Nanosolar - low cost solar energy. Or not?

Matt the Poet

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Just wondered if anyone here knew anything about this.

The Guardian published a piece on the front page of Saturday’s edition trumpeting some sort of breakthrough in solar panel technology that’s going to make it as cheap to produce electricity from the sun as it is to produce from oil. Which is very exciting, and allows the breathing of maybe a tiny sigh of relief over the whole global warming issue.

The BBC website, however, seems to have bypassed the issue, and I haven’t seen or heard it reported anywhere else.

Checked the relevant company’s website (Nanosolar), and they haven’t announced anything – the last thing of interest that happened was some sort of buyout/top personnel change issue.

So – is this company marketing sneaking into the broadsheets on a slow news day? Lazy science journalists picking up on an elderly story? Or has anyone heard anything elsewhere about it?
 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2233074,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/dec/29/solarpower.renewableenergy
http://www.nanosolar.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanosolar

Sounds interesting, and is certainly possible. However, quotes like this one, from the second link:
However, the company, which claims to lead the "third wave" of solar electricity, is notoriously secretive and has not answered questions about its panels' efficiency or their durability.
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make me a little suspicious.

Even if completely true, it seems to be only a new manufacturing technique and nothing more. Solar power will still suffer from the same problems of low efficiency, unreliability, unsuitability in many places and so on. I suspect that in reality it won't save anywhere near as much as they claim, and until solar cells are cheaper than established sources of power, not just comparable in ideal conditions, nothing much is likely to change.
 
Yes, I thought it all sounded a bit too easy. Careful re-reading of the article suggests that nothing much new is happening, which leaves only the question as to how the Guardian was convinced to run several hundred words of advertising on its front and first inside page, let alone decide that it was worthy of leader comment...
 
I read about in in Popular Science. They listed it as one of the best new technologies. I posted about it before, let me check...

Here we go.
 
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It is not the only company trying to use this "thin film" (however it is called) tech.
Others are Konarka and Miasole..
 
"Nothing new is happening" != printing solar cells on rolls like newspaper

We'll see how the 1.4MW system in Europe works out; I'm in the market for some solar myself. I'd love to be selling power back to the power company.
 
This really sounds like Ovonics (Ovshinsky) all over again, not that I don't like solar powered calculators. Amorphous solar cells are well understood and just not efficient enough. Why don't they just tell us what their efficiencies are? I would be very cautious about this. Does NASA use it?
 
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Schneibster said:
The point isn't high efficiency; the point is, it's CHEAP.
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Well, I think that at some point efficiency is precisely the point. Solar gives us about 1000 watts/square meter...maximum. That's the bottom line for 100% efficiency. Don't even think about a solar family car...well ok, those test cars that you have to lie down in to drive across the desert, fine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insolation

Approx. numbers:
If you only have 100 square meters on your roof, (10 x 10 meter roof), the maximum the sun can give you is about 100 kw. Not a lot! Cell efficiency of 50% (silicon crystalline) 50 kw, then conversion to AC 60 Hz, storage losses, maybe 30%, etc, etc. (Some of the best cells are 70%)

Solar quickly appears to me to be just a novelty for generating electricity at 10% efficiency and less.

http://www.ovonic.com/eb_so_solar_aerospace_solutions.cfm

Amorphous cells just can't hack it, unless you have several acres. In which case, I think using focused mirrors onto a boiler in the desert is superior, for a neighborhood. Or solar water heating on the roof seems to work for many homes.

I really hope this outfit is onto something, but it reminds me of the claims of Steorm. The website just makes me nervous.

By the way, I just saw on "How it's made" tonight, the making of silicon solar cell arrays. This one company makes 6 per day, by hand! The question is why this process cannot be greatly automated.
 
OK, here's the deal: I have a 100A breaker on my service connection, and that means that at maximum draw, I can use 12kW per leg. That's 24kW maximum total usage. Generally my usage is well below that. If I can make enough extra during the day to sell to the power company that it pays for my usage at night, then I'm a net zero power consumer.

My house has a two-slope roof, plus an addition. I figure I can generate about 50kW at the service connection. The way I figure it, all I have to do is amortize the investment in solar panels by the money I save on my electric bill; if I'm a net zero power consumer, then I can amortize about $3,500/yr. If the solar cells cost $10,000 installed then it will take me three years to amortize the investment. Everything after that is pure profit to me. If they last 5 years, then I'll use them 5 years and buy another set, and still be ahead. On the other hand, if they cost $20,000, it will take six years to amortize, and if they only last 5 years then I'm out $3,500, so I won't.

Cheap solar power cells are more important to me than high efficiency solar power cells. Do you see why?
 
Schneibster said:
Cheap solar power cells are more important to me than high efficiency solar power cells. Do you see why?
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No. Cheapness and efficiency are pretty much interchangeable. It's no good having cells five times cheaper if they're five times less efficient. In fact, for a given product of cost and efficiency, expensive but efficient cells will be better since available space will be less of a factor.

Of course, the actual winner depends on the details, and it is hard to see in this case due to the reluctance to by Nanosolar to actually say anything in public (which in itself suggests they are not as good as they are made out to be). However, the figure given in the Wiki article is for efficiency of 14%, with a maximum of 20% for this kind of cell. They say they hope to sell them for $1 per Watt eventually, which means they are currently more expensive. This means that the figures of 5 times less efficient and 5 times cheaper are likely close to reality, and so these cells are no improvement at all over existing cells, except that they will take up more space, are largely untested and of unknown durability.
 
Schneibster said:
OK, here's the deal: I have a 100A breaker on my service connection, and that means that at maximum draw, I can use 12kW per leg. That's 24kW maximum total usage. Generally my usage is well below that. If I can make enough extra during the day to sell to the power company that it pays for my usage at night, then I'm a net zero power consumer.

My house has a two-slope roof, plus an addition. I figure I can generate about 50kW at the service connection. The way I figure it, all I have to do is amortize the investment in solar panels by the money I save on my electric bill; if I'm a net zero power consumer, then I can amortize about $3,500/yr. If the solar cells cost $10,000 installed then it will take me three years to amortize the investment. Everything after that is pure profit to me. If they last 5 years, then I'll use them 5 years and buy another set, and still be ahead. On the other hand, if they cost $20,000, it will take six years to amortize, and if they only last 5 years then I'm out $3,500, so I won't.

Cheap solar power cells are more important to me than high efficiency solar power cells. Do you see why?
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What if the $20k ones are three times more efficient, meaning that you can sell back $7k per annum of power to the power company? Now you amortise your cost over less than two years ($3.5k reduced costs and $7k income per annum) and everything after that is pure profit.

Surely it has to be a combination of price and efficiency not one or the other in isolation?
 
I am convinced that the only really cheap way to make solar electricity on a huge scale is thermal steam plants. This is a well-proven technology. If you overbuild your collectors, you can actually bank superheated water in a cistern and use it to generate through the night.
 
BenBurch said:
This is a well-proven technology. If you overbuild your collectors, you can actually bank superheated water in a cistern and use it to generate through the night.
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When you do that you can also use a smaller generator and turbine and put a lower peak load on the electricity distribution system. (the hot reservoir is usually a liquid salt, not water)
 
OK, there're some more considerations here as well.

For example, cheap power cells makes the cost of entry lower- that means more people can afford it. Even if it's not very efficient, as long as it saves money, it can be justified, and every bit counts if we want to lower CO2 emissions. I don't say efficient isn't better- it is. But the thing is, you need good market penetration to get major CO2 effects more than you need highly efficient solar cells that only a few people can afford.

For another example, you need to compete economically with coal if you're going to replace it. That doesn't mean you're going to replace base load- but if you can replace some peak load, you're going to reduce the amount of coal you need to burn, and even reduce the number of plants you need to build. All of that is savings. Efficiency only gets you so far in that competition; at bottom, you've got a limitation on insolation. Cheaper solar cells get you closer to coal faster than more efficient ones do.

And for yet another example, if I can outfit my home with cheap solar cells, I take less risk of capitalization supposing that they are damaged or destroyed by something, or have some flaw or other; this reduces my insurance costs. And then there's future-proofing; if they're cheap, then I can upgrade when the upgrade comes along without losing too much of my capital investment.

So there are three or four good arguments why cheap solar cells are more important than high-efficiency solar cells. Again, I don't say high efficiency is something to ignore; for a power plant, where the initial capital outlay is already so high that using more expensive, high-efficiency cells is a minor consideration in terms of the total investment, they make a lot of sense. But for mass deployment, cheap wins every time. And we need mass deployment. It's the same argument as for batteries; for fixed installations, cheap batteries that last a long time are more important than high-capacity batteries, whereas for mobile applications, the size may be the overriding factor.
 
soylent said:
When you do that you can also use a smaller generator and turbine and put a lower peak load on the electricity distribution system. (the hot reservoir is usually a liquid salt, not water)
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I can see where that would be a LOT cheaper and much safer! My experience with stored-heat thermal systems is all from locomotives, specifically the fireless engines that used to be run in power plants. Of course there were ample resources at as power plant to get steam for it. (When the plant was cold, there was an auxillary boiler for this use and for emergency generation for the plant.)
 
