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Breakthrough in solar photovoltaics
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Feb 28, 2005 10:40 AM
from the nano-vapor dept.
from the nano-vapor dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Holy Grail of researchers in the field of solar photovoltaic (SPV) electricity is to generate it at a lower cost than that of grid electricity. The goal now seems to be within reach.
A Palo Alto (California ) start-up, named Nanosolar Inc., founded in 2002, claims that it has developed a commercial scale technology that can deliver solar electricity at 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. " As always, take these claims with a dose of salt the size of the Hope Diamond.
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Cost ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Could we "coat" a laptop with these in order to enhance its battery life duration ?
Re:Cost ? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes we can. However it would be called "rooftop"
then - the article lists the size of 120 watt panel as 14 feet by 10 feet.
You'll get a really large screen though.
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Re:Cost ? (Score:5, Informative)
this implies that the sheet 10 X14 feet produces around 1.5 killowatts, and costs around 500 bucks!!!!! GIMME GIMME I WANT ONE
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Re:Cost ? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, yes we do not know the lifetime of a solar panel because there doesn't appear to be data for end of life failure of solar panels. That is an important distinction because there have likely been failures of solar panels, but end of life failure would see a lot of panels of the same installation time failing near the same time.
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Re:Cost ? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Cost ? (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed. If only we had some means of moving electricity from one place to another.
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Re:Cost ? (Score:4, Insightful)
It would have to be much cheaper I would think.
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Re:Cost ? (Score:5, Informative)
California did not refuse to build new power plants, and has in fact been building them like mad ever since it got raped by Enron.
Enron shut down Enron's power plants, Enron moved out of state, became a distributor only, and Enron did so deliberately in order to create shortages. Enron managed to pin this on CA, and to this day, Enron's criminal behavior has gone unpunished by regulators while California seeks to get back the overcharges caused by Enron.
Clear?
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Less Pot and More Facts, Please. (Score:5, Informative)
California, because it had not built enough power plants, was importing power from other states.
In order to import power you have to have your own power system suitably balanced. It's not like you put electrons on trucks and wheel them in. To do this, you offer financial incentives to buy or sell power at various points on the grid. To this day, PJM does this on the east coast and you can actually check it out here PJM LMP pricing [pjm.com]
Also, you have to adequate transmission rights to get the power in.
So what Enron did was rather clever. First, they had better software than the California ISO for determining grid imbalances and so they scheduled power deals to manipulate the grid. Import power in the north, export it in the south, boom there is an imbalance, and you can sell the power you exported back to the state for a lot of dough. Then, they would also go and buy up transmission rights into the state (which is actually pretty cheap), and then play games at peak times.
The amazing thing about the whole thing is that gaming California's stupid grid managers WAS LEGAL. That's right. Enron didn't do -anything- wrong by screwing the state of California. The state made its rules for its market place and Enron exploited them, but California should not have made those rules to begin with. To cap it all off, California deregulation stripped utilities of the ability to pass variable costs to consumers. So, if the price of electricity shot up, it should have shot up for consumers as well, and guess what, people turn their air conditioners down, and there is no power crisis. But oh no, California made it so that the utilities could not recover the costs and so they had to sell power at a loss, and all the utilities in California went bankrupt, and Enron made a mountain of money, legally.
The thing that got Enron into trouble was that they were lying on their financial statements, and for that, the company is now bankrupt, her executives are either on trial, and the accounting firm that certified those statements no longer exists.
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Re:Cost ? (Score:5, Informative)
My girlfriend lives in a solar powered house here in BC (Canada). For 4 months she has to suplement power from the grid, but for the rest of the year, it's enough. That's big savings. Another friend lives in a passive solar house, and only had to fire up his heat for about 2 weeks this winter. And these are spacious houses with lots of windows and all the normal (power saving) appliances.
The thing about these techniques is; they're cost efective _now_, if you can aford the capital outlay. Your bills go down, and it pays for itself.
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Re:Cost ? (Score:5, Interesting)
I doubt the power monopolies are very happy about this though. If you can buy a machine that generates power, it will eventually put them out of business.
