I remembered reading a while back about Nanosolar, the company trying to perfect extremely cheap, non-silicon based solar cells. And it occurred to me yesterday, “hey, how is that going, anyhow?”
After some Googling, it turns out that the answer to that question is very, very good indeed. The dawn of individual power generation is very nearly upon us, and it can’t come fast enough.
(Mind you, the United States alone uses over three terawatts of energy at peak hours right now, so, yeah, being able to produce 430 megawatts of generation capacity per year is, you know, not nearly enough. On the other hand, though, now that there’s a cheap model for people to copy, nanosolar production can be very easily advanced through government incentive programs. Imagine about a hundred of these factories and suddenly you’re producing 43 gigs of generation capacity every year; that’s the United States taken care of in a decade with room to spare. And that’s before someone unscrupulous just steals the technology outright and starts putting up factories in China.)
Related Articles
3 users responded in this post
This is great news, i don’t know if read the article in popular science. if this technology works as well as they say it does and the price can be brought down to 30 cents a watt everyone will be able to afford solar panels. the company with the latest innovation,First solar, will have a hard time selling their product to anyone other than commercial apps. If Nanosolar goes public, suck up some of the IPO as the stock will skyrocket as First Solar stock has.
What silicon shortage?
The earth’s crust (rocks) is 27% Silicon.
Commercial viability for Iron mining is around 10%
For copper mining we get down to
The only downside is that it will be several years before you start seeing this available for consumers. The first 100,000 panels are going to a commercial solar plant in Germany and I’m sure they have other commercial customers lined up around the block.