Martin Roscheisen, CEO of a company called Nanosolar, sees that future in a set of red-topped vials, filled with tiny particles of semiconductor. "I put some of that on my finger, and it disappeared right into my skin," he says. He won't say exactly what the particles are, but the "nano" in the company name is a hint: They are less than a hundred nanometers across—about the size of a virus, and so small they slip right through skin.Sweet Jesus! At current prices (roughly $10/watt) solar is already competitive, albeit with subsidies. Some companies have already proclaimed the possibility of solar power at $1/watt, which would make it competitive with other power sources, without subsidies. At fifty cents, solar goes from being "competitive" to earth-shatterting goodness.
Roscheisen believes those particles promise a low-cost way to create solar cells. Instead of making the cells from slabs of silicon, his company will paint the particles onto a foil-like material, where they will self-assemble to create a semiconductor surface. The result: a flexible solar-cell material 50 times thinner than today's solar panels. Roscheisen hopes to sell it in sheets, for about 50 cents a watt.
Now, I don't mean to get overly excited about this, but lord do I wish Nanosolar luck. Another happy little number is the energy-payback time (the time it takes for the solar panel to begin showing a surplus over the energy cost to make it.) This page at Nanosolar gives the figure for conventional cells as 1 year. The number for Nanosolar's thinner cells is three weeks.
Given the kvetching a lot of Oil Peakers do about "Energy return on energy invested", do we think this might be important? I sure do.
So far, all I've got is a National Geographic article and the company's own website, so I'm trying to stay skeptical. But it's good to stay open minded, too.
2 comments:
Don't know if you've seen this: Applied Materials Hires New R&D Executive
This fellow was chief scientist at Nanosolar.
This says to me that Nanosolar is likely finished, but Applied Materials might be a big future player.
I'm not sure I would count them out on the basis of 1 man leaving the company. I think a more interesting angle would be for AMAT to buy the company and gain a leading position in the CIGS market.
I understand it isn't their core business but they could let it operate as a subsidiary and spin it off at a later date. It would be the same concept that EMC did with VMware. Something to chew on anyway....
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