Posted on 11/19/2007 6:11:05 AM PST by Uncledave
The New Dawn of Solar
Imagine a solar panel without the panel. Just a coating, thin as a layer of paint, that takes light and converts it to electricity. From there, you can picture roof shingles with solar cells built inside and window coatings that seem to suck power from the air. Consider solar-powered buildings stretching not just across sunny Southern California, but through China and India and Kenya as well, because even in those countries, going solar will be cheaper than burning coal. That’s the promise of thin-film solar cells: solar power that’s ubiquitous because it’s cheap. The basic technology has been around for decades, but this year, Silicon Valley–based Nanosolar created the manufacturing technology that could make that promise a reality.
The company produces its PowerSheet solar cells with printing-press-style machines that set down a layer of solar-absorbing nano-ink onto metal sheets as thin as aluminum foil, so the panels can be made for about a tenth of what current panels cost and at a rate of several hundred feet per minute. With backing from Google’s founders and $20 million from the U.S. Department of Energy, Nanosolar’s first commercial cells rolled off the presses this year.
Cost has always been one of solar’s biggest problems. Traditional solar cells require silicon, and silicon is an expensive commodity (exacerbated currently by a global silicon shortage). What’s more, says Peter Harrop, chairman of electronics consulting firm IDTechEx, “it has to be put on glass, so it’s heavy, dangerous, expensive to ship and expensive to install because it has to be mounted.” And up to 70 percent of the silicon gets wasted in the manufacturing process. That means even the cheapest solar panels cost about $3 per watt of energy they go on to produce. To compete with coal, that figure has to shrink to just $1 per watt.
Nanosolar’s cells use no silicon, and the company’s manufacturing process allows it to create cells that are as efficient as most commercial cells for as little as 30 cents a watt. “You’re talking about printing rolls of the stuff—printing it on the roofs of 18-wheeler trailers, printing it on garages, printing it wherever you want it,” says Dan Kammen, founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. “It really is quite a big deal in terms of altering the way we think about solar and in inherently altering the economics of solar.”
In San Jose, Nanosolar has built what will soon be the world’s largest solar-panel manufacturing facility. CEO Martin Roscheisen claims that once full production starts early next year, it will create 430 megawatts’ worth of solar cells a year—more than the combined total of every other solar plant in the U.S. The first 100,000 cells will be shipped to Europe, where a consortium will be building a 1.4-megawatt power plant next year.
Right now, the biggest question for Nanosolar is not if its products can work, but rather if it can make enough of them. California, for instance, recently launched the Million Solar Roofs initiative, which will provide tax breaks and rebates to encourage the installation of 100,000 solar roofs per year, every year, for 10 consecutive years (the state currently has 30,000 solar roofs). The company is ready for the solar boom. “Most important,” Harrop says, “Nanosolar is putting down factories instead of blathering to the press and doing endless experiments. These guys are getting on with it, and that is impressive.” nanosolar.com —MICHAEL MOYER
>>CEO Martin Roscheisen claims that once full production starts early next year, it will create 430 megawatts’ worth of solar cells a year—more than the combined total of every other solar plant in the U.S. The first 100,000 cells will be shipped to Europe, where a consortium will be building a 1.4-megawatt power plant next year.
This is really cool, and I hope it all happens quick and production ramps up well beyond those numbers. But let’s offer some numbers to see what we’re up against.
30 years ago, I worked a few quarters as an engineering co-op student in the power generation industry. The coal plant I worked at had 2 units rated at 800 MW and two at 880MW, or an overall plant capacity of >3.3 GW. That’s three orders of magnitude bigger than that European plant, and around 8 times the annual output of this nano-solar manufacturing plant. And the coal plant can run in the dark, and has full output even on a cloudy day, so it’s MWH production will be much higher than an equivalent installed base of solar cells.
And this was but a single (albeit quite large) conventional generating plant.
Like I said, I hope this nano-solar tech is cheap, works out technically and economically, and completely replaces coal plants. But there’s a *long* way to go.
How well does it work covered with a foot of snow? In the dark? When its cloudy?
By taking much of America’s smaller lighting, utility,transport needs off the standard electric and petroleum grids, you make more petroleum products available at a cheaper cost for the bigger boys like your 747’s. This reduces the need to import foreign oil as our domestic sources will be more able to cover what we do need. If the other technologies you speak of kick in, we’ll be awash in petroleum as well. The Saudi’s could go back to just kicking sand at each other!
Storage is another major problem. Supply is intermittent and cannot be adjusted to demand. (i.e. You get power when it is sunny, not when you need it. Luckily, demand is often highest when it is sunny. Business day, people awake, A/C, etc.)
Not so much for grid-connected sites, which is the vast majority of load.
Many utility companies will credit you (or even pay you) for power you return to the grid. The night time usage costs, provided they are not excessive (gaudy Christmas lights etc...) could be dramatically offset by such an arrangement.
Wishful thinking, on at least two counts: 1. very little oil is used to power the electrical grid, so solar power does nohing to reduce the amount of imports; 2. since oil is fungible, any amount we don't buy will simply lower the price others pay, by reducing demand. If we stop using imported oil for transportation, and shift to using some substitute at twice, or three times the cost, we have hurt no one but ourselves.
