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
Troubles at Nanosolar?
Much-heralded — and much-funded — solar panel company Nanosolar seems to be going through some jarring high-level change. The $100m-funded company — whose investors include Google’s founders, Benchmark Capital, an Apax partnerPartners, and others — no longer has the services of its chief scientist, Chris Eberspacher.
Why not? Because Eberspacher just joined Applied Materials:
Applied Materials, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMAT) announced today that Dr. Chris Eberspacher has joined the company’s Solar Business Group to lead advanced R&D programs. In this new role, Dr. Eberspacher will lead efforts for both silicon and non-silicon based solar materials and will report to Dr. Winfried Hoffmann, chief technology officer of Applied’s Solar Business Group. Before joining Applied, Dr. Eberspacher was most recently chief scientist at Nanosolar, Inc., a solar start-up focused on roll-to-roll processing of thin-film photovoltaic (PV) products.
[Update] After posting this I received a note from Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen. He says that Eberspacher actually “disengaged” with Nanosolar “almost two months ago”, well before joining AMAT. Martin went on to argue that Eberspacher’s departure wasn’t that big a deal, a point upon which we apparently disagree.
Good!
My electricity here in California typically runs $0.37 a kWh because I go way over the base rate (as do most people here). 1000 hours and it pays for itself here. The real question is how quickly does it degrade. Standard silicon solar panels have a typical life of around 25 years and is degrading all that time. If it takes a year or two to recover the costs that would be a really good deal even if it only lasts 10 years.
If this is really true, sign me up!
If it is privately held and on the edge of extreme success you would think the good Dr. would endure whatever to become filthy rich.
Something is up.
Oh I did’t mean to say it would all happen over night, even the manhatten project didn’t translate into nuclear power stations until the late 40’s early 50’s(we got to explode bombs first). But it wouldn’t take much time for even the smallest changes to begin to show dramatic effects and this new type of Solar siding is one small step into the future!
Oh I didn’t say that there wouldn’t be a need for petroleum products for manufacturing or large scale transport...I was emphasizing the fact that much of our smaller transportation/utility issues at the home and family could be met with some of these emerging alternative technologies, free up much petroleum reserves for the “bigger players” such as trucks, planes, tranes and manufacturing. I am aware that most electrical sources aren’t oil based any more(coal, natural gas, hydro, nuclear, ect are most often used but I was trying to emphasize the liberationg effects of home-owners who became more self sufficient in their energy needs as well as the benefits the nation would enjoy as well.
Reliability, especially in Seattle, WA, or Binghamton, NY - the first and second LEAST sunny places in the US.
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Reliability, especially in Seattle, WA, or Binghamton, NY - the first and second LEAST sunny places in the US.
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Just how “reliable” is solar power? It produces power in proportion to the amount of solar energy that falls on the cell. At night, every night, it never produces power. As an issue of “reliability”, it fails at least once every day to produce power. Some days, it never gets enough sunlight to produce enough power to bother with.
Every moment solar cells don’t produce power, the replacement must come from somewhere. And the replacement power source, in every aspect, must be fully capable of producing power to satisfy the customer’s needs, for however long they need it.
This only means that instead of solar cells being the primary source of power, they can only be used to reduce the fuel usage of the primary source.
Should someone propose we store the solar power in batteries of some kind, reverse-pumping hydro storage, high pressure air storage or any other type of storage, we are now faced with having a finite amount of storage after which we must be able to rely on standby generators. Again, whatever level of backup we rely on, it must have the capacity to supply the full demand.
All this translates into cost. We are just putting our economy and our prosperity at risk if we leave strategic decisions like these to politicians who have no concept of the vast scope and scale of the energy needs of the US.
At present the grid is a once-way tree, from the trunk at the power plant to the branches of sub-stations, the limbs of neighborhood power lines and the leaves of individual home connections. With very few exceptions, power only flows one way in this tree.
When many end-customers can supply excess power back to the grid in coordination from the central dispatch control center of the grid’s operator, the grid becomes a matrix, or mesh, where sellers of power could be commanded as needed to supply power and the mesh would account for who is owed money and who is to be charged.
The sizing issues greatly change, for in the present structure, like with the internet service of an ISP, the capacity needs ‘roll up’ and aggregate from one layer upwards to the next. This is why power lines quickly get very large. A mesh would not need to have nearly the capacity at the upper levels as it does now.
But economically speaking, this is all blue sky for the simple reason that the customer always must pay the full cost of every facility the utility builds to provide his power. The power plant and the power distribution system must be paid for even if the customer base decides to buy so many power-selling hybrid cars that the power plant is not needed.
No one who understood either nuclear power or the power generation industry in general, would have ever said such a thing. In fact, in the 1950s when the quote originated, the nuclear industry was not at all sure they could ever be competitive with other sources of power.
If you're interested, here's an explanation of how that misleading term came into use. It was a government bureaucrat being quoted by the NY Times. That combination most always gets it wrong but the anti-nuke Luddities have used that quote to mislead the public ever since.
1/4 century of cheaper solar panels started at $5 a watt and is still $5 a watt.
Actually, every square meter of solar panel in Florida would produce about 500wh of electricity per day. The roof of a golf cart is about 3 square meters, so you have 1.5kwh per day. That is enough electricity to drive a golf cart about 10 miles per day.
“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)”
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Shortage? Silicon is made from SAND or DIRT. Its expensive because it takes allot of heat energy to purify.
Yes, it has its issues with day/night, sunny/cloudy, lattitude, etc. that make it less than “perfect”.
If life were all-or-nothing, we wouldn’t get anywhere.
By making such panels cheap enough, we can at least take a bite out of the standard electric bill, and do something methinks more important: increase self-sufficiency. Being able to augment home power with a non-dependent electricity source is, to some of us, _huge_. Blackout? keep the fridge running, charge the notebook computer & cell phone, pump water, and otherwise keep important-yet-not-continuous stuff running.
Turn your main breaker off some time for a few hours/days. Think about what you really need running - and that’s not the TV or 1500 watts of light bulbs.
The sun has to be pretty high in the sky to approach the peak power a solar panel is rated at. The usual method of taking that into account is to figure 5 hours of sunlight per day as an average over the year.
Current PV panels require about one square foot to produce a peak 10w. So if you need 1000kwh per month, you need 1000kwh / 30days = 33kwh per day / 5 hours per day = 6.6kw capacity = 660 square feet of panels.
At 30 cents per watt, the panels would cost $2,000. Batteries, inverter, installation, etc., however, would make it $10,000 for a home system. A grid-tie system would be cheaper because it wouldn’t need batteries. That would save $3,000 and eliminate the recurring replacement expense. Deep cycle lead batteries only last about two years. Even at $10,000 initial cost plus $1,500/yr recurring cost, it would be cheaper than my current annual electric bill in southern California.
If you have electricity, you can make fuels for use in jet engines. More expensive than pumping it out of the ground, but you can do it. The less expensive the electricity is, the more feasible synthetic fuels become.
I'm having a hard time figuring out what they're talking about. First of all, a watt is a unit of power (energy/time), not energy. If they're really talking about energy, how would you know how much a given solar panel will "go on to produce"? That's a function of how long it's used, and under what conditions. If they mean power, then what does the comparison with coal mean? Coal is a consumable fuel, whereas a solar panel is a durable good. A given amount of coal equates to a total available chemical energy, not a power generation rate.
“... a roof-sized panel will not be enough to power the home on which it is installed.”
This is true for apartment buildings or condos, but rarely true for single family residences. The average home requires about 660sf of panels to produce 1,000kwh per month. Most single family homes have more than enough roof area.
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