 100 hours, that's 4 kWh. If you had two 40W bulbs, they would draw a combined 80W, and would consume the same 40 Wh in just 30 minutes. For most homeowners, your electricity is billed in kWh. The utility doesn't care much if you run 1 bulb for a month, or 30 bulbs for a day, it's (roughly) the same amount of fuel to provide that energy. Larger facilities may have a "peak demand" charge, "power factor" charge, and time-of-day usage.

Re:Watt vs KW/hr

[hackertourist]

There's no 'per hour' in this figure. At peak power, an area that will produce 1W costs 40 cents.
Install this area, then yes it will produce up to 1 Wh in 1 hour.
To compare to a grid-tied system you'll need to split its price into panels and electronics. As a shortcut, you can usually find the price per Watt of the panels since that's the easiest way to compare different panels. It bypasses the need to calculate the panel's efficiency vs. cost and gives a single metric to gauge the panel's economic feasibility.

Re:Watt vs KW/hr

[jank1887]

Watt per hour and watt-hour is not the same thing. watt-hour is energy. watt per hour is... change in power? You buy capacity, or power. I.e., a 500MW coal plant. if it runs for an hour, it produces 500MW-hours of energy. 40 pennies per watt means it will produce 1 watt of electricity under peak conditions for every $0.40 you invest into capacity. How much energy you'll actually put out over a day is another question altogether.

a couple reports last year said something about $5/Watt installed would be the tipping point. So, $0.40/Watt looks damn good, but I'm sure that's just an optimisting unpackaged cell cost.

Re:Watt vs KW/hr

[johanwanderer]

The price ($0.40/W) is the production cost for the PV panel. So, if you want to install, say, a 10kW panel on your roof, the solar panel itself would cost about $4000 to manufacture (as opposed to $8000 by other processes). How much it will cost you, however, still depends on market price, installation and infrastructure cost (batteries, inverters, switches, etc.)

Now, a quick search shows that current panels sell for $250 for a 100W (or $25K for 10kW). And a whole system (< 10kW) is somewhere in the $20-$30K range. What that shows is most of the manufacturing cost of the panels is only a part (30%) of the whole. If all of the saving get forwarded to the consumer, you would see that the the cost might drop about $4K. So basically it'll take 16+ years instead of 20+ years to pay for itself.

After 25 years, you replace the panels and repeat the process, maybe at half the price :)

Re:Watt vs KW/hr

[blind monkey 3]

I must be missing something from your calculations, if current panels are $250 per 100 watt, that equates to 25000 for 10 kW, if panels are $40 per 100 watt (0.40 * 100), that equates to 4000 for 10 kW - a saving of $21000. Even tripling the cost still saves $13000 (by your calculations of cost). What have I missed?

Re:Watt vs KW/hr

[johanwanderer]

That's my point of production cost vs. price. The article stated that currently it costs about $8000 to manufacture about 10kW worth of panels. The new process cuts it down to $4000. However, the current price is about $25000. If all the saving is passed on to the consumer, that would only cut it down to $21000. But you have to factor in capital investments, etc. so most likely you'd save maybe $2000 out of the $20000-$30000 for an installation. That's still 10%, but much less impressive than the 50% that the article seems to imply.

Re:Watt vs KW/hr

[Anonymous Coward]

watt per hour is... change in power?

Yes. My local 400MW coal power station can change its power output by 8MW per minute. So it is 30 min for zero to full power. Gas turbine power stations need a couple of minutes and water storage plants less than a minute.

Re:Watt vs KW/hr

[rrohbeck]

Watt per hour is physically meaningless. Power is the first time derivative of energy. The second would be change of power over time, something you're probably not interested in.

So this is the year?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

So this is the year of the solar panels? Hope it goes as well as the year of Linux desktop.

Re:So this is the year?

[Kupfernigk]

In my part of town, pv panels are quite common. I can see three sets just from my bedroom window (mine are above it). It's happening.

Re:So this is the year?

[samwichse]

Well, I have a Linux based server, tablet, phone, TV, router, GPS (Nuvi 7xx), and of course my laptop and desktop run Linux, but that's unusual.

None of these products are particularly "out there," so the year of the Linux desktop may never have arrived, but I'd say the year of Linux on the "everything else" came a couple years ago and is still happening.

So I agree, I hope it grow as well as Linux did.

Sam

Re:So this is the year?

[samwichse]

Whoops, just checked and Linux is on the Nuvi 8xx and 9xx, so my GPS does NOT run Linux :-P

Sam

"Hydrogen ion" AKA proton

[Kazymyr]

Is it fancier to call those hydrogen ions? Because they're protons. Proton accelerator, sounds nice enough to me.

Re:"Hydrogen ion" AKA proton

[Intropy]

It probably accelerates deuterium and maybe some tritium along with all the protium. So generically "positive hydrgen ion" is fine.

Re:"Hydrogen ion" AKA proton

[EngrBohn]

I think they're calling them hydrogen ions to clarify where the hydrogen bubbles come from.

Re:"Hydrogen ion" AKA proton

[EngrBohn]

I just looked at the company's website. There, they do call them protons: "In PIE, high-energy protons (or hydrogen ions) are embedded into 'donor' wafers", where PIE means "Proton Induced Exfoliation".

Re:"Hydrogen ion" AKA proton

[Confusador]

Wait you're telling me they have an Ion Cannon that makes PIE? These guys are marketing geniuses!

Wait, WHAT!

[Anonymous Coward]

WE HAVE ION CANNONS?!?!?!

Re:Wait, WHAT!

[HornWumpus]

If you have an old TV you have one.

Re:Wait, WHAT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Shhhhhh!!! It's a secret. I use mine to take down UFO's. It's fun, and they always get mistaken for meteorites. Hehehehehe.

Re:Wait, WHAT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ion Cannons, Tesla Coils, (Marine) Rail Guns, (Airborne) Obelisk of light, Stealth Tanks...

I can't wait for Tanyas and Chronospheres!

Conflicting statements

[Capt James McCarthy]

"thus within reach of challenging the fossil fuel hegemony" vs "leave it in a sunny area"

  I can run my lights all night long, which ironically enough is when I need them.

And don't call it "Green" when there are some nice large battery stores that need to be dealt with in a few years.

Re:Conflicting statements

[rickett81]

Green-er?

Re:Conflicting statements

[LanMan04]

Store it as heat in a 55-gallon drum of molten salt. Pump water uphill.

These are not hard problems when you don't have to stuff it all into a car.

