Solar Energy Cost Reductions

Thanks for this in part go to EVangel who read the last post and commented. EVangel's suggestion to check out Nanosolar prompted this post.

Nanosolar

Company reduces cost of solar, Nanosolar

An American company is producing a solar product that reduces the cost of solar energy production down to 99 cents per watt. This is a huge leap over the current cost of about $3 per watt. Also, energy payback is almost immediate or less than one month!

The technology used is called (CIGS) photovoltaic. CIGS stands for Copper indium gallium selenide. What reduces the cost is that there is no silicon (a big material cost) and it doesn't have to be mounted to glass (a weight factor).

Two things that bum us out:
1) Nanosolar is not a publicly traded company.
2) The product is not initially being used in our own country but rather in Germany. This underlines the fact that we as a country are far behind not only Germany, but that we are not leading the world through strong government backing in this very important area.

The first 100,000 cells produced were slated to be shipped to Europe, where a consortium will be building a 1.4-megawatt solar power plant located on a former landfill owned by one of the largest waste management companies in Eastern Germany.

According to the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, production of photovoltaics jumped to 3,800 megawatts worldwide in 2007, up an estimated 50 per cent over 2006. Photovoltaics is growing by an impressive average of 48% each year since 2002, doubling every two years, making it the world’s fastest-growing energy source.

The Nanosolar product touts these features:

- the world’s first commercial solar panel based on a printed solar cell

- the world’s first thin-film solar cell with a back-contact

- the world’s lowest-cost solar panel –which they believe will make them the first company capable of profitably selling solar panels for as little as $.99/Watt

- the world’s highest-current thin-film solar panel – delivering five times the current of any other thin-film panel on the market today and thus simplifying system deployment

- an intensely systems-optimized product with the lowest balance-of-system cost of any thin-film panel – due to innovations in design

British scientists called the Nanosolar product "a revolution" in generating electricity.