I made a lot of comments on Solar energy and related topics in the last few months. This is my attempt to pull them together so they are easy to access instead of spread out among several articles.
Feb 14, 2008: First Solar Financial results:
First Solar just announced their fourth quarter results. Sales for the quarter are almost four times as high as fourth quarter last year--over $200 million, which is impressive. Do that for four quarters and you're very close to a billion dollar company. Also impressive, they claim that their current cost of production is $1.12 per watt (down 12% from last year).
That impresses me more than Nanosolar's claim of under $1 per watt at a profit because First Solar's cells have been in production for over a year and have a track record. Nanosolar's numbers are lower, but they are still just claims until the company actually gets to full production later this year. That isn't to say they are wrong. They're just not proven yet.
First Solar makes thin film Cadmium-Telluride cells, a slightly different technology than Nanosolar's CIGS. As to what their price at retail is I don't know. In extremely large quantities (over 500 megawatts) I think the price is under $2 per watt. That's still not as cheap as coal, (if you don't count the environmental costs of coal) but it is getting pretty close.
The First Solar press release on their 4th quarter earnings is here. I figured out that prices for very large buys would be under $2 per watt from the press release here.
Feb 5, 2008: The Pentagon's Solar Cell Project:
Ironically, the solar effort that I think has the most potential at the moment has been almost ignored--maybe because it is an initiative aimed primarily at the tactical requirements of the Iraq war.
We're approximately halfway through a DARPA fast-track (50 months) initiative to get 50% efficient solar cells ready for production. One of the groups involved in that initiative is already at 42.8% efficiency in the lab, with a technique that appears to be producible without a lot of manufacturing breakthroughs.
Basically they concentrate the sunlight 20 times, then split the beam into three parts and direct each of those parts onto a part of the solar cell optimized for that part of the solar spectrum. That sounds a lot more complicated than Nanosolar's 'print it like newspaper' approach, but it has the advantage of potentially being 4 to 5 times as efficient or more. That means that you can get the same energy in 20 to 25% of the space. I suspect that both approaches will find their niches. If you could get 500 watts per square meter of solar cell, that's useful in a lot of mobile applications that lower efficiency solar can't handle.
Here's a link
Feb 4, 2008: The Political Implications of a Growing Solar Power Industry:
I'm wondering how the politics of all of this will play out. Unless things go haywire in a major way very soon, within three or four years there will be several US-based solar companies with over a billion in annual sales. That's not in the same league as Exxon and company, but it's big enough to start having a political impact. If several of those billion dollar solar cell companies are very profitable that would amplify the political impact a bit more.
The interests of a tiny solar cell industry can be ignored. A big one is a different story. The interests of that industry and the public interest may or may not always be the same thing, especially as companies get bigger. As they get big enough, some of them will almost certainly start trying to push policies that would make it more difficult for new stuff coming out of the labs from startups to get a foothold. On the whole, though I suspect that having more of a counterbalance to the money that oil companies are throwing at the political process is going to be a good thing.
Nanosolar is partly funded by some of the people behind Google, so expect some of the same somewhat unorthodox policies that you get from Google. I would love it if that included a commitment to research into the fundamentals of material science. The country really needs good paying jobs in practical science applications of physics and chemistry.
Feb 4, 2008: Solar Power Growing Fast (Evergreen Solar & Nanosolar):
It just amazes me how much additional solar cell capacity is in the pipeline. Evergreen Solar has a process where they make 'ribbons' of solar cell, which cuts down on waste from cutting the ingot. In any case, promising tech. They just announced their financial results. I think their currently at about 30 to 60 Megawatts of annual production. They're planning to expand to
"...approximately 125 MW in 2009, 300 MW in 2010, 600 MW in 2011 and 850 MW in 2012."
So somewhat over 10-fold in four or five years. If they can pull it off that's impressive. Unfortunately a drop in the bucket compared to electric demand, but still impressive in terms of the scale of ramping up.
By the way, Nanosolar has already sold the first 18 months of their production. No lack of demand there. I wounder what they're actually charging per watt. I'm guessing it isn't $1 per watt. Probably $3.50 or $4. That still undercuts the market price considerably and gives them cash to expand once they get the current factory working at the rated capacity.
If Nanosolar can sell profitably at $1 per watt, why wouldn't they? I believe that what Nanosolar has said is that they can make cells profitably at $1 per watt, not that they were going to initially sell them at that price. They're a for-profit company, which means they are likely to sell their product at a price that will maximize their profits. If they could sell their product profitably at $1/watt but actually sell it for 3 or 4 times that they are able to pay back their initial investor quicker, or expand more quickly without going more deeply into debt (raising capital from outside the company), or pour more money into R&D.
