” their next production plant is aimed precisely to the “roof-top solar” house market”
....to me, that makes a lot more sense than beaming solar back to earth from outer space...
Oh, I agree. Jerry Pournelle has been touting "solar power satellites" since forever. And the approach made some sense back in the day when the only solar cells were made from crystalline semi-conductor grade silicon, so you absolutely "had" to maximize the "per cell productivity". And the best way to do THAT was to get the cell where maximum sunlight hit it 24/7---a condition found only in space.
But Nanosolar's invention is a true "paradigm-shifting", game-changine piece of technology. A single production line (not a single production PLANT, but one line in such a plant), operated at their tested maximum speed of 100 ft/sec can turn out 1GW (the equivalent of a 1000 MW nuke plant) per year. According to the Nanosolar head honcho, cell quality actually improves at the higher production rates. Note that the 100ft/min feed rate is not the maximum the equipment is capable of---newspaper offset printing is run at 2000 ft/min--but they have not yet tested at these higher rates