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.
I wish them luck, but I doubt their claims.
with 100 million to play with, someone sure doesn't doubt they might have something...
Wait a minute, maybe there's hope for the MSM after all. They can publish solar cells.
Solar works great on a small scale but if they can economically produce electricty on a large scale it's good news for the southwest.
"I wish them luck, but I doubt their claims."
Which of their claims do you doubt?
I remember being a 12 year old boy, taking apart selenium rectifiers from radios and connecting them in series to create a solar cell, long before silicon solar cells appeared.
The technology they're using is scientifically sound, and the new technique for creating the photovoltaic surface sounds promising.
I wouldn't discount this company at all.
Solar power will never work on a large scale. CA might as well suck it up and start building nuclear power plants.
The benefits would be enormous so let's hope they can do it.
True, but what about those of use who live in Michigan? Almost useless there several months out of the year...
you'd get more resources that wouldn't be needed in sunnier parts
you'd get more resources that wouldn't be needed in sunnier parts
Let's do it. Anything to lessen our dependence on Muslim or anyone else's oil is a good thing.
Maybe this company will be the one that actually does it. Who knows? But, so far, all such claims have been expensive hot air.
My uncle met a scientist in Japan who is working on a durable coating for roads and parking lots that uses solar energy to produce electricity.
"Solar power will never work on a large scale."
Depends what you mean - if you are thinking of covering square miles in the desert, no - but covering hundreds of thousands of square miles on rooftops ... it will work when they are cheap enough.
Now there would be something usefull, look at the sq. miles of pavement out there. Hell if Walmart did all their parking lots alone they could probably generate enough to at least take a chunk out of their air conditioning costs...
> The technology they're using is scientifically sound, and the new technique for creating the photovoltaic surface sounds promising.
> I wouldn't discount this company at all.
It's very exciting, really. Keep an eye out for an IPO in '08.
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