Solar cheaper than nuclear

Let's see them disconnect themselves from the grid, and then we'll see how independent they are.

Sylvia.

m!

That must be one big building!

Yeah, Canuckistan has always been a trouble spot.

"Make" energy out of sunlight?

That's what they've been saying for fifty years. Fusion will be here RSN, too.

Except it doesn't. It makes them dependent on my tax money *and* my electric rate.

Ripping off the taxpayer? I suppose you could call that "clever".

Assuming linearity, yes.

Not evidence, theory.

to show that a higher

"Reliable" is dicey. Turns out that the majority of concensus-driven science winds up being...

Well, actually, a lot more than the majority.

With the normal distribution passing through zero.

I believe we WILL ignore it.

John

own

of

illiterate

generating

BS spins more useless bloviation than JL :-)

Nothing. We can still do the math. Hell, I can still teach the math.

OK. I'll pretend I'm from Missouri... show me.

Show me only stuff that can be shown to pass a rigid ROI and C/P analysis. (Excluding the tax credits and rebates which are robbing Peter to pay Paul.) ...Jim Thompson

Sheeesh! Gore's "hockey stick" curve lives on.

Any data on energy consumed to make, versus lifetime energy produced; and a cost/performance analysis? ...Jim Thompson

The naivete, and ignorance (?), of tree-huggers is stunningly profound.

I suspect it's because they're not engineers... they think arm-waving and warm and cuddly feelings are what make things work. ...Jim Thompson

So you have some reason for believing that solar panels are going to remain at around $400 per sq m when at least one company is manufacturing them at a third of that price? And that manufacturing cost will never fall below that value?

Dirk, Yes, the panels MAY drop in price, by a third or even more.

The mounting hardware and similiar infrastructure won't drop that much, if at all.

Installation for them will only go up, at least for a while.

Inverters and other grid tie or other uses SHOULD go down, but they haven't yet!

BTW, the trend in industry for residential panels is to include the inverter and grid tie equipment ON THE PANEL! That way, the actual interconnections are all done as standard electrical connections as per NEC, meaning a standard electrician can wire them up without a lot of special training. Also makes passing code easier.

But right now, as a home owner, I can't buy Nanosolar panels. They are shipping everything they can produce either to Germany or to large industrial installations. When their production increases to the extent that they can sell to residential installers, MAYBE we will see less expensive home panels...

Charlie

And the benefit/cost ratio is what?? ...Jim Thompson

Improving all the time, with no reason known for it to stop within the next couple of decades.

True. That price will come to dominate.

Well, we know where the prices are heading by looking at a mature comparable technology that is being mass manufactured - PC PSUs. I have seen retail 200W PSUs for $10

I think that is definitely the way to go for small domestic installations.

The price reductions will be small over the next few years, then precipitous as over capacity hits. Right now just about everyone is getting into PV manufacture. And selling all the can make very profitably. Installed PV capacity worldwide doubled in 2009 (in the worst recession for 70 years!)

Just saw this as an example of what's happening:

"Norwegian company EnSol AS has patented a ground breaking, novel thin film solar cell technology which they seek to develop commercially by 2016. The company is now working with experts in the University of Leicester Department of Physics and Astronomy to develop the revolutionary new type of solar cell material that could be coated as a thin film on, for example, windows in buildings to produce power on a large scale. ... A spokesperson for EnSol AS said: "The basic cell concept has been demonstrated, and it will be the objective of this research and development project to systematically refine this PV cell technology to achieve a cell efficiency of 20% or greater.

"A thin film deposition system with nanoparticle source, will be designed and constructed in collaboration with the University of Leicester for the fabrication of prototype cells based on this design.

"This experimental facility will be designed to produce PV cells with an active area in excess of 16 cm2 (40 mm x 40 mm) deposited onto standard glass substrates. These prototype cells will subsequently be characterised and tested in collaboration with our academic partners.

"EnSol's next generation PV cell technology has tremendous potential for industrial scale, low environmental impact, cost effective production via standard "spray on" techniques.""

...although you have to keep in mind that the cost of replacing a PC's PSU is rather less than the cost of replacing a busted solar panel...

You can bet that the power supplies used in, e.g., most web servers are rather more durable, reliable and costly than the $10 units.

(With Google being a notable exception: They're striving to maintain the highest performance per dollar, and often find that, e.g., "consumer" grade hard drives, motherboards, etc. are still cheaper overall even when factoring in the labor required for replacement -- they can get away with this since they have massive redundancy and many servers can go down without any impact on their service... whereas most people's web sites are not at all redundant and one physical machine going do completely removes their web presence...)

---Joel

I am not an expert solar cell shopper, since I have not been much in the market for them. However, I have been a regular reader of this newsgroup since 1994, and I have yet to hear of available solar cells having efficiency much past the ~10-11% typical of monocrystalline silicon.

Should you know something I don't about where to get solar cells better than that, preferably where any old hobbyist can get them, please tell!

ost

ns.

ws200631202.html

2. > The company is now working with experts in the University of Leicester

Metal nanoparticles. Sure, why not. Anyone know what kind of metal?

Even top quality PSUs are available for less than 10c per Watt. I would eventually expect raw panels to be producing at around 20c/W As another poster said, it will come down to land price and metalwork costs.

If solar is making nuclear marginal now, where will it be in 10 years?

I saw that one, and had to scan past plenty of pages on global warming stuff before they started talking about this better solar cell. Although they did say early on 70% efficiency in theory, 50% efficiency in practice.

As exotic as the diagram of the cell looks, that "50% efficiency in practice" looks to me like a laboratory prototype. The structure is a GaInP cell over a GaInAs cell over a germanium one, all in one die.

Interesting - another new material, so new that there is yet to be a solar generaltor using it. But there hopes that it will be cost-effective, due to usefulness in solar concentrators.

However, that article did say that there is now 20% efficient solar power generation.

W/o feedback

Not theory, simulation.

If only we could ignore Congress.

Most of the effort in indsutry today seems to be towards making moderately efficient cells dirt cheap to manufacture rather than significantly improving the raw efficiency of the cells.

Granted, people play fast and loose with the word "efficiency" -- they often do mean "cheaper overall system cost" and not much more...