New Solar Cell Technology...

 I just read on Slashdot about a company using a new technique to create solar
cells that makes it <blah blah> times cheaper and
<blah blah> times more efficient.

Anyone know anything about this?  The article seemed to indicate that it's
commercially available, but I contact the company and
they say that I can't get it anywhere, that they're still commercializing it.

Here's the money shot:
"A Palