The Age Of The Sun
By Ron Beasley
I was not a big fan of solar power until a heard about Nanosolar about six months ago. I reported on it here. Nanosolar has developed a process to print thin film solar cells instead of using the slow and expensive vacuum deposition process. As a result they can produce panels for solar installations that $2.00 a watt making it cheaper than $2.10 a watt plus fuel for a new coal fired plant. Check the above links for additional details.
Well via Big Gav we find out that Nanosolar has reached an amazing production level.
As we are busy ramping our operation, we almost forgot to recognize achieving a major milestone in solar technology: The solar industry’s first 1GW production tool. Here it is:
Most production tools in the solar industry tend to have 10-30MW in annual production capacity. How is it possible to have a single tool with Gigawatt throughput?
This feat is fundamentally enabled through the proprietary nanoparticle ink we have invested so many years developing. It allows us to deliver efficient solar cells (presently up to more than 14%) that are simply printed.
Printing is a simple, fast, and robust coating process that in particular eliminates the need for expensive high-vacuum chambers and the kinds of high-vacuum based deposition techniques from industries where there’s a lot more $/sqm available for competitive manufacturing cost.
Our 1GW CIGS coater cost $1.65 million. At the 100 feet-per-minute speed shown in the video, that’s an astonishing two orders of magnitude more capital efficient than a high-vacuum process: a twenty times slower high-vacuum tool would have cost about ten times as much per tool.
Plus if we cared to run it even faster, we could. (The same coating technique works in principle for speeds up to 2000 feet-per-minute too. In fact, it turns out the faster we run, the better the coating!)
Nanostar received no US government funding and much of their current production is going to Germany.
I heard that all of the production for the next 2 years was going overseas. What a shame.
Posted by: pwapvt | June 27, 2008 at 07:40 AM