Re:Conflicting statements

[HornWumpus]

You should visit a heat treatment shop (as in hardening metal) to see the fun safety issues that come with molten salt.

Granting they often use molten cyanide salts, it will still be all kinds of fun when your kid attaches the garden hose to the breather.

Re:Conflicting statements

[jpmorgan]

But you can run your power hungry AC when the sun is at its hottest and brightest. In fact, HVAC accounts for about a third of US energy consumption.

A lot of the cost of having your own solar power comes from the complexity of the grid connection, or overnight energy storage. A very worthwhile investment would be building a standardized energy bus for powering AC directly from a solar panels, at ~500V DC, instead of going through the complexity of a grid inverter.

The benefits of this are many. It would cut the cost of micro solar installations enormously (which are already the majority of the cost). Peak solar power coincides strongly with peak AC demand. Taking these both off the grid frees up large scale generating infrastructure for other demands (like replacing oil consumption), and also makes the grid easier to manage (microsolar could cause real problems for grid management if it becomes popular enough, as there's no way to centrally control output).

ion cannons?

[alienzed]

come talk to me when we have photon torpedos...

Selling the Shovels

[necro81]

This company isn't a solar panel manufacturer, per se, but rather a company that wants to manufacture semiconductor wafers that are thinner than you can get right now, with less waste. So, they are like those enterprising fellows that sold the shovels and pickaxes to gold prospectors back in the day. They didn't care who struck it rich so long as they could sell the equipment and supplies to all comers. They aren't Xerox or a publishing company; these guys want to sell reams of paper.

This is great stuff – an innovation that can benefit the whole industry. There are other companies that are working along similar lines, though with different technology. 1366 Technologies is one that comes to mind.

Re:Selling the Shovels

[Amouth]

not even that - they aren't going to make wafers - they are building and selling the equipment to make the wafers.. so this is like the company that sold the laths to make handles to the company that made the pickaxes to sell to gold prospectors.

normally i'd look at something like this and say "someone will buy and bury it" except it has more than one industry.. while it has the potential to drop solar panel costs.. it also has the potential to drop semiconductor fab costs.. so if someone wants to buy and bury it.. you will have oil vs. chip/tech.. going to be a hard fight.. so if this thing actually works and does as it says it does.. give it a few years and we might actually see the prices dropping considerably on solar panels..

right now the pay off for complete solar is 30-35 years where i live.. if that gets into the 10-12 year.. i'll be game to switch.

Re:Selling the Shovels

[JazzHarper]

Other technologies along similar lines include polysilicon ribbons and vapor deposition of amorphous silicon films. The Twin Creeks research is unusual because most other researchers abandoned monocrystalline silicon wafers ("slices" to you folks in Texas ;-) about ten years ago. The holy grail in this field is continuous-process silicon; this doesn't appear to be headed in that direction.

part of me

[phrostie]

is thinking WOW, that's Awesome!

the other half is thinking, April 1st is coming up.

Goooooood luck with that

[Anonymous Coward]

[...] within reach of challenging the fossil fuel hegemony.

Well, I guess it was nice knowing Twin Creeks in the short amount of time between when they came out of hiding and when they became next on the list to be made examples out of by the fossil fuel industry's hit armies. They seemed like such nice kids, too; no idea why they decided to anger the gods like that.

Re:Goooooood luck with that

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt that. For solar to be competitive against Big Oil/Big Coal, it will require infrastructure, and there isn't really that present.

Solar also requires a lot of real estate, while a coal plant can be located relatively close to a city, minimizing voltage drop via long wiring runs. This means a small town in west Texas will be quite well off with a large photovoltac array, but it would be infeasible to carry that much power to anywhere else.

Re:Goooooood luck with that

[AlienIntelligence]

Solar also requires a lot of real estate, while a coal plant can be located relatively close to a city, minimizing voltage drop via long wiring runs.

How many coal plants can you fit on the roof of your house.

By my calculation, exactly one solar plant can be put up there.

I believe currently the score is solar, 1... coal plants, 0.

-AI

watts/sq. ft?

[oneiros27]

There's lots of technology that has gotten better price per watt ... but they all sucked at watts per area, so it wasn't worth installing them. (as you have similar installation cost for labor, with a longer payback period)

Re:watts/sq. ft?

[necro81]

Meh, the world isn't lacking in area that could be covered with solar panels. Cost for the modules is running about half the cost of the whole system, with installation about 1/3, and the "balance of system" for a grid-tie the remaining sixth. I think price per watt, of an installed system, is the metric people care about. If it requires twice the rooftop, but the modules cost half as much, and the installation costs are only 50% greater (power electronics are a wash), then you likely come out ahead.

Re:watts/sq. ft?

[AlienIntelligence]

Meh, the world isn't lacking in area that could be covered with solar panels.

Lol, the young and ignorant.

Here's a slight fact that you seem to forget... all this land you are referring to,
hosts some type of flora or fauna that the environmental groups will not allow
you to kill or modify the territory of.

And while I'm not at the height of tree hugging... stopping the use of fossil fuels
to remedy one issue by creating another one, isn't exactly the greatest of ideas.

Rooftops are the key, that is what this article is about. This company has devised
a cheaper method of production and at the same time, made a solar cell that is
flexible. That means more rooftop installs. More on the side of water storage tank
installs. Farmer Brown gets to make some money cause his corn silos have some
solar cells wrapped around them, and there's solar on his barn roof, etc.

The solution to fossil fuel independence, isn't killing indigenous plants and animals
to install large solar heaters. It is making each person grid independent. And to
get them off of fossil fuels by providing an at-home electrical solution.

-AI

Re:watts/sq. ft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol, the old and condescending.

What the fuck did you think he was talking about?

Re:watts/sq. ft?

[necro81]

If you reread my post, you'll see I was talking about rooftop installations. But rooftops alone probably won't be enough: the land area of a typical city isn't big enough to support its energy needs through rooftop photovoltaic, and bringing in the gigawatts necessary from millions of farmsteads hundreds of miles away probably isn't effective with current technology. We'll probably need to carpet large swaths of land, in addition to other generating sources, too. In energy technology, there is no silver-bullet.

And considering my UID is some 250,000 lower than yours, I am insulted by the notion that I'm young and ignorant, you insensitive clod!

Fuel cells are overrated.

[mosb1000]

You can burn the hydrogen in a combined cycle plant and get 70% efficiency. Fuel cells are overrated.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually if you store the hydrogen for heating, efficiency of burning hydrogen will be as good as any boiler, with the advantage that you don't havy any soot.
Batteries are more efficient if you want to store for overnight electricity.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Nadaka]

Stored heat in an insulated molten salt reservoir is far more efficient than chemical batteries for overnight base load production. But you are right about hydrogen, A heat engine is a heat engine. It would not take that much extra equipment to pipe heat from burning hydrogen though the same boiler system for longer term stored energy.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[fyngyrz]

Ultracaps... that's where we need to go for short term storage. If they can stem the leakage they're prone to, then long term as well. Other than storage density, they're really a spectacular well of desirable characteristics already.

But these new solar cells... the question is, when can we buy them, as it always seems to be with these breakthroughs. And for my area, how well will they withstand hail?

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Dishevel]

Shh. We do not talk about hail.
Oil has no place left in a green society.
It is not enough that we use sustainable sources when it makes sense. We must destroy oil in the process.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Plunky]

And for my area, how well will they withstand hail?

Most of the solar PV panels I see installed on roofs around here, do not have the silicon exposed directly to the hail, there is a clear sheet (glass, polycarbonate, acrylic?) covering the cells..

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[rhakka]

If you are trying to heat, you can just store hot water directly or heat it with the PV. the tank isn't that big. lasts for a long time. very little maintenance or development required.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[fyngyrz]

Here too... then we have to ask, how does this affect the efficiency, heat dissipation, installation cost, what is the lifetime of the cover (plastic turning dark purple won't help PV efficiency), and so on. And then there's windloading on the plastic... 70 mph winds see big sheets of anything as a clever way to remove large chunks of your roof, lol.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. We should burn all the oil. For nature.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[gewalker]

70% seems too high to me. I doubt you can can past 60%, especially considering you are talking about demand power generation instead of base load. When you factor in a 50%-70% efficiency in the electrolysis process itself, you are more likely topping out at about 40% efficiency for the full cycle (not counting losses in the photovoltaic process)

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[mug funky]

seems to me oil is far more useful in manufacturing. burning it seems like a hell of a waste.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[mug funky]

if you have frequent blizzards and hailstorms, then solar is probably not for you.

to be sure it'd be great to be able to harvest and store a fraction of what we get from the sun, but if it's windy, maybe wind power would suit?

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Anonymous Coward]

Shh. We do not talk about hail.
Oil has no place left in a green society.

Strawman arguments are lies.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can keep a fuel cell in the cupboard under your stairs. Try doing that with a combined cycle generator, see how you like it.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[fyngyrz]

Wind power suffers similarly... we get very high winds on a regular enough basis that windmill costs for survivable windmills are very high. I'm located in the high plains in Montana.

The fun part is we have lots of sun, and lots of wind. Difficult to use it, though.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Anonymous Coward]

But these new solar cells... [...] how well will they withstand hail?

One could always use a resilient plastic substrate. Oil is a common feeder stock for plastics manufacturing. After all, when these take off, we'll have all this oil to burn.

Oh, wait....

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Cyberax]

1) No large molten salt storages exist in reality. The largest one can barely keep a small power plant running through the night.
2) Molten salt storage is ineffective. Remember, Q ~ dT/T and for molten salt dT is barely 200-300C.
3) Molten salt storage is way too expensive.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Nadaka]

1) No large scale chemical battery arrays exist in reality. The largest array that I am aware of cost billions of dollars and can only provide emergency power to a small Alaskan town for 20 minutes.
2) The "hot" end of the molten salt storage cycle is over 550C, the cold end at 200-300C is just to keep it from freezing.
3) expensive? perhaps, but it is vastly, vastly cheaper than chemical batteries per watt.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Cyberax]

1) That's why I'm not advocating them. Natural-gas fueled turbines are the best solution for backup power generation (along with nukes for the baseline).
2) Yep, and that's why thermodynamic efficiency of molten salt plants is so bad.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[phalcon352]

why not use the excess heat to run a small turbine to charge the batteries at night or when tere's no sun. I mean if you're gonna have a boiler you only use a small % of the energy for heating the rest is wasted.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Nadaka]

Natural Gas and Nuclear are not renewable. And nuclear power is "scary", despite being cleaner and safer than coal, oil and natural gas. And neither has anything to do with molten salt heat storage. If you are attempting to store electricity from ANY source of power, there is no good solution. However if you are attempting to store energy from the sun, as indicated by the original comment about "overnight storage", then you are far far better off storing solar heat directly than you are in converting it to electricity and then attempting to store it via electrolysis, chemical batteries, pumped storage or resistive heating of a molten salt reservoir (which no one was dumb enough to suggest).

You keep changing your argument against molten salt. First it is that it is too expensive compared to batteries, now you are saying it is not efficient enough with no baseline or comparison. The delta T of the salt does not matter, it is the delta T of the steam it produces that matters and >550C is plenty to provide high pressure steam for traditional turbines.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[tolkienfan]

Leaving aside questions of pollution and climate change, oil is not renewable. For those of you not keeping up, oil will run out. And with rapidly industrializing countries, oil usage is only likely to increase.
If a company can make an alternative energy source competitive with fossil fuels, they will do well. That's simple economics.
You don't even need to make any touchy partisan arguments that might offend some weak fool.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Dishevel]

So. Oil was made by God or aliens and they are making no more.?
Or did you mean to say that oil is in fact renewable at the rate that natural process create it?

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[tolkienfan]

Way to miss the point.
Well done. You just surpassed my teenage daughter and obtained first place in willful ignorance.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Cyberax]

I know that NG is not renewable. It's still way better than molten salt storage, even given the CO2 footprint of natural gas.

And storing sunlight as heat is the most stupid thing (apart from batteries) you can do. It requires you:
1) To use solar-thermal powerplants which are going to become more expensive than photovoltaics.
2) You'll need HUGE reservoirs to store gigawatt-hours of energy.
3) Pumped hydro is actually the optimal choice if it's available.

And you might notice that I've never advocated chemical batteries for storage.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Nadaka]

Pumped hydro is not an optimal choice. The creation of surface reservoirs of all types are massive ecological disasters that result in the destruction of enormous amounts of land, and if placed in an existing drainage basin, disrupting the ecology of the entire river basin.

I am not unaware of the requirements involved in solar thermal. A gigawatt solar thermal plant will require about 125k-150k cubic meters of insulated storage for a 24 hour base load production. And because the you can control the amount of salt pumped out to produce electricity, and that will be its primary source of heat loss, you can get away with less volume if you expect lower nighttime electrical requirements.

How many millions or billions of cubic meters of water will you need to store to run a gigawatt plant for 24+ hours?

Right now, solar thermal is far less expensive than PV, especially when you consider the inefficiencies in converting electrical power to a store-able medium for use at night. The only possible way for PV to serve as a base load power source is if we have a global superconducting power distribution system or some fantastic almost magical revolution in energy storage. Neither of those options can exist yet, meanwhile solar thermal plants running 24/7 experimentally exist, and it is a simple matter of engineering and funding to get them actually built.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Dishevel]

The point is that regardless of the fact that you believe oil and coal to be evil they are in fact sustainable resources. We are just (I believe, because we have no data because no one is looking.) using them at a higher rate than is sustainable.
The statement you made saying that oil is not a sustainable resource is wrong. You can disparage me all you want. You are still wrong. Unless of course you do believe that God or Aliens made all fossil fuels. In that case you would be right.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Cyberax]

Efficiency of pumped hydro approaches 90%. And that's for the complete pump-and-dump cycle. And existing pumped storage in Norway actually already works for the intended purpose - to compensate peaky nature of renewables in Denmark.

"Right now, solar thermal is far less expensive than PV, especially when you consider the inefficiencies in converting electrical power to a store-able medium for use at night."

No it is not. Almost all of the new planned large thermal solar plants are switching to PV.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Nadaka]

Efficiency of 90% for pumped hydro is irrelevant to its real cost as a complete ecological disaster. All forms of hydro power are terrible. This isn't even accounting for the evaporation losses that pumped storage will inevitably incur when used in the sunny arid environments where solar energy is most viable.

Efficiency of stored heat is based on its insulation, and can exceed 99%.

PV are at best a supplemental predictable daytime peak power source and in no way can effectively produce base load in the way that solar thermal can.

Considerations for cost:
PV cells decay over time, for effective purposes solar thermal does not. PV cells only provide a cheaper alternative in the short term, and are only cheaper if they are not used to provide the power for the predictable daytime peak. Due to the storage issue, they can not provide baseline power for any reasonable cost.

In the long run, the only viable sources of clean baseline energy are nuclear and solar thermal.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[tolkienfan]

It is presumptuous, at best, for you to state that it is a fact that I think oil and coal are evil.
If you cared what I think you'd ask. But let me volunteer: oil and coal, among all inanimate objects cannot be evil. Only humans and to a lesser degree other primates can be truly evil.
And if you were really interested, you would have taken what I said in context. Any new oil or coal is forming at such a low rate that it is for all intents and purposes zero. So, you can quite literally call it unsustainable.
If you really want to be pedantic, which you clearly do, you could say they are being used at a rate many orders of magnitude greater that they are being generated, and unless we curtail their use, they will run out.
Of course, with the supply and demand as they will become, the price will rise inevitably, as the supply drops, and the rate of use will eventually begin to reduce. Even sources of energy that are currently considered expensive will eventually be cheaper than oil or coal.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Dishevel]

I am sorry.
Can you point me to the number of barrels of oil produced by natural processes?
That way I can compare that number with the number of barrels of oil extracted and find out exactly how much we are over.
Or. I can go your route and just state a "fact".
The point is no one is even looking at how much oil is produced. Know why?
I think it is because the powers that be do not want any number. Oil, coal and natural gas have been stated millions of times as Unsustainable. Period.
The truth is nothing lasts for ever and if it is created it is sustainable at a certain rate.
But you just go on stating "facts" that you and I both know can be based on nothing. There is no close to definitive research on the the production of oil by the earth.
None. But you go on lying. I would normally not call someone a liar.
You though seem to be able to put together a coherent sentence so I will assume you are not a moron.
Since you are not a moron then you know you are pulling facts out of your ass. Since the facts you are pulling out of your ass.

Any new oil or coal is forming at such a low rate that it is for all intents and purposes zero.

and

you could say they are being used at a rate many orders of magnitude greater that they are being generated

Both are fully unsubstantiated and conveniently happen to back up your world view. I would say that the statements while based on nothing are purposeful.

In my book a purposeful statement like that comes only from liars.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[tolkienfan]

Question: do you agree that CO2 in the atmosphere is rising?

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Dishevel]

Yes.
Also. That has nothing to do with anything in our conversation so far.
All good though. It is not like you had anyplace to go. I would have expected you to fire off with profanities or just quit.
Setting up a kill shot in an unrelated area though is not what I expected. Won't work but bravo for trying sir.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[tolkienfan]

And, do you also agree that the cause of the increase is fossil fuel combustion, at least in large part?

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Dishevel]

Wow. You just keep going.
It really is amazing. Almost like you felt your belief system attacked and must do what ever it takes to keep your view stable.
How about you finally answer the first question.
Why are you stating as facts wild guesses? I was not going to ask. I believe you wont really ever answer. But given the the way you have conducted yourself so far in this discussion I think that you need to man up and admit that fossil fuels are a sustainable resource. Then after you explain your need to lie about amounts and shrug them off we can dive into questions of pollution and global climate change.

Re:Fuel cells are overrated.

[Cyberax]

"Efficiency of 90% for pumped hydro is irrelevant to its real cost as a complete ecological disaster. All forms of hydro power are terrible. "

Pumped hydro is often used in mountainous regions where its impact is close to zero. Certainly that's the way it is in Norway.

"Efficiency of stored heat is based on its insulation, and can exceed 99%."

Which is totally irrelevant. Thermodynamic efficiency is capped at about 30%, but even that is not the biggest problem.

You see, molten salt storage mandates the use of concentrated solar - a lot of mirrors focusing on the central tower. And that is expensive - each mirror has to be individually focused on the central tower, and that requires a fairly complex tracking system for each mirror. In comparison, PV plants can make do with simple fixed rows of solar panels.

"PV cells decay over time"

So do the mirrors, steam turbines, electric generators and so on. Maintenance costs of solar thermal plants are about 10 times more than solar-PV, even when factoring in the depreciation.

"for effective purposes solar thermal does not. PV cells only provide a cheaper alternative in the short term, and are only cheaper if they are not used to provide the power for the predictable daytime peak."

And molten storage can't realistically compete with nuclear or fossil fuels.

Followup Twin Creeks Story

[Anonymous Coward]

Chevron purchases Twin Creeks to add to their Ovonics portfolio.

Re:Followup Twin Creeks Story

[Amouth]

except this is useful for chip fab.. so there is a chance that Chevron will have to bid against Intel and other Fab's

FIre the Ion Cannon

[Oswald McWeany]

"Commander Worf, fire the ion cannon"

"It appears the vulcan ship has turned into a giant solar panel, sir."

Re:FIre the Ion Cannon

[decoy256]

Why in hell would the Enterprise be firing on a Vulcan ship?

Re:FIre the Ion Cannon

[Oswald McWeany]

Why in hell would the Enterprise be firing on a Vulcan ship?

Because humans are highly illogical.

Re:FIre the Ion Cannon

[Zaatxe]

Wasn't Worf a lieutenant at Enterprise and promoted to lieutenant commander when transferred to DS9?

Re:FIre the Ion Cannon

[MattSausage]

Even better. Now you can slice them up into 20 micron thin sheets!

Re:FIre the Ion Cannon

[decoy256]

No, He was promoted to Lieutenant Commander at the beginning of Generations (just before going to DS9). He is never officially (by canon) promoted to full Commander.

Incomplete article

[jklovanc]

Here are a few points that the article do not mention;
1. What is the cost of the hydrogen ion particle accelerator?
2. Is the low cost only taking into account the cost of materials and power and not the amortized cost of the machine?
3. What is the efficiency of the panels? The hint that it is less due to the reflective surface but how much less is an issue. Lower cost is great but if it uses 4 times the area it might not be viable. I love this quote "Sivaram says the company has implemented an alternative anti-reflection technology that allows its solar cells to perform as well as ones made with the conventional process." If the process is not yet implemented it is only a theory and may not work.
4. How resistant are these wafers to the elements?

Yet another "release" that appears to be a technology article but really is a thinly veiled attempt at gathering investment capitol.

Re:Incomplete article

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading this, I'm pretty sure I'm replying to a troll, however: it's advertised crystalline Si. You should be able to make p-n junctions or MIS cells with this and get the same efficiency. Maybe you create some grain boundaries with this process, in which case p-n junctions would give lower efficiency; MIS cells wouldn't really be affected that much.

Antireflection technology takes time to get right for the first cell, and then you're done and can reproduce it for the rest cells. Most proof-of-concept cells in the literature use single-sided-polished silicon and don't do anti-reflection coatings, because it's easier to do the measurements and then extrapolate the measured short-circuit current density to the case with an anti-reflection coating and then compare this to current density for silicon absorbing all the light it can (42 mA/cm^2). One real problem is silicon doesn't have very good absorbtion above 900, so you'd be losing maybe 10% of your photons vs a thicker layer.

4. It's silicon. You get some native oxide, but you remove it during processing. Silicon PV has been in use for a while, and processing is very well known. Assuming you don't have any nanoscale-type structure at the surface, it should be the same. You only need a small thickness of crystalline silicon (and about 1/10 the amount of polycrystalline silicone) to absorb pretty much all the light you can.

Instead of being skeptical and putting fake quotes around "release," try to learn something.

Re:Incomplete article

[Anonymous Coward]

The numbers are all wrong too. The cheapest solar _panels_ available right now are about 55 cents/W. Since these days the cost of the glass, framing and transport cost are a significant fraction of the total panel cost, the cells in these panels can't cost more than about 20 cents/W. So these new cells (that are not even in production yet!) are actually twice as expensive, not half the price as stated in the summary.

Re:Incomplete article

[Anonymous Coward]

That, and "thinly-veiled" should be hyphenated.

Re:Incomplete article

[TubeSteak]

1. What is the cost of the hydrogen ion particle accelerator?
2. Is the low cost only taking into account the cost of materials and power and not the amortized cost of the machine?

Dude, you're overthinking this.
When the company says "we can sell this for $0.40/watt," their figure includes all the costs + a profit margin.
Rest assured, since the company's goal is to sell their production process, interested parties will ask all the hard questions before buying the hardware and changing their manufacturing line(s).

Re:Incomplete article

[Tweezak]

And is it even scalable and manufacturable? I worked in a silicon fab for years and it was like pulling teeth to get another $5M implanter purchased. The size of the vacuum chamber on the tool shown in the article will probably take hours to pump down to the vacuum needed to operate. To do any volume with that design you'll have to have several of those machines in operation. Hopefully that operating principle can be optimized around smaller batch sizes requiring a less expensive tool so you can have several running in parallel.

Re:Incomplete article

[jklovanc]

Did you even read the second article? Here is the full paragraph about reflection;
"While the company emphasizes that the technology is compatible with existing production lines, it does require at least one change. Ordinarily, wafers are treated to create a rough surface texture that helps them absorb light rather than reflect it. The texture is made of pyramids that are about as tall as the Twin Creeks wafers are thick, so it isn't practical to use with the new wafers. Sivaram says the company has implemented an alternative anti-reflection technology that allows its solar cells to perform as well as ones made with the conventional process."
They can not use the standard method and must develop an as yet unproven idea. I would be satisfied with a quote of watts/square foot but they didn't state that number for some reason. Why didn't that state such an important number if they are not trying to hide something? The same goes for the cost of the production machine.

Purchasing a PV panel based on price per watt is like purchasing a vehicle base on range between full ups. The vehicle manufacturer just neglects to say that the gas tank is huge.

Sure "[s]ilicon PV has been in use for a while, and processing is very well known" but for wafers that are 10 times as thick. How well is it known for wafers this thin?

I am trying to learn something which is why I asked about the missing information. This article sounds too much like smoke and mirrors to get people to invest.

Re:Incomplete article

[jklovanc]

That is an assumption on your part and not one I am willing to make. The article states that this process has been though of before but the accelerators have been too expensive. How did they create a cheaper accelerator that is ten times as powerful? The article glosses over that.

Re:Incomplete article

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent here: yes, I read the article, and roughening it is one way (I've used single side polished as well as "rough" silicon for Metal-insulator-silicon solar cells; sometimes you need the smooth surface if you are doing surface treatments) but another way is to put an anti-reflection coating. Anti-reflection coatings just require the man-hours to make it compatible with your system. It's not unproven; it's just not developed for this system.

Again, this is early work, but it is silicon, and silicon is very well-studied, mostly because of the semiconductor industry. High-efficiency p-n junctions have been around since the early 80s, and there is a lot of work on MIS solar cells as well. It just takes time to optimize these things.

It's thinner, so it may suck at absorbing some of the lower-energy photons (>850 nm), so instead of 18% in commercial modules you might see ~16%, which is comparable to CdTe, but without the environmental risks.

Re:Incomplete article

[MrQuacker]

If you check out the video on their site, they have a robotic system that automatically loads/unloads the cells through an airlock system.

