No it isn't. There's the matter of having enough sun. There are few places in the continental U.S. that get sufficient sun to do the job.
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
Clouds don’t completely block sunlight. The “solar insolation” figure is based on actual readings averaged over several years time, including cloudy days, rain, angle of the sun in each season, etc. There are many solar projects in Michigan. At the present retail price of $5/watt of panel, they would never pay for themselves, but they DO produce electricity year-round. At $0.30/watt they would pay for themselves in less than ten years.
“We need more nukes for this and more. But a widely distributed storage system in the form of millions of car batteries is a beautiful thing for wind energy and other renewables. Turbines spinning at night have very limited market for the power today, but once people are charging cars overnight that equation changes drastically, and makes the economies of wind energy look very very good indeed.”
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Transporting HEAVY batteries over long distances?
No it isn't. There's the matter of having enough sun. There are few places in the continental U.S. that get sufficient sun to do the job.
My roof is covered with snow about 4 months of the year. That's also that same time frame when I get minimum daylight. At 42 degrees north, the amount of solar energy available is limited anyway.
The Miller steam plant in Alabama is a 4 gigawatt facility. It can do that 24x7. How much physical space is required for this technology to replace just this single facility?
#1 - Go 100% Nuclear on the power grid.
#2 - Begin designing in and installing solar panel power systems in ALL new homes.
#3 - Design and market “commuter cars” that are deisal/electric. 50 mpg is EASILY obtainable.
Well...yeah. That's what an electric car does. If it's 100% electric there's no need for a heavy IC engine, radiator, etc.
I once bought a solar powered electric fence charger. It would last as long as the charged car battery lasted without the solar panel.
It did zero because there just isn’t enough sunshine here.
I hear that they work quite well in the south west.
“Well...yeah. That’s what an electric car does. If it’s 100% electric there’s no need for a heavy IC engine, radiator, etc.”
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It would be more efficient to transport electricity over long distance via powerlines.
“#1 - Go 100% Nuclear on the power grid.”
Nuclear is great.
“#2 - Begin designing in and installing solar panel power systems in ALL new homes.”
Why?
“#3 - Design and market “commuter cars” that are deisal/electric. 50 mpg is EASILY obtainable.”
Do you own Ford?
I get so tired of the un-ending, un-economical/impractical GANG-GREEN puss claims!!!
And the power gets into the car how?
Have you never heard of the second law of thermodynamics?
P.T. Barnum sure knew what he was talking about!!!
That said, what I can envision happening if a large number of intermittent, widely dispersed sources connecting to and dropping off of the grid, depending on environmental conditions (which is what you'd have if you had large numbers of solar-based systems trying to "tie in" to the grid through their own home power connection), you'd have superimposed on the baseload capacity a fluctuating component of supply. That is manageable and you can make use of it if the fluctuations are predictable and don't vary suddenly over a wide range. An example might be bringing an NG-fired peaker unit online to meet a peak in the demand curve, or maybe tapping the capacity of a pumped-storage reservoir. In those cases, you have a good idea of how much capacity is coming online, how long it might be available, and how you might be able to wheel in other supply once those units go offline.
With sources that depend on natural environmental phenomena, the situation becomes much more chaotic. You could be running along very nicely on a sunny day with the distributed solar collectors contributing to the variable part of the demand curve. Things look very stable and you're tempted to scale back your spinning reserve to save money. That works for a time until the afternoon heat starts generating scattered thunderstorms. The storms are scattered and their leading edges are ragged. Solar output beings to fluctuate. You need to damp those out so you start looking for quick-start variable capacity. That means an NG peaker. So you bring that in and that covers your butt until the storms start clearing some of the solar collectors. Now you've got excess capacity that you need to juggle. So you shut down the NG peaker since that's the most expensive unit you've got running. The solar capacity comes back up slowly and you're running along fine until another crop of scattered storms pops up in a different area of your grid. Uh oh. Now the NG peaker is in coastdown and it might take some time to bring it back up. Capacity drops because of fluctuating solar collector output and on occasion you're dropping below the demand, causing voltage sags and brownouts. Neighboring grids are in the same boat and aren't in a position to wheel you any excess capacity. You start thinking about shedding load. Just before you do that, in comes the cavalry! A neighboring BWR that had been in load-following mode kicks back into baseload operation at 100% capacity factor, and you can borrow power enough to avoid blackouts. So for your heroic part in avoiding a major blackout you get a raise and promotion (out of the dispatching center), and your raise is sufficient to cover your heart pacemaker implantation.
“And the power gets into the car how?”
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The (gas) station in which swaps the batteries out, charges the batteries.
The reason why electric cars have such insanely low range is because batteries weigh much more then a tank of gas. Transporting a charged battery long distances would be extremely counter productive. It would probably take a million truck drivers sucking up diesel to accomplish it.
Where did you get that map ? Those numbers seem way too high ! I couldn’t find it on the NREL site. I’d like a link so I can interpret their numbers.
Even in southern states, you won’t get more than 0.5kwh per square meter from current PV panels. Which is fine, since 60 square meters isn’t that much and would provide all the electricity the average home uses.
This graph shows over ten times the values it should. You wouldn’t get 6.5kwh even in Arizona with a 100% efficient PV. Luckily, you don’t need to. A lower solar radiation value just means you need more area, and area is rarely an issue. Only cost is an issue.
I don’t think the scenario you’ve laid out is a likely result. Utilities will figure out how to deal with it, or they just won’t do it.
I think more likely is that the solar power put on the grid will be priced very low for grid-tying, say a penny or so/Kwh. Utilities will then decide to use it or dump it if it’s too much trouble. Maybe the utility subsidizes the inverter in exchange for very low cost power that they may find a use for. Of course, some govt pork can easily get thrown into this.
The big win for this technology in consumer adoption, as I mentioned earlier, is from rechargeable vehicle batteries. A great deal of families can make very good use from a second “around town” car that’s say ~$5,000-7,000, can go 40-50 mph for about 100 miles - instead of having two $15-20k gas cars. Those products will be coming online over the decade I think.
The solar-charged electric car is only saving you money if it's on the road, and it's use displaces what you'd normally use gasoline for. That means high availability. That means it has to hold a charge efficiently between charging cycles, be able to respond efficiently to multiple, repeated deep charging cycles (which means advanced battery technology), and there had better be enough sunshine frequently and for a long enough duration to effect those charging cycles. If not, you risk running out of juice at the wrong time. Electric vehicle mileage will be drastically impacted by the use of environmental controls, heating in the winter and A/C in the summer. We don't think about it much now because it's very easy to pull into a corner gas station when the tank is running low. We may not have that option when the battery is giving out. I know, I know, just pull into a battery-swapping station. But it's going to be a long road getting that kind of infrastructure in place.
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