The .30/watt would be peak production at noon in the desert close to the equator. For real places in the US, the figure will be lower. I'm going to guess that a rooftop unit in California or Arizona would see the equivalent of 4 hours at ideal conditions, so figure .30 gives you 4 watt-hrs/day. So 4 kw-hrs/day would cost $300 and return 40 cents/day (if power costs 10 cents per KWh), or $146/year, for a two year payback
If we assume that the cost of mounting and installing is twice the cost of the panels, then payback would be a reasonable 4 to 5 years
I could envision a "grid" where every "big-box" retailer in the US (Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Lowes, etc.) had a roof covered in solar panels owned by power companies. There are several MAJOR benefits to this:
1) Economy of scale for capital and operating costs.
2) Electricity would be generated where it is needed, reducing the need for additional upgrades to transmission lines. (i.e. Big-box retailers are located near population centers.)
3) The grid would be incredibly terrorisn proof. Thousands of independent generation points.
We are not there yet, but this film might be a step in the right direction.
Probably not too well. I see this as a solution in areas south of the Mason-Dixon.
As for the dark and cloudy times, I don't see ever getting completely off of the grid with this technology. It won't soon replace coal, nukes, or gas fired plants completely. But it will certainly supplement them.
During the day when I'm not home, my house could be a net producer of energy on the grid, which I sell back to the power company via a two-way meter. At night I would be a net consumer on the grid. The power company would act as a battery from my point of view.
We can end all brownouts during peak usage periods in the US if this was applied to all those roadside advertising signs.
In Michigan we don’t get enough sunshine to run a 100 watt lightbulb.
If zero-cost solar cells were available, all these other costs would have to be taken into account and compared to the cost of burning coal or oil. But this is exactly the same economic issues with respect to nuclear power, a source that it was supposed to be so free it would not be worthwhile to meter. Now we know that this free power source is crippled by the capital, regulator compliance and security costs. Consuming $5-10 billion to build a plant producing free power is not free. Even so, it can be costed out given a model of consumption. And that is exactly what happens.
With solar, by definition, we will have to have a mirror capacity to replace the power when the sun doesn’t shine enough. Since that replacement plant only runs part of the day, instead of recovering the capital costs over a 24x7 production period of power sales, it will have to be recovered for the times it is used. This only means one thing: a higher cost per KWH. We pay for the production capacity twice, even if daylight power is “free”, and even if the replacement power comes from big batteries charged by sunlight.
We are going to have to be told quite often how great solar power is so that when we get our utility bill, we won’t fell the pain of writing the bigger check as much as we rationally should. But we are dealing with government, and leftist media, so rationality is not part of this discussion.
Actually, shifting transport onto the grid - even if coal powered - is more efficient. Electric rail, vehicles, etc. Internal combustion engines convert about 25% of the gasoline's energy into mechanical power. You're better off energy-wise burning gas in a utility's power plant than in your car engine.
Of course, there's massive infrastructure upgrading costs. I'm just speaking about energy costs.
In my grandfather’s lifetime, the US economy had already make a successful, peaceful and interruptive transition from whale oil to coal oil. It took over 50 years to do that. Later, it took about 50 years to make another peaceful and economic transition from whale oil to coal oil. In my father’s lifetime, we transitioned from coal oil to crude oil.
Each time, there was an orderly introduction of new equipment that used the new fuel source and old equipment that used the old fuel was decommissioned as the equipment became worn out and not worth replacing.
Today, entire industries, such as air freight, can operate in their present business model based on the costs as they are today. Their business models would break and they would go bankrupt if some external force suddenly imposed a forced transition to new, unproven, and much more expensive capital equipment. Worse, nobody considers the safety and reliability issues associated with decades and generations of experience in producing and operating such equipment.
Nothing good will come of forcing these issues before the people involved can absorb and properly deal with the changes. And the point of my reply was simple: what we are going through is entirely unnecessary: we have done this to ourselves by imposing restrictions on our own oil industry.
We are the ones kicking ourselves.
In the south, much of the consumption of power from the grid comes when the sun is shining the brightest, causing A/C units to labor the hardest. If nothing else, solar would serve to avoid brownouts and/or blackouts during peaks.
I understand your points regarding the capitalization of power generating assets, and the fact that they have to be paid for somehow. Do you think that because of the possibility of higher costs of power company-generated power, that this will only serve to drive consumers more toward solar, thus accelerating the increase in costs for power company-generated power? What happens then? Do we end up with centrally-generated power being so expensive that it is no longer viable, at least in the south?
Or perhaps the decreased demand for centrally-generated power will reduce their variable costs (fuel) so much that things balance out. I dunno.
Thanks for the ping. This one does look like it has the potential to take off and fly like the Wright Brothers plane in 1903.
I’ve seen a lot of solar-powered billboards pop up over the past couple of years. Between high-efficiency lighting, cheaper solar panels and better batteries the cost of installation is lower than the cost of having the billboard connected to the grid.
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