Solar is continuing to sizzle, with new markets and technologies emerging despite economic woes. Unfortunately, however, the high costs of large-scale solar installations have put a slight damper on building bigger plants. But home and small business users are taking advantage of newer solar technologies that can be had at affordable prices. Flexible thin-film photovoltaic (PV) cells can be used to collect power from the sun at a much lower cost than other technologies.
Slimmer Panels = Cheaper Panels
Thin-film solar panels work in the same way that regular solar panels do, but since they are much slimmer, they require less materials and energy for construction and are therefore much cheaper. The technology involves putting extremely thin films of PV material onto a thin layer of backing. This is made possible through several means, one of which is solar ink. A PV material is dissolved into a solution and that can then be printed into ink. Solar ink means that PV material can be printed onto thin layers of plastic, metal, or fabric allowing for the mass production of solar panels at high speeds and lower costs. Several companies, including Nansolar, are taking hold of the growing market for solar cells.
Nanosolar developed thin-film printed solar cells with high levels of efficiency in 2006. The U.S. Department of Energy awarded $20 million to the Nanosolar in 2007, and last year, the company's thin-film solar panels-which roll off an assembly line as opposed to being baked in batches-were selected as one of Time magazine's top 50 inventions.
Residential panels on the way!
Currently Nanosolar is targeting small municipal solar power plants. CEO Martin Roscheisen, said he believes that by outfitting utilities first, it will ultimately benefit residential customers searching for lower-priced solar solutions. In a blog, Roscheisen wrote, "To all of you who are disappointed that our first product is not for residential homeowners, we can reassure you that we do have a fabulous residential solution on our near-term roadmap-one that will bring the utility scale economics of Nanosolar Utility Panel...technology to homes everywhere and completely redefine how residential solar is done."
More specifically, Nanosolar ‘s idea is to build municipal solar power plants, two to ten megawatts in size, on the outskirts of small cities than could feed directly into the municipal power grid. These lots, consisting of several rows of rail-mounted solar panels, would provide up to two megawatts that would be enough to serve 1,000 homes. The small plant approach has been widely implemented throughout Europe and Asia.
Industry Expansion
Growing demand for clean energy has resulted in a dramatic increase in demand for solar cells. The inks used for the PV market are highly engineered to efficiently collect solar energy. Other solar tech companies in the printed solar cell market include United Solar Ovonic, Global Solar, First Solar, Konarka, Solopower, HelloVolt, Daystar, and Evergreen Solar. First Solar will add 500,000 square feet to its manufacturing and R&D facility in Perrysberg, Ohio, and Global Solar recently moved into its 1,000,000 square-foot factory in Tucson, AZ.
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Under an Indian Sun: Solar Industry Bright in India
It's Curtains for Solar Power: Nanotechnology Brings Solar Power to Fabrics
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The energy used to manufacture photovoltaics has always been a big limit to their growth. Most current stuff takes around 10 years to pay back the energy input. The impact of that is that if you want to switch over, say, 2% of electricity to PV in a year you'd have to generate an extra 20% electricity during that year. That severely limits what the industry can produce.
To make any meaningful headway means you'd first have to build more conventional coal fired plants to build enough generation capacity to make PV.... which defeats the purpose.
Much of the cost of generating a regular PV is direct energy cost. There has been a lot of talk about manufacturing scale significantly reducing the cost of regular PV, but that is limited by the cost of energy going in.
No matter what incentives or subsidies you give to a technology like that, it just does not provide a meaningful outcome.
The only way to make headway with PV is to have a significant change in technology that requires vastly less energy input and thin film PV looks like it could achieve that.
Written in May 2009