Good News for Solar

A bunch of good news pieces for solar energy. From the Energy Blog:

Daystar Technologies announced plans to establish a profitable manufacturing platform, expandable to Gigawatt scale (1,000 MW), by 2008. They said that they are positioned to become the premier low-cost, high-volume producer of solar-electric photovoltaic (PV) cells in the world. The announcement states that the company will accomplish this by being the first to successfully implement a proprietary, high-throughput, manufacturing methodology for the production of Si-free, Copper Indium Gallium Selenide (CIGS)-based solar cells, thus enabling PV to compete with traditional power generation in the growing global electricity marketplace. They claimed that their products are lighter, more robust, and have comparable performance to the current industry standard, crystalline Silicon (Si) solar cells.

The benefit for CIGS cells is that they don't require the increasingly-expensive polysilicon that conventional cells do. They also don't rely on toxic cadmium, like some competing technologies do. 1Gw per year is a hell of an output - if we had that here in Ontario, our summer electricity problems would be a thing of the past.

If that weren't good enough news, a different company is preparing to introduce PV cells based on quantum dots, a technology that has the potential for remarkable efficiency - 65%, potentially:

Innovalight solution-processes the quantum dots in a so-called silicon "ink" that lends itself to proven manufacturing technology using roll-to-roll printing technology used for printing on paper or film. Being able to deposit ink on flexible substrates allows Innovalight to apply its technology to applications such as clothing and portable chargers for both consumer and military customers.

By controlling the sizes of the dots from 2 to 10 nm the company can tailor either the absorption or emission spectra of the resulting film. This allows capture of everything from infrared to ultraviolet and the visible spectrum in between which is not possible with conventional technology.

Between Inovalight, Nanosolar, Daystar, and any number of other firms it looks like we can expect rapid decreases in price for solar energy. More importantly, we're also seeing the beginnings of high-volume production. 1Gw per year would be huge.