Re:Incomplete article

[Anonymous Coward]

CdTe is $0.55/W before installation. Might be some extra costs associated with the fact that the cells are toxic.

Isn't light absorption the problem with Si?

[feranick]

As far as I know, the reason silicon-based solar cells need to be thick is essentially because of the poor light absorption. Si is an indirect band semiconductor, which means that in order to have a splitting of electron and holes due to light, you need a thick layer of active material. Therefore, a thin solar cell would not provide enough photon to electron conversion. This is normally why direct band semiconductor solar cells (GaAs, CIGS) are usually thinner (about 1 micron) than Si. Bottom line: it's OK to make Si thinner, but what is the performance hit due to reduced sun collection?

Re:Isn't light absorption the problem with Si?

[cyfer2000]

30 micron is good enough, people actually measured this.

Re:Isn't light absorption the problem with Si?

[Anonymous Coward]

Article says the silicon wafers are thick because thinner wafers would be too brittle to survive the manufacturing process.

Oil gives the world 160 exajoules per year...

[gestalt_n_pepper]

is all I can think when I read these stories.

Re:Oil gives the world 160 exajoules per year...

[Hazelfield]

We consume 160 exajoules per year of the world's finite oil reserves

FTFY

Re:Oil gives the world 160 exajoules per year...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually you're about 60% low. 1 CMO (Cubic Mile of Oil) produces 160 exajoules, the world uses approx 3 CMO annually.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil

Re:Oil gives the world 160 exajoules per year...

[blackfrancis75]

how many joules does your house use?
how much do you pay for electricity?

Re:Oil gives the world 160 exajoules per year...

[gestalt_n_pepper]

I don't know off the top of my head. It's absurdly cheap. Today.

Re:Oil gives the world 160 exajoules per year...

[wurp]

Solar energy incident on the earth in a year: (100 watts) * 24 hours * 365 * pi * (6 400 000^2) = 4.05804097 Ã-- 10^23 joules

160 exajoules = 1.6 x 10^20 joules

So we get more than 20,000 as much energy as we currently use in solar. Assuming we could capture it...

Re:Oil gives the world 160 exajoules per year...

[blackfrancis75]

would you pay negative dollars (amortized over time) to help reduce pollution?

Re:Oil gives the world 160 exajoules per year...

[Anonymous Coward]

160E18 joules/year is equivalent to covering 2% of Australia with PV cells (if I did the math right). I bet you could do that without harming even a single Wallaby. If you want to say goodbye to oil now might be a good time.

Re:Oil gives the world 160 exajoules per year...

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Depends on the level and type of pollution. Some pollution is inevitable if you're on earth and breathing. I'd have to be honest and admit that I'm more concerned with preserving some sort of industrial civilization and avoiding an unpleasant population bottleneck which appears to be where we're headed than I am about pollution, per se. That said, I'm aware that ecological preservation is critical for our survival as a species. In the end, however, money may be the most successful self replicator on Earth for a while until it too, goes through its population bottleneck along with us.

Re:Oil gives the world 160 exajoules per year...

[jpmorgan]

Well, no. You aren't accounting for how much solar energy is currently consumed by agriculture.

Of course, most plants are incredibly inefficient at capturing solar energy (an order of magnitude worse than solar panels).

They don't make cells, they make machines

[Kagato]

Twin Creeks doesn't make solar cells. They make machines used for making the major component of the cells. They have production ready machines for sales right now. According to the Wall Street Journal article they are quite happy to sell the machines to Red China and the WSJ thinks that's who's going to buy most of them given they have the capital and they don't have irrational politicians that think "green" is a bad word. We could be making the cells here in the US. But that's not going to happen because it's more politically expedient to sell out the countries future for short term gains. The end result is this technology will create a few hundred jobs in the US to make the specialized machines. Most of the end products will be purchased by European and Asian customers who have a long term energy policy.

Re:They don't make cells, they make machines

[Anonymous Coward]

We could be making the cells here in the US. But that's not going to happen because it's more politically expedient to sell out the countries future for short term gains.

Your conspiracy theory is exciting. However, I'm laughing at you.

The USA has the Obama administration right now, the one that shoveled money at Solyndra. Solyndra failed because the evil Republicans sabotaged it somehow, right? Wrong: Solyndra failed because their costs were too high to make a profit.

If we slashed regulations and cut taxes a bit, manufacturing might get more competitive. Of course if we do that, I'll bet you will start screaming like a stuck pig about the government bending over for evil capitalists.

Right now we have the government trying to pick winners and give them money; and they keep choosing... poorly and the money keeps vanishing. That's a problem but it's not the one you are complaining about, which doesn't exist.

Oh, one other problem: try to build a large solar plant out in the middle of the desert, and a bunch of environmentalists will be all over you with lawsuits. Doesn't make any sense to me; I don't know why the lizards or whatever will even care about a solar plant, there is plenty of sun to go around.

P.S. I know someone in Portland, Oregon who put solar cells on their house. Their house puts power on the grid all day and the power company pays them for the power, so their payback will be less than ten years. And that's with the sunlight you can get in freaking Portland, Oregon. There's a government subsidy mixed in here somewhere, I'm pretty sure, which is another reason I'm laughing at your conspiracy theory.

Re:They don't make cells, they make machines

[Anonymous Coward]

At least we're manufacturing something.

Twin Creeks = Great Private Enterprise

[BoRegardless]

Read the article and it immediately came to mind of all the recent solar failures like Solyndra.

Twin Creeks illustrates perfectly why no government can be the one to pick a "successful" technology, because it never is known who the winners will be until later.

Re:Twin Creeks = Great Private Enterprise

[Kagato]

I would point out that Solyndra was one of many green programs under the loan program. The vast majority of them did just fine. Surprisingly the best performing are the solar farms because the loans were backing projects that had 20-year energy purchase agreements.

Re:Twin Creeks = Great Private Enterprise

[BoRegardless]

Solyndra failed because its technology (indeed some with patents) was advanced at one time, but then technologically behind newer entrants and the price of polysilicon fell dramatically with increased supply. Picking winners early on is almost impossible.

Even picking a winning solar farm is iffy. If it pays itself off and returns capital to investors, it is likely to take many years or a decade.

Just because a solar farm succeeded in year one doesn't mean they will even be remembered in year 5 except by their creditors and shareholders who failed to sell out when the handwriting was on the wall.

