Better Than Printing Money?

EDN Magazine reports on a new technology for making solar cells. Printing them.

This week, Nanosolar put up a video of its 1GW (in annual production) solar ink coating machine, which the company says costs $1.65M. The coater, which works in a normal factory environment, and coats metal film with a proprietary ink based on a Copper-Indium-Gallium-Diselenide (CIGS) compound, is just a continuous-process printing machine, and is inherently cheaper and simpler than traditional silicon wafer deposition processes used in today’s photovoltaic cells. True, the efficiency of the Nanosolar technology is less: 14% compared to ~25% silicon wafer efficiency. But 14% is still very practical.

So, in essence you have a machine you pay $1.65M for and feed in CIGS ink and metal foil, and at the end of the year you have produced 1GW worth of thin-film solar cells which you sell for about $1/W, or about $1B worth of product. Yeah, I’m beginning to see Nanosolar’s business model.

Here’s another interesting energy number from the Nanosolar site: Energy payback time is the time that a solar panel has to be used in order to generate the amount of energy required to produce it. The energy payback time for a Nanosolar panel is less than two months. A typical silicon wafer solar panel has an energy payback time of around three years, and a typical vacuum-deposited thin-film cell has one of 1-2 years.

I'm wondering if this might not be a Pony Express situation. Where the solar guys have figured out how to start getting into the market in a big way and then are derailed by something like this: World's Simplest Fusion Reactor Revisited. Just as the Pony Express was derailed by copper wires. At least the solar stuff is a sure thing. Even at my most optimistic I still have to say that fusion as of now is not a proven technology. It is still just promise. In any case the choices are widening. Now if we could just get the NIMBYs and their politician enablers out of the way.


Cross Posted at Classical Values