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The world of Alternative Energy is full of the words “might, maybe and possibly”. I wanted to sift out the research purists to focus on those things that are going to impact us in the next five years; the year I will retire. I want my next home to be green but my current choices seem to be either non-starters financially or just too trivial to bother with. I want someone to fix the problem in the next 5 years so I can implement it in my next home. The first company about to make a splash is NanoSolar NanoSolar just opened a factory in California that manufactures a new type of solar cell. This is the first cell I am aware of not to use Silicon. The problem with Silicon is that it is getter scarcer and is therefore relatively expensive. It is brittle and the yield in manufacturing for solar cells is very low. It doesn’t make sense to build a strategy around a scarce material. Manufacturing yield in NanoSolar’s new process is very high and the process itself is like printing onto aluminum foil. Thin film cells are literally printed onto a long roll of foil. The company is forecasting the price of cells to be about one tenth of the Silicon cell. Now we are getting somewhere. I suspect this will bring pressure on the energy storage guys to come up with better solutions. The company estimates annual production capability at this new plant worth 430 Megawatts of energy producing capability. Most homes will use less than 10,000 watts so that one factory can power around 43,000 homes by my math. They will need more factories. Another way to gauge a company is by the investors. The guys who invented Google are invested in the company. This is no hole in the wall operation and even better; shipments begin this year from their new factory. NanoSolar is currently field-testing their product and signing up integrators for installation. Goodbye Silicon. Comments3 Comments so far |
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This is very exciting, but I’m surprised Silicon is scarce. I thought (and I’d be the first to admit I’m wrong) that Silicon was a very common element in Earth’s crust. Quartz is silicon dioxide, after all, and I thought sand had a pretty high amount of silicon in it. What wouldn’t surprise me is if the Silicon is hard to extract from those sources. Quartz, after all, would make a really bad solar cell and sand wouldn’t be much better. What are NanoSolar’s cells made of, though? Maybe I’m better off not knowing. I’d have looked for a cheaper way to extract Silicon, but obviously the NanoSolar engineers took a different, smarter direction. And the important thing is it puts you closer to your dream.
Actually there are serious inaccuracies here. The most glaring is the assertion that silicon is scarce. It is in fact one of the most abundant elements on earth. The scarcity comes from purified silicon- a temporary bottleneck that’s easily corrected when new manufacturing plants come on line to meet demand (and they are)
Thanks for the comments guys. Of course the real issue is in lifetime costs of an installation and the resulting payback. Hopefully that will become clearer. Another unknown is the life of this product. Hopefully both will be positive outcomes. Only time will tell.