Today (Sunday the 13th) the Science Channel show Eco-Tech did a segment on the Konarka Power Plastic solar cells. They never did mention the efficiency. But IIRC they said that traditional cells cost about $2 per watt, while Konarka's cells are currently at $1 per watt, and they claim that as they scale up they'll be able to lower that to about 10 to 20 cents per watt.

The episode was called Powering Up and will air again Feb. 2nd at 9:00 p.m.

They also showed a guy who invented a helical wind turbine that is better at handling turbulent air than the traditional 3-blade types. They're ideal for putting on the roofs of office buildings in urban areas. I don't recall the guys name, though.

Steve S.
 
Cuddles, after skimming through the posts I didn't see a response to one of your points, but cost per watt is the economic stumbling block for most applications, not efficiency.

If you are in space, opr another application where mass is at a premium (solar-powered UAVs, for example) then efficiency is important, but if not, then cost is more important, becuase if you had a 100% effficient solear cell that cost $10k/watt, it would be great in the above applications, but in generating electricity where you just need to cover a larger area of desert, there would not be any economic justification for such a system, and ten times the area at 10% efficiency and $1 per watt would win out.

Assuming that 10% efficiency is a realistic benchmark, then a house with a sloping roof of area 5mx3m could have (roughly )10% of 15kW (1.5kW) generated during the daytime, this would definitely be a useful amount, unlike the situation if the efficiency was 1%.

Given the current cosp and efficiencies, cost per watt is probably the important factor (efficiency is obviously going to be an important factor in this cost, of course, as less silicon is good).


Slight derail:

Here are some vaguely interesting articles:


The optimistsic (price parity oper watt with copal-fired in 2010):


From Semiconductor International newsletter:
Report from Asian News International brought to you by HT Syndication. -- Hindustan Times, January 1, 2008 Tuesday 11:58 AM EST


The report also states that the growth in installations in the United States increased from 20 percent in 2005 to 31 percent in 2006, primarily driven by California and New Jersey. Initial estimates for the United States as a whole indicate that PV incentives helped to achieve an incredible 83-percent growth in installations in 2007.

The average price for a PV module, excluding installation and other system costs, has dropped from almost $100 per watt in 1975 to less than $4 per watt at the end of 2006. With expanding polysilicon supplies, average PV prices are projected to drop to $2 per watt in 2010.

For thin-film PV, production costs are expected to reach $1 per watt in 2010, at which point solar PV will become competitive with coal-fired electricity.

Published by HT Syndication with permission from Asian News International.
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The more pessimistic view, again form one of my email alerts (powermanagment by darnell IIRC)

About 50% oversupply in 2008, so typical semiconductor market fluctuations, just as the rest of the semiconductor market becomes mature, and less oscillatory...

Supply and Demand

Bottom line: by the end of this year, 2008, cell producers will have installed capacity of 12.2 GW annual production according to present manufacturer plans. When you add in solar thermal capacity (Ausra, Schott) that number grows to 12.9 GW. Looking ahead, the 2009 end-year production capacity is simply enormous, at 17.2 GW. Is this a problem? Oh, yes, when you look at the demand estimates. Match the year-end 2008 capacity of 12.2GW with 2009 demand: the EPIA optimistic (”policy-driven”) estimate of 2009 world-wide demand is 4.3GW. Lehman calls it 4.8GW. Merrill Lynch has 5.2GW. A Q-cells presentation referred to a UBS number of 8GW. Even if you de-rate the 12.2GW number to account for “actual” vs. “nameplate” capacity; even if you attempt to adjust for “press-release” vs. “actually built” capacity, the numbers are still very out of balance. Even the most optimistic 2009 demand guesses fall far short of what the industry intends to produce.
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Jim

ETA:

Actually Schneibester has answered the question, but hey...
 
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steve s said:
They also showed a guy who invented a helical wind turbine that is better at handling turbulent air than the traditional 3-blade types. They're ideal for putting on the roofs of office buildings in urban areas. I don't recall the guys name, though.
.
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Was it these people?

From this article in the engineer:

In the city, the wind is fickle and variable, changes direction suddenly and often, and builds up and dies down again equally quickly. A horizontal axis turbine, which works at optimum level when facing into the wind, cannot track the direction of air flow fast enough.

Vertical-axis turbines are proving a better option. The orientation of their blades means they will spin in the same direction regardless of where the wind is coming from although they do not suit gusty wind. Holger Babinsky, an aerodynamicist at Cambridge University's engineering department, has been working on these problems and believes he has found a way to overcome them.

Babinsky is working with the urban wind turbine specialist Quietrevolution, whose turbines have been mooted for an ambitious project to install generation units across London (see The Engineer, 21 May).
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