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Re:Cost ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I see this all the time. Please tell me why an alternative energy source has to be able to replace 100% of electricity to be viable? No, solar can't do it all. Neither can wind. Or hydro. Or geothermal. Or biofuel. Or nuclear. Or coal for that matter. But if we can get solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, nuclear and biofuel to each pick up 5% or 10% of our energy needs then there is a 25% to 50% reduction in fossil fuel consumption.
Every single
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alternative energies (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not as much a question of *IF* it helps when their is alternative energy available, but rather the amount it can replace - at least, when you are diosmantling (as happens in my country) nuclear powerplants that provide about 60% of the total power. This was due thanks to the pressure of the greens. No-one seemed to have wondered at that time, where that energy should come from in the future - apart from some nonsensical crap about windmills and the lot.
Ofcourse, it's plainly obvious that those won't do by a long stretch, so then it DOES become important to know how much it can replace. Solar can't do it, not even a tenth of the required energy. Neither can wind. Or hydro. Or geothermal. Or biofuel. And all taken together, they STILL wouldn't replace more then half of what is needed today, let alone in 5 years, when nuclear powerplants are shut down.
In fact, from your entire list, only two CAN have a reasonable chance of providing enough energy now and in the future; and those are nuclear and/or coal.
I think that's what ppl mean, when they say alternative energies are not real options as yet. Sure, anything that helps is welcome, but in any realistic viepoint, ALL of the above mentionned energysources - apart from nuclear and fossile fuels - even combined together will NOT be make more then a drop in the ever power-hungry ocean, at least in large parts of the western world.
I think the only real solution is fusion. But untill that because viable, the use of coal will rise, alternative energies will remain largely a fringe activity (at least on large scale demand) and closing down nuclear reactions without providing real alternatives remain political idiocies without equal in a socio-economic sense.
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Re:theory vs practicality (Score:5, Insightful)
We're talking about less than 1/2 of 1% of the total ocean area. Did anybody consider what would happen before we altered 25% or more of the total land area, or before we started harvesting 90% of the population of various ocean species? Why the sudden interest in side effects?
If the worst case global warming scenarios are correct and a lot of glaciers melt, the size of the oceans will be altered by much more than 0.5% anyway.
Here's my viewpoint: If you put collectors up over 0.5% of the ocean, you create side effects with that order of magnitude. If you release CO2, it continually accumulates in the atmosphere, and it hasn't been determined if natural processes will remove it in any reasonable amount of time. Some scientists predict that its level will double over pre-existing levels; that's a 100% increase in an important climactic variable. The side effects from our current activities will likely to be much greater than anything that would happen with solar collectors.
Will it not become a burden to the sea-routes and a danger to ships?
That's why it's good modern technology has brought us GPS, radar and RFID.
Who would be legally responsable? What if they are layed in international waters?
Some treaties would probably have to be created. Since they would involve something constructive, they would have a more positive tone than the proscriptive Kyoto treaty, and people would be more willing to participate. (We'll see if anybody actually abides by the Kyoto treaty when push comes to shove, or if it's all just talk.)
What is the cost of maintainance? How many will get wrecked by storms? Will it be economical viable?
Those are good questions. There are similar questions about fossil fuels, like would it be economically viable to dig thousands of wells from floating ocean platforms miles into the earth's crust. People did the hard work to find out, and the answer was yes. If people had given up just because the questions existed, we wouldn't have any energy supply today.
You mention wind power and wave power a lot. I agree that they won't ever add up to a large fraction of total energy supply, and that's because there is a limited supply of windy land area and shorelines. Solar collectors don't need to have that limitation. I'm all for fusion power too, but IMO its technical feasibility is currently even more questionable than my "crazy" proposal.
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Comprehensive EU plan for CSP in Sahara (Score:5, Informative)
The results of the EU ECOSTAR CSP program have just been released at a workshop held last thursday in Brussels. The 140-page report can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.dlr.de/ecostar. CSP power stations occupying an area the size of France in the Sahara, using available technology, can produce the current total energy consumption of the whole world.
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Re:Is single-sourcing all of our energy desirable? (Score:5, Interesting)
A set of Solar Panels on the roof of a house (or rather some solar thermal water heater) cannot replace all the gas that a house needs. But it CAN reduct your enegy bill considerably. My dad has a setup like that on our roof and he got a visit from the utilities who thought he has mucked around with the meter. Not so, a few simply black sets of pipies pre heated the water which helped reduce the electicity bill.