Price is usually a matter of supply and demand. There is an almost unlimited demand for solar cells at $1/watt. Nanosolar can make no more than 430 megawatts of them per year. If Nanosolar sells their solar cells at $1/watt they are leaving million of dollars on the table. As a for-profit company their goal is to set their price at the highest level at which they know they can sell the 430 Megawatts they are currently producing. Since current solar cells are priced at a little under $5/watt, going to $3.50 or $4 essentially guarantees that they can sell all of the cells that they can make.
Let's say they price their cells at $1/watt. They end up moderately profitable with sales of $430 million. If they price them for $4 watt, they end up with sales of over $1.7 billion, with over a billion dollars to help them expand, increase R&D, and repay the venture capitalists that bankrolled them. I can't imagine a businessman not pricing to maximize profit. Why leave a billion dollars on the table?
Feb 3, 2008: DC Power For Homes, Solar Power For Truckers:
You know, I have no clue how you could implement this given our current infrastructure, but given the number of things in a household that ultimately use direct current it might almost make sense to have a central "power supply" that converts AC to DC and then just use that to power the appliances that need DC, rather than having a whole slew of cheap, inefficient power supplies that do the conversion for each appliance.
Hmmm. If you could convert rooms or whole houses to run on DC that might make solar on the roof considerably more affordable. Right now you have to take the DC power from the solar cells (or more likely the battery pack), convert it into AC, with considerable losses, then convert it back to DC to run all of the appliances that ultimately run on DC.
There are DC versions of just about every appliance imaginable, mainly for remote cabins and the like, but they usually cost an arm and a leg because they are specialty items. Oddly enough, there are a lot of small DC appliances in truck-stop-type gas stations. Truck drivers power them off of the cigarette-lighter--sometimes with little inserts that allow them to plug in two or three things at a time.
You know, I would think truck drivers and maybe RV owners would be a ready market for solar power. While they're on the road they are really using the equivalent of a generator to power anything they use in that cigarette lighter, and I'm guessing that by the time you use the engine to create power (probably AC), convert it to DC, store it in the battery, then send it to your appliance that power is probably more expensive than power from a solar panel would be.
Feb 2, 2008: LED Lighting & Lights That Go Out on Their Own:
Here is a quote from New Scientist on a new type of LED light that is giving great results in the lab:
"The final LEDs were also efficient, giving off more than 300 lumens of light per watt of power going in. Commercial white LEDs only provide about 30 lumens per watt because phosphor scatters much of the light and is less efficient at converting the blue LED's output into visible light.
By comparison, off-the-shelf compact fluorescents provide about 60 lumens per watt and traditional incandescent bulbs a measly 15 lumens per watt, with most energy dissipated as heat."
There is still a LOT of work to do to get those things from the lab to manufacturing, but when you figure that lighting if around 25% of our electrical power use, that's got a lot of potential.
By the way: Every once in a while if you look for it you'll see a very unique type of light bulb at Menards. The bulbs automatically turn off after 30 minutes. If you want them to go longer, just flip the switch off and back on, and they'll stay on for two hours. What does that do? If you have a teenager in the house and they are forever going to the attic or basement and leaving lights on these bulbs take care of that problem.
Kind of a sad story there. A little company apparently produced the chips that do all of this as an add-on. If I got the story right, they talked Phillips into incorporating the chips into Phillips bulbs probably 10 years ago. Big breakthrough for a little company. Right, except that no one knew quite how to market a bulb that had as a selling point the fact that it went out after 30 minutes. Phillips apparently made a slew of them, sold them to Menards, who had no clue how to sell them either, but every once in a while someone inside of Menards will think they can unload the things, and so they'll show up at prices lower than ordinary light bulbs.
I think that the company that designed them probably went belly-up because with all of the unsold bulbs in the channel they couldn't sell any new ones. Tat's really too bad because they had some very cool stuff in the works, including bulbs wiht motion sensors built in so when you walk into the room the light comes on. When you leave it goes out. No hardware required outside of the bulb. You can still do that with an external do-hickey that you screw into the light socket, but incorporating it into the bulb is very cool.
Feb 2, 2008: My older Solar articles:
Before I get into the new posts, I think people might be interested in some of the stuff I've posted on energy, solar power, and global warming over the last several months. Since we can't feature stuff on our Gather homepages I had to organize this stuff on my other website, and then link back to the Gather stuff. In any case, click here to check it out.
recommend this
email
print
link to this page
Comments: 2
Interesting about the light bulbs - a bit of decent marketing could've made a huge difference couldn't it.