Re:Twin Creeks = Great Private Enterprise

[Kagato]

Despite what the media would have people believe, there are standards for loan underwriting at the DOE. I would contend an energy production project is far easier to underwrite because their aren't a lot of unknowns. Durability of pannel, average sunlight in a year, transmission costs, these are all pretty well known factors. Whereas a new technology project has a lot of unknowns about yields and comercial viability. Like I said before, the solar farm project the gov't loaned money to generally have 20+ year contracts with local utilities. The risk to the tax payer in those cases was pretty low and so far is paying off quite well.

Re:Challenge the fossil fuel ..???

[jandrese]

You don't have to solve every problem on day 1. Simply reducing the load on Coal power plants and letting more people charge their (electric) cars off of solar would already make a huge dent in the fossil fuel consumption across the globe. Maybe in 5-10 years such a setup will be practical, depending on advances in battery and solar technologies. It's hard to predict. Airplanes will still use fossil fuels (or maybe biofuels if that pans out), but that's alright because the pressure on them will be lessened from several other sectors of the economy.

Re:Challenge the fossil fuel ..???

[GameboyRMH]

You're right about the large aircraft, but nothing else.

and i'll bet you....

[Lumpy]

They also last half as long as today's cheapest cells.

the ONLY cells that have any longevity are the grown crystal types. The garbage that you see at the low price end lose 20% of their power generating capacity each year.

the 45 watt harbor freight kit will be generating 2 watts in 4 years, even in a northern climate.

Call me when these new "cheap" solar cell techniques will last 40 years under airizona sun. I still have 4 old panels from the 80's that have turned dark brown and they generate 70% of their new rated capacity, and they were retired from a solar farm in 1993.

Re:and i'll bet you....

[pz]

Which part of the panel has turned dark brown? An outer plastic layer that could be refreshed to get you back up to nearly 100%?

Re:and i'll bet you....

[HornWumpus]

Cite? The data I've seen that shows that kind of degradation is on orbit.

Re:and i'll bet you....

[Lumpy]

The silicon cells themselves seem to have darkened significantly. they were already brownish when I got them in 2000. It's why the Solar farm was replacing them and selling them for $0.10 on the dollar.

Re:and i'll bet you....

[rhakka]

bullshit. large percentages of these installations have monitoring equipment built in. a 20% yearly degradation would be front page news on every oil friendly publication in the world and people would be storming congress in hordes to stop the subsidies if that claim were anything but BS.

Re:and i'll bet you....

[Anonymous Coward]

To quote you, " large percentages of these installations have monitoring equipment built in." Really? please post a link to ONE installation of thin film solar that has monitoring equipment. Hell how about a single post to ONE large scale thin film solar installation. You cant because you are a complete fucking idiot. All the real installs are mono or poly crystalline NOT thin film. Maybe if you actually knew what you were talking about you would have a clue. Only a complete moron would install a large scale thin film solar system. The crap is so low in performance that it's mostly only used for yard lights.

Lumpy is 97.6% right, you are just an asshole.

What lumpy missed is that all glass plate thin film solar is made in china, So all of it is utter crap. thin film solar for space use is a completely different product, and even if you are Mitt Romney, you cant buy it.

Disclaimer: I work in the solar industry so I know what I am talking about. Hand maiden rhakka does not, in fact he knows nothing at all about solar power.

Re:and i'll bet you....

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll comment should not be informative; this is single crystal silicon, which is rated for 20+ years, only instead of a wafer saw, they use hydrogen.

Re:and i'll bet you....

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the OP but here you go, pretty much every household who use this company have monitoring tied to the web and you can see real time generation figures, and also historical.

http://www.sullivansolarpower.com/residential

I'm sure they're not the only ones doing it, but they happen to be near me when I was researching it so I know of them. But of course, you must be right because you work in the solar industry! You never did state your position though. Janitor, maybe?

Solar Cells

[Anonymous Coward]

They still won't work at night though - so they will never challenge oil.

Re:Oblig XKCD

[Amouth]

luckily the XKCD doesn't apply.. as this isn't a research announcement.. they are actually selling the manufacturing equipment. though i do agree it will take a few years before we see any major change in prices (even if it can do what it says).. also note that it doesn't have to be "developed to a useful state" as it is a replacement for a step existing manufacturing processes, which means it is far more likely to be useful.

Now make a bunch of them

[EliSowash]

and hang them on a tree-shaped frame. Guess what? You've made a tree.

Cost is not everything

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if they are cost competitive, they would still be an environmental disaster, spreading out over the land, killing plants by stealing the sunlight, and the animals by killing the plants. Water usage would go up hugely to keep them clean to keep their efficiency.

Re:Cost is not everything

[deadweight]

Good thing coal mines never pollute anything then!

Re:Cost is not everything

[oldmac31310]

Thanks for that illuminating insight. Please go along with the nurse now to your ward.

Re:Cost is not everything

[Anonymous Coward]

They are not any better, nukes are the answer.

Not a hegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

"within reach of challenging the fossil fuel hegemony"

Fossil fuels aren't an artificially-maintained hegemony, they're cheap. That's the sum total of why they are used so much. Even with all the hidden costs (pollution, wars), they are still cheap by comparison to other energy sources. Granted, some of that is due to many decades of investment in the exploration, production, transportation and refining infrastructure to find and move all that product around, but fundamentally the thing that makes fossil fuels so commonly used is their relatively low cost. When they aren't cheap anymore, they're "hegemony" will dwindle away and disappear.

I prefer THIS Cannon

[AlienIntelligence]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Htm_956k5ps

To slice cars up adjacent to me.

Solves one form of pollution with another. /s

-AI

Re:Challenge the fossil fuel ..???

[Anonymous Coward]

As usual, your utter stupidity shines through. What about your favorite fetish, rockets?

OK

[BigChigger]

Then shut up, start producing them and start selling them. I'll buy them. I'll cover my freaking roof with them. Just STFU about how things are going to be better "someday". I am so freaking tired of these one-off asshole companies announcements about how someone has had a "breakthrough" never to be heard from again. Just shut up about it until you are producing them for sale. And the green companies are the worst.

Interesting turn about

[Anonymous Coward]

My expectation was that we'd have to suffer the cost of hydrocarbon fuels exceeding the price point of the alternatives to justify switching over. To have the alternative energy source come down to less than the price of the hydrocarbon fuels is a great change.

To be honest, I'm not so much worried about the greening of the planet or all that but I can always appreciate doing things in a more cost effective, efficient manner.