I work in a building which (admittedly with the help of a solar research institute) has reduced its energy consumption by 65% by good use of isolation and glazing. I might add that this is in Germany, not exactly the sunniest place in the world, so it works in more northern climes too.
The key here is local power generation and better isolation of the building instead of massive central power stations. For instance, the people in the previous article moans that a notebook cannot be powered by it. No, maybe not. But those cells might increase the duration of your battery by an hour or two and that is useful in itself. Because you get more out of your notebook and reduce consumption of fossil/nuclear powered electricity.
Most solar research does not deal with PV in any case, it deals with better isolation and solar thermal (concentrated rays and such) to reduce reliance on other energy sources.
Anone wants to know more about Solar please visit
ISES [ises.org].
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Re:Is single-sourcing all of our energy desirable? (Score:5, Insightful)
Secondly, cost effectiveness is not just what the power company can do. Remember my power company puts out a little pie chart telling me how much my electricity costs and why.
35% generation
3% Transmission
62% Distribution
If we build solar cells in our own homes at our own costs, we negate the transmission and distribution costs. All we need to do is generate enough to cover our homes/office buildings etc and we have a 65% automatic head start on the power company. Lets build our own infrastructure shall we?
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Re:Is single-sourcing all of our energy desirable? (Score:5, Informative)
They don't have the problems of past low power bulbs. They don't blink. I've never noticed a blink rate, and I've been reading by them for 4 years. They do take 20-45seconds to get to full output. A 60-watt rated bulb (actually 15 or so watts) starts out at what I would say is 40-watt equivalent light, but it gets up to full in less than a minute. That's great, if you need more than 40W incandescent-equivalent light, you're going to have the light on for more than 20 seconds, so don't anyone think about complaining about that.
Everyone that hears me should go out and buy these for their homes. I don't mean to sound demanding. I sincerely desire to know what would be a good reason not to use them, because I can't find one.
These bulbs are sold as long-lasting, or cost-saving, but they need to instead be sold as environmentally friendly, and as using 75% less fossil feuls while their on, 75% less CO2 created, etc, etc.
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Re:Cost ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Avg. solar radiation is surprisingly uniform. Sure, the southwest is higher, but it's at most 2x anywhere else in the U.S.
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Re:Cost ? (Score:5, Interesting)
This peak demand electricity is the costliest to produce. That's when you bust out the natural gas turbines, and start running your boilers and reactors at full tilt. A field of solar cells, at the right price, would really lower the cost of delivering electricity during these peak times.
I recall a news story a few years ago about a resident in my home town (Philly) who outfitted his roof with solar cells. All of his appliances were DC powered, and during some seasons of the year his meter flowed backward; he was producing more power than he was pulling off the grid.
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Re:Cost ? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Cost ? (Score:5, Funny)
Shhh!
Don't tell the plants. If they find out that sunlight is impractical as a power source, we'll be in a real pickle, a real pickle, I tell ya'
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Per Square _inch_? (Score:5, Insightful)
Something seems fishy about this. Isn't the amount of sunlight hitting the earth only about a KW per sq. M?
Re:Per Square _inch_? (Score:4, Informative)
Jeroen
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Re:Per Square _inch_? (Score:4, Informative)
6 kilowatts per square meter? That's a 'you must be on crack' figure.
Here [uoregon.edu] are some actual numbers:
Note that that's *peak*. Averaged over, say, a year, which includes periods where the sun doesn't shine at all ("night"), as well as periods where it's not high noon on a cloudless day, and average insolation falls quite a bit. This site [apricus-solar.com] claims a yearly average for central Australia of 5.89 kilowatt-hours per meter per day, which (if my conversion is right), breaks down to an *average* insolation of 245 watts. So just flat-out double that to get rid of the night time, and you're getting an average value of about 500 watts in one of the sunniest, hottest places on the planet.
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Some basic math (Score:5, Insightful)
There are 1550 square inches in 1 square meter. Even if there was (optimistic) 6 KW/sq meter of sunlight hitting the Earth, you'd only have 3.9 watts per square inch.
