Here's a slide show.
Here's a slide show.
Please Freep Mail me if you'd like on/off
Down in Florida and elsewhere, people in retirement communities keep electric golf carts to get around and go to the stores. Having a solar panel on the roof of the cart to keep it charged for these short intermittent trips would mean these vehicles could be entirely solar powered
Looks like great stuff. Too bad it is privately held and you can’t buy stock in the company.
Cool stuff but that is still 3x the normal retail rate.
Cool stuff.
>>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.
We can end all brownouts during peak usage periods in the US if this was applied to all those roadside advertising signs.
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!
1/4 century of cheaper solar panels started at $5 a watt and is still $5 a watt.
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.
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.
Let you know when I can buy one and test it out. Then and only then ...
There has been a lot of pie in the sky inventions, someone is bound to do it sooner or later.
One more issue, where do the batteries come from where we store the energy?
bump
#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.
I get so tired of the un-ending, un-economical/impractical GANG-GREEN puss claims!!!
Do they have it in yellow?
Even if this doesn’t work out, we might be able to use the technology to kill people.