Re:Get ready for....nothing! - installation

[yodleboy]

I've read here and other places that one of the issues with solar adoption, at least in the USA, is that while the price of the hardware has dropped, the cost of an actual installation has remained relatively flat. Say you have an installer that is charging you $20K for a system. If ten years ago it cost them say 17k for pv panels and now it costs them $12k, they are pocketing the extra money rather than passing the savings on. If true, it sucks, but can't say as I blame them since people are apparently willing to pay.

The Twin Creeks information page says 10 cells

[Mike_EE_U_of_I]

http://www.twincreekstechnologies.com/technology/hyperion.html

The significant quote is "Twin Creeks has lifted 14 laminae from a single donor wafer in its labs with Hyperion and produced solar cells on ten laminae lifted from a single donor wafer."

    So, they've only been able to lift 14 wafers from a donor and made all of ten cells? Really? Either their web page is way out of date, or Twin Creeks is so early in the process that they are years and years away from being ready to ship.

   

Re:The Twin Creeks information page says 10 cells

[MrQuacker]

No, they took one thick donor wafer and cut it up. So under normal production, that one wafer would make one solar cell. Now that same wafer was cut into 14 wafers. Of those 14, 10 made it all the way to the final step. So they took 1 wafer and made it into 10.

This is an example of their efficiency. Not a statement of fact that they have only made 10 cells total.

Hahhhh!! Take that!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

....take that China!!!!!

Slicing?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have thought it would be more efficient to use electrolytic deposition.

FINALLY!

[slashmydots]

This is, I think, the first solar energy story in Slashdot history where they actually made something. Theoretical stuff like all that quantum this and that and magic chlorophyll extraction and tunnels and electron ripples and all that are great but we don't need it 10 years from now, we need it now. This is a simple cutting technique that could be implemented in a month and other than the cutting, basically isn't a lot different from existing techniques. Retrofit a factory and you're all set to take over the entire industry. I bet someone will jump on that pretty quick!

This again?

[superdave80]

...and thus within reach of challenging the fossil fuel hegemony.

Oh, if only solar were a wee bit cheaper, it would compete with oil! This is becoming the Duke Nukem of the power industry...

Re:Challenge the fossil fuel ..???

[GameboyRMH]

I've posted little to nothing about rockets, maybe you have me confused with someone else.

What other vehicles could not be suited to either batteries or an onboard reactor?

Numbers for Germany

[Lonewolf666]

Currently, an installation costs around 2000 Euros/kW(peak). YMMV and all that, but it is a reasonable number for estimating if you should consider it at all.

In (relatively) sunny southern Germany, you can expect around 1000 kWh per year per kW(peak). At end user prices of 25 (Euro)cent per kWh, that means 250 Euro/year or a payoff in 8 years if you use all the energy yourself and use it to lower your consumption.
The areas bordering the Mediterranean Sea are better by the way, you may get twice the output there.

Two more interesting details:
Germany also has a premium price for buying grid energy from renewables, but it is decreased each year for new installation (once an installation is operational, it gets the price from that year for 20 years).
For small installations it is currently 24.43 (Euro)cent per kWh, so the above calculation also works for selling to the grid. For large installations, the price is already below 20 cent per kWh.

Great, cheap panels!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, make batteries and inverters cheap (yet reliable) as well. THEN solar will be a viable competitor to fossil fuels. Oh, and make contractor installation (so that the setup qualifies for government rebates) cheap while we're wishing, so that home users will be able to qualify for the government rebates.

Panel pricing keeps dropping. If these panels don't pan out, in a few more years, normal panels will be at that price anyway. But panel price is still just a fraction of the entire cost of a system.

Offlawn viewpoint

[dbIII]

Pocket calculators don't all plug into wall sockets now, and some of them are solar because of convenience. I can see netbooks going the same way if power consumption continues to decline.

Re:Offlawn viewpoint

[AdrianKemp]

Oh sure, at the rate of power requirements decreasing, processing increasing and solar panels improving I'd say we'll be there in 5-10 years (tablets if not laptops).

But the (GP at this point?) was right that for current devices a solar cell on the back or behind the LCD would neither collect nearly enough energy to make it worth while. Just like you can't solar power one of those beastly accountants calculators with the giant whos-your-daddy motor. You can make a version that works from solar, but you can't (meaningfully) solar power the old model.

I figure within 3-4 years we'll have working colour e-ink, and intel is already working on chips that are powered from very modest solar arrays... solar powered tablets won't be far behind, with laptops coming not too long after.

What about rooftops?

[dbIII]

Wasn't very hard to render all of the above irrelevant was it?
The "ignorant" insult you used is paticularly amusing since you've missed such an incredibly obvious example.

Whoops - too quick on the trigger

[dbIII]

It appears I should read entire posts instewad of posting in a hurry - sorry about that AlienIntelligence.

Re:Challenge the fossil fuel ..???

[Anonymous Coward]

So your plan is to not bother wasting our time with any of these alternatives until we've definitely completely run out of fossil fuels?

Final destination!!!

[jaymemaurice]

"A typical PPM flywheel is made from steel laminates, approximately 1 m in diameter and 500 kg in mass, designed to rotate at a maximum speed of 2,500 rpm.[7] The flywheel is mounted horizontally at the centre of the unit, beneath the seating area."

Roof TIles

[Anonymous Coward]

the batteries, inverter, voltage regulator, filter and the copper wire, switches, and custom panels or custom control panels, switches, lights, displays etc, and storage areas, are big cost for the AC power.

Still I wouldn't mind a couple thousand watt 12 VDC sys for my radios, where it just needs to be in the battery. Maybe small things like battery chargers from the AC?

I got one of those $55 led lights, I like the light, but hate the focused-ness of it, it's like I need three more $$$
I got one of those led front porch lights @ $75, and it rocks, that one really does great, mostly cause the light goes around the doorstep and keyhole so you can see if you drop or get that key in that hole when it's dark.

Re:Challenge the fossil fuel ..???

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a feeling large companies involved in air travel would probably appreciate less pressure on oil prices from cars.

so when????

[hesaigo999ca]

We always hear these stories but never see the resulting price chop at the corner store, until 10 years down the road.
When will we be able to all go out and buy these solar panel cells at a cheap cost?

KOD (Kiss Of Death)

[h8sg8s]

Let's see, USG funded solar success stories in the US = 0, privately funded solar success stories in the US 3 and counting. So, all the USG funding is good for is *killing* innovative solar ideas. How about the USG simply lowers tax rates for 5 years on Solar manufacturing in the US instead of trying to pick the winners ahead of the game?