Sustainable Design Update

Nanosolar Powersheet

Nanosolar Powersheet, a very thin film solar panel has won the Popular Science Innovation of the Year award. The technology uses no expensive silicon and the production process is so efficient that it can make solar cells for about 30 cents per watt, or about one tenth of the cost of making traditional solar cells.

The incredibly low costs are achieved by using a printing press style machine to deposit a layer of solar absorbing “ink” on thin rolled metal sheeting. In addition to low costs, the process is also fast, making several hundred feet per minute.

Backing Nanosolar is funding from Google’s founders and the U.S. Department of Energy.

From PopSci:

Cost has always been one of solar’s biggest problems. Traditional solar cells require silicon, and silicon is an expensive commodity (exacerbated currently by a global silicon shortage). What’s more, says Peter Harrop, chairman of electronics consulting firm IDTechEx, “it has to be put on glass, so it’s heavy, dangerous, expensive to ship and expensive to install because it has to be mounted.” And up to 70 percent of the silicon gets wasted in the manufacturing process. That means even the cheapest solar panels cost about $3 per watt of energy they go on to produce. To compete with coal, that figure has to shrink to just $1 per watt.

Nanosolar’s cells use no silicon, and the company’s manufacturing process allows it to create cells that are as efficient as most commercial cells for as little as 30 cents a watt. “You’re talking about printing rolls of the stuff—printing it on the roofs of 18-wheeler trailers, printing it on garages, printing it wherever you want it,” says Dan Kammen, founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. “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.”

In San Jose, Nanosolar has built what will soon be the world’s largest solar-panel manufacturing facility. CEO Martin Roscheisen claims that once full production starts early next year, it will create 430 megawatts’ worth of solar cells a year—more than the combined total of every other solar plant in the U.S. The first 100,000 cells will be shipped to Europe, where a consortium will be building a 1.4-megawatt power plant next year.

Via: PopSci

Nanosolar

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Energy, Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.