So their claim of over 100+ Watts per square inch is obviously an error. I don't think they'd even claim that since it doesn't even come close.
They also claim that their panels are 12% efficient, so a more realistic figure would be 1 KW of sunlight per square meter, equalling about
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Re:Per Square _inch_? [THAT'S CORRECT] (Score:5, Funny)
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Metric Conversion and Stonehenge (Score:4, Funny)
This sounds like the kind of mistake made by somebody who's used to working with the metric system writing down the wrong name for unfamiliar foreign antique measurement systes, rather like most of us tend to misread things measured in pecks per square furlong or whatever.
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Two lousy links for nanosolar (Score:5, Insightful)
Let the fun begin! (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFA (Score:5, Funny)
These are probably dye-sensitized semiconductors (Score:5, Informative)
From what I read on the website: nanostructured materials, estimated lifetime of 25 years, made of "nontoxic semiconductor paint" suggests that it is about dye-sensitized solar cells [google.com]. These are based on small TiO2 particles, the same that is used as a pigment in white paint. These do not absorb visible light by themselves, but can catch and transport electrons from certain light-absorbing dyes. These solar cells were invented around 15 years ago; the necessary components of such a solar cell, TiO2, dye, solvents, sandwiched between two glass plates, are relatively cheap, but the yield is still below 10% (sunlight power to electrical power).
Apparently, this company has found a way to mass-produce cells based on this principle using plastic films instead of glass. The glass was the most expensive component; the problem with plastic films is that it is hard to make them last a long time while still being impermeable to oxygen and the liquid solvent inside the cell.
Re:These are probably dye-sensitized semiconductor (Score:4, Interesting)
I think this is the main problem with solar cells. Until someone comes up with an effecient dye based on a more abundant metal there is no possible way that solar cells can become ubiquitous.
Though it is unclear from the site what sort of dyes this company is using -- perhaps they have found a new one. Though i suspect if they had it would be all over their site. I gather, rather, that they are just using the "nano" buzzword to make their stuff sound new and cool. Oh well.
OH, by the way i am not a solar cell scientist -- but i do work down the hall from a few. Cool.
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Doesn't look like a scam... (Score:5, Informative)
I think these guys are for real.
Check out their news page (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.nanosolar.com/articles.htm [nanosolar.com]
They've got government contracts, funding out the wazoo, etc. They're not just a garage shop with fancy website.
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The energy industry is not a meritocracy (Score:4, Insightful)
Exciting.. Where Do I Sign? (Score:5, Interesting)
However if it is indeed true, it should not be a huge surprise. The cost of solar has been falling in recent years.
I did speak to a solar firm about putting in enough to run my house ( 69 kwh/month ) the cost to install was going to be around 75,000 dollars, and in my area electricity is still to cheap to justify the cost.
However if I can install at this super low 5 cents/kwh, I just might bite the bullet. That is roughly 2 cents/kwh cheaper than my utility sells juice for!
Good article!
Grain of Salt (Score:5, Funny)
The reference is to a grain of salt because, with just a grain of salt, one wouldn't eat much of what's being served.
To take something with a dose of salt "the size of the Hope Diamond", well, one could conceivably eat the whole thing -- wait for it... -- hook, line and sinker.
Re:Grain of Salt (Score:5, Informative)
Most peole believe that the grain of salt is the antidote to the mistruth. The true meaning is lost in the mists of time so you might be right or they might be.
According to Word detective [word-detective.com]:
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Snake Oil? Snake Oil? They have pictures (Score:5, Funny)
Heard it all before! (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I *am* a fan of nuclear energy; the economic case is only poor because the clean-up requirements are absurdly expensive - considering that coal-fired plants spew an order of magnitude more radioactive fallout across the countryside.
Still too expensive (Score:5, Interesting)
Anything much more than that without ample tax incentives (and maybe not even then) just isn't going to happen on a large scale.
Well... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.nanosolar.com/pr2.htm [nanosolar.com]
$30 / square meter? (Score:5, Interesting)
Breaking News: Attorney General Declares ... (Score:4, Funny)
Also, the AG has written the binding opinion that anyone trying to exploit technology supposed developed by NanoSolar, Inc. would be open to physical coersion up to and probably including limb removal that would not legally be considered to be torture.
Go about your business. Nothing to see here.
It's all about funding (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot needs Science Editors (Score:4, Insightful)
Taking care of some things in one post. (Score:5, Informative)
OK, since this is a solar photovoltaics post:
Someone is going to claim that solar will never be practical, because it is 10 - 15% efficient, while internal combustion, etc. is 30%+. Please, consider that you have to *buy the energy* that goes into that 30% efficienct machine, while the 15% efficient solar panel gets it all free - then run the numbers. The only cost that matters is the dollars per Watt capital cost of the cells upfront (which is still too high, but coming down.)
Someone is going to claim that solar panels produce less energy over their lives than it takes to manufacture them. This has not been true for about 40 years. [energy.gov]
Someone is going to claim that solar panels are a toxic danger to human health. Please consider that they are manufactured using identical processes to microprocessors, are easier to disassemble for recycling, and last 20 - 30 years plus, as compared to the five year or so length for most consumer electronics.
Someone is going to claim that solar only makes sense in certain parts of the United States. Keep in mind that, for instance, Albany, NY gets 80% of the solar radiation of Reno, NV. Since you pay twice as much for electricity in Albany, solar panels actually make more sense there. (Remember, most solar panels go on rooftops and spin meters backwards - you get retail price ($.08 - $.15 / kWh,) not wholesale ($.02-$.04) like a power plant.
Someone is going to claim you would have to blanket the desert with solar panels to make a workable power plant. Is this what you do with a distributed, smart, resource, that can occupy unused roof space anywhere? Did we take all of our microchips and assemble them into one giant supercomputer in the desert? Solar panels belong in a distributed network of generators - at the end of the wire, and putting them there is cheap and practical.
Someone is going to claim the solar industry can never meet real-world power demands. Check any industry publication for an interesting statistic - in 1996, 100 megawatts of solar were manufactured. Jan - Dec. 2004 saw about 1100 MW (about $ 6 billion worth) manufactured. Still pretty small, but an amazing growth rate.
What does solar cost now? About 1/20 what it did in the 1970s, but still about twice as much as grid electricity. Once you buy the panels, and finance them with, say, a home equity loan, you're looking at $.18 - $.25 /kWh. Getting closer every year, but still not quite there.
Finally, a comment on the article. Yeah, Nanosolar is pretty neat, but I think that Konarka [konarkatech.com] is quite a bit further along - and doesn't share nanosolar's tendency to overpromise. Here's what needs to happen. Their efficiency is fine, don't care - a 5% or 10% efficient cell, as long as it's less than $1.50 / Watt, the world will beat a path to your door. However, their longevity is not there. A normal silicon solar panel lasts at least 20 years, these things last more like 5 right now. Hence their strategy of putting them in consumer electronics that have about that lifetime anyway.To be a real power generation source, they need to get that lifetime up by a factor of 4 - doable with the right encapsulants, some chemistry, getting rid of liquid electrolytes, etc. I bet one of these poeple will be at $.10 / kWh in five years - but the conventional silicon cells can probably get there in about 8, with manufacturing and scale improvements. So it's a real race...we'll see who pulls it out.
There's a patent: #6,852,920 (Score:5, Informative)
First, by "manufactured by printing", they don't mean a roll to roll process like a printing press. They propose to deposit materials with an inkjet-like mechanism.
Second, what they call "nanotechnology" is surface chemistry. There are ways to make semi-regular structures by bulk chemical means, and that's what they're doing. They did throw a reference to "bioengineered self-assembly" in, but that's not how they do it. The processing looks much more like processes you'd do in a wafer fab. There are common fab processes like electrodeposition, chemical removal of support substrates, and heating in an inert atmosphere.
The basic idea is to address the reasons that solar cells are inefficient. In bulk materials like silicon, only a small fraction of the photons do anything useful. Most of the photons are at the wrong wavelength. And many of the photon interactions that do occur don't result in an electron being delivered to the output. They're trying to fix both of those problems.
Their policy seems to be to shut up until it works. It might work, or it might not. They're not selling stock, and they're not issuing press releases. They have VC funding and some money from DARPA.
Dose of Salt... why post? (Score:4, Funny)
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