Well, it’s time to do something about the neglected
exterior and roof of the old homestead. I figure I have three
choices: re-stain the wood, put up aluminum siding, or cover the whole
dang homestead in solar panels. Choices! I hate choices.
My bosom is rent with conflict.
“Whoa, wait a minute... solar panels? Are you
nuts? You got money coming out your ears?” My internal dialog,
the sentient keeper-of-the-gate subconscious mind kicks in.
“The whole dang homestead? You get some rest.
I’ll take over the thinking.”
“Why not, solar panels?” I argue right back with
confidence.
It’s a rare day when I know something that my
subconscious hasn’t figured out yet. Even rarer is the day when I
can torture it with “I know something you don’t know!
Thhhppppwwt!” And just for the heck of it, I expound further, "I’ll
do the north facing side too!”
I then abate the growing subconscious anxiety by
giving it something to do: “You figure out what to do with all that
electricity.”
“Grrr!” The low growl echoes deep within my otherwise
empty cranium clearly spelling some upcoming internal turmoil for me.
Lunacy at best, but that’s how my internal dialog goes sometimes.
Nevertheless, I’ve been waiting for that long-promised $3.00 per watt
solar panel price for over a decade now. It seems lately that the
solar tide has shifted into reverse and solar has become an even more
expensive option than it was five years ago. But what would you say
to $0.99 per watt? That’s not a decimal error, 99 cents a watt!
Dream-weaver? Living on another planet? Attacking the cooking
sherry again? Not the case, I assure you. Especially if
Nanosolar, Inc. comes through with their hefty promise, this could be a
reality. Solar panels ...cheaper than milk! We could be seeing
solar panels rolling off the presses at under a dollar a watt by this time
next year. Check it out (message for the subconscious here) at
www.nanosolar.com.
And I do mean literally “off the presses." The
innovative folks at Nanosolar have developed a newspaper style pressing
operation that uses a high-tech nanoparticle-based semiconductor ink that
is “printed” right onto a conductive, flexible foil substrate.
Entire cell structures, minus the outside world contacts, appear to be
fabricated in a single operation on one big, long roll of something akin
to Reynolds Wrap as it weaves its way through a mass of rollers and
through what looks to be the ultimate Chamber of Surprise. The
printed structure
ejects from the novel printer, sandwiches with other
device components and is then rolled up like a drum on rollers just like
the newspapers did for Clark Kent at the Daily Planet. The extremely
thin film deposition process is without expensive vacuum chambers and
utilizes printing technology capable of deposition rates on the order of
25 miles per day! Contrast that with typical growth rates employed for
photovoltaic (PV) silicon crystals which are measured in inches per day.
Yikes! That’s progress.
In fact, says Nanosolar, first shipments have already
been made in Europe. “It really is quite a big deal in terms of
altering the way we think about solar and in inherently altering the
economics of solar,” says Dan Kammen, founding director of the Renewable
and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at
Berkeley.
With a new factory located in San Jose, California
and another in Germany, plus substantial funding already in their pockets,
Nanosolar stands ready to deliver on their hefty promise. They
project an annual capacity of 430 megawatts (MW) of solar panel production
per year when fully operational; it will churn out about 200 million cells
per year. Contrast that with the silicon industry’s throughput at
the beginning of this decade of around 200 MW per year.
At the heart of the Nanosolar technology is a
non-silicon absorber material, Copper Indium Gallium Diselenide (CIGS) or
Cu (In,Ga) Se2 for you purists out there. Employing a non-silicon
based semiconductor ironically produced in the very bosom of California’s
Silicon Valley, Nanosolar is well-poised to start a solar cell war the
likes of which we have not seen in the west since the sheep/cattle range
wars of yesteryear. It can only be good for consumers.
In any case, Nanosolar’s goal is to make PV solar
energy conversion more economically attractive than coal. That means
a final module product priced in at less than one dollar per watt.
Can it be done? They think so and state a present cost of $0.30 per
watt making a market price of $0.99 a clear reality, at least for the
first shipments. Alas, Nanosolar has already stated that the entire
2008 year’s capacity is already spoken for. Consumers will have to
wait until 2009 to see if “cheaper than milk” solar energy is a reality.
On the positive side, at least some bugs should be worked out by then.
Three If’s:
Clearly the Nanosolar group has come up with some
innovative ideas and, according to the press releases, has been able to
realize a pilot-plant scale of operation. The next step is to scale
the baby-fresh technology to a production scale capable of meeting their
stated throughput and cost goals. Bear in mind that this has never
been an easy or straightforward path in the semiconductor industry.
Never! Things just don’t scale linearly as they should. And if
Nanosolar’s technology, as they imply with their name and the nanoparticle
nature of the semiconductor ink, is truly on the nanometer scale of things
(one billionth of a meter or one billionth of 39 inches), it’s getting
darn close to bumping up against some rather strange quantum effects.
And in the quantum world, even physicists admit they’ve lost touch with
reality.
While on the subject of reality, with regard to
Nanosolar’s dawn of a new solar, three big reality if’s come to mind that
bare heavily on the future of mankind:
• If the inked-on solar panels produce the claimed output without
significant photo degradation, delamination or other “after production”
calamity (see “The Staebler-Wronski Affair”)...
• If production can be uniformly sustained at, or close to, the levels
stated in the press releases (i.e. 430 megawatts or so)...
• If the price per watt ultimately lands below $1/watt i.e. less than the
price associated with today’s coal fired energy production...
THEN...
Nanosolar will go down in history as having
revolutionized not just the terrestrial solar PV industry, but perhaps the
future development of mankind! This will be a radical shift, a
quantum leap; Nanosolar will have done to energy production technology
what Einstein, Max Plank, and a few others did for physics, and the way we
look at the world, in the early 1900’s. It’s history in the making
and we, the lucky first consumers, the beta testers, are pioneers standing
here today and looking down on the very cusp of before and after.
But whoa there, a sense of déjà vu slips over me.
I swear I have traveled this path before. In 1931, Bruno Lange’s
solar battery aroused quite a stir: “In the not to distant future,”
ejaculated Bruno, “huge plants will employ thousands of these plates
[solar batteries] to transform sunlight into electric power.” His
vision of replacing huge hydroelectric plants with roomfuls of solar
batteries never happened. Later, when I was a little Hellion of 5,
my grandmother read to me (this wonderful woman would bring me books and
newspapers when I was only old enough to chew on them) the 1954 New York
Times article espousing Bell Labs scientists Daryl Chapman, Calvin Fuller,
and Gerald Pearson’s device that used the sun to drive a toy Ferris wheel
and powered an FM radio (yes FM, yes 1954). Said the NY Times,
“...[the solar powered Ferris wheel] may mark the beginning of a new era,
[sound familiar?] leading eventually to the realization of one of
mankind’s most cherished dreams - the harnessing of the almost limitless
energy of the sun for the uses of civilization.” Well, it didn’t,
the idea fizzled, and had it not been for the space race, solar technology
would have been remained as useful to consumers as a rubber-band engine on
a Buick.
