Posted on 06/24/2006 11:19:37 AM PDT by Abathar
A well-financed California startup is promising to build a solar-cell factory that could finally make solar power affordable.
This week, Nanosolar, a startup in Palo Alto, CA, announced plans to build a production facility with the capacity to make enough solar cells annually to generate 430 megawatts. This output would represent a substantial portion of the worldwide production of solar energy.
According to Nanosolar's CEO Martin Roscheisen, the company will be able to produce solar cells much less expensively than is done with existing photovoltaics because its new method allows for the mass-production of the devices. In fact, maintains Roscheisen, the company's technology will eventually make solar power cost-competitive with electricity on the power grid.
Nanosolar also announced this week more than $100 million in funding from various sources, including venture firms and government grants. The company was founded in 2001 and first received seed money in 2003 from Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Experts say Nanosolar’s ambitious plans for such a large factory are surprising. "It's an extraordinary number,” says Ken Zweibel, who heads up thin-film research at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO. Most groups building new solar technologies “add maybe 25 or 50 megawatts," he says. "The biggest numbers are closer to 100. So it's a huge number, and it's a huge number in a new technology, so it's doubly unusual. All the [photovoltaics] in the world is 1,700 megawatts."
Today, the lion's share of solar cells are based on crystalline silicon, which is about three to five times too costly to compete with grid electricity, Zweibel says.
Nanosolar's technology involves a thin film of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium (CIGS) that absorbs sunlight and converts it into electricity. The basic technology has been around for decades, but it has proven difficult to produce it reliably and cheaply. Nanosolar has developed a way to make these cells using a printing technology similar to the kind used to print newspapers, rather than expensive vacuum-based methods.
Although the company expects to start selling solar cells next year, ramping up to full production will take more time. Meanwhile, high demand for solar cells worldwide will keep prices high, Roscheisen says. Eventually, however, he says the company hopes to attract more customers with lower prices, in several years reaching prices that make solar-power electricity competitive with the grid.
Zweibel says the company is likely to face challenges in ramping up production, although their pilot manufacturing facility is a big step. And he adds that Nanosolar is not alone in developing inexpensive manufacturing processes for CIGS solar cells, and at least one other company is working with a printing process.
Meanwhile, Andrew Gabor, senior engineer at Evergreen Solar, a silicon solar-cell developer and manufacturer in Marlboro, MA, says current supply problems related to conventional solar cells are easing as more production capacity is coming on line. This could mean that prices for silicon cells start dropping again, eventually becoming competitive with grid electricity. He suggests that in the future solar electricity supply will likely be met by a mix of technologies.
You must be joking. I want to put an small ham antenna on my roof. It's going to take a hydraulic cherry picker to safely get up there. That's only feasible in the summer time. The cul de sac in front of my house is too tight for the snow plow. We routinely have 18 inches of snow on the street from Thanksgiving until Ground Hog day. The snow on either side of my driveway is usuall piled 3 to 8 feet deep. Nobody is getting near my roof to brush it off each morning.
It has nothing to do with English composition. Do you make your own petrol?
bump for later
You are way wrong
Punch the numbers in yourself on how much solar energy reaches the earth at any given location, at http://fuzzo.com/science/RadData.htm
For my house at about 44° latitude, the amount of solar energy reaching the surface at noon is
404 watts per meter² June 21
253 watts per meter² Sep 21
97 watts per meter² Dec 21
My house which is about average size has 140 meters² of roof space (1500 feet²) and the best solar panels have only 15% efficiency
So we are talking about maximum
8.5KW June 21
5.3KW Sep 21
2.0KW Dec 21
Now throw in the fact that my (and no one else’s) entire roof faces the direction of the sun all at once, the solar cells will have to be spaced, and there’s night time, 1 out of 3 days are cloudy and/or rainy where my house is, the pollen, dust, bird §¶‡+ and other debris that will accumulate on the solar cells, there are many trees within a few hundred feet and the snow that falls on the roof and watch those numbers plummet right down
Your typical house need 30KW hours per day to run,
Sorry but solar is and will always be a pipe dream. I'm actually shocked that on a Conservative site I'm reading some of the blather and Liberal wishfull thinkings posted in this thread
The whole industry is propped up by Liberal feel good but actually do nothing policies, Take away the subsidies the industry will die immediately.
Add tracking and tilting and improved efficiency to 20% and you get very close to 1500 sq.ft.
"There are probably not too many of us who remember those orange colored stacks of square plates."
I'm quite certain you're right. And even fewer who know that they could be converted into solar cells.
Schottky diodes. They are used in the panel circuits to help with the problem of shaded panels.
Your panels probably already these for shading within individual panel, but more may be needed for the shading from panel to panel within an array.
Not a perfect solution, but they may help in your situation.
My personal "Price Point" is $2.00/watt for solar panels. After you buy the panels, you still have to invest in a mounting system, controller, batteries & an inverter. Even at $2.00/watt for the panels and doing the installation myself, I probably wouldn't see a true economic investment payback in my lifetime...
That's exactly right. Die hard liberals really want to end capitalism and our way of life. They envision a utopia where we all live together in peace and harmony. Unfortunately man is man and it will end up just as you envision it.
Not lately. It takes energy to make solar cells and that energy is expensive.
In my judgment (considering my own practices), the typical American consumer wastes an enormous amount of electricity. I never want to return to the days of Jimmy Carter where one was expected to do his socialist duty, submit to a scolding by a scowling and feckless clown-in-chief, and obsessively replace all 100 watt light bulbs with 60 watt light bulbs. However, renewable sources of electricity that encourage consumers voluntarily to find a break-even point by eliminating or reducing wasteful practices seem to make a lot of sense.
Thus, if solar energy costs three times as much but I could still break even by decreasing my use by two-thirds without suffering a material loss in convenience or comfort, then it would be wise for me to invest in solar energy.
Interestingly enough, Hooker Chemicals & Plastics made (still makes?) components for solar heaters back in the 1970’s .
If you remember they were responsible for a little thing called Love Canal.
So solar power has already caused more Environmental damage here in America than Nuclear has
and of course the usual hard-headed liberal "pragmatism" hat is applied to missile defense and racila profiling ("It just doesn't work!").
Quite the opposite, Liberals love solar because it makes them feel soooo good even though it doesn't work.
A cheap solar panel on the roof of an infrequently-used electric vehicle makes a lot of sense.
There's also solar-powered emergency radio-telephones that you see along some highways.
There WILL be a market for solar power in places where it's not workable to string a power line
Unless they put the solar panels ABOVE the parking lot, providing shade as well as power
"SOme people have these little lights that they plant along paths. "
Just about everyone has those, these days. I bought some when they were really expensive. Now, you can get a whole box of the things for the price I paid for one.
Remote power is perfect for solar. There are solar panels all over the place where the roads and powerlines don't go. They're powering all sorts of stuff.
I bought one of those little solar panels to trickle charge the battery of the Chevy. There could be enough sunlight perhaps four months a year, but even then the air is murky enough normally to make the effort totally futile.
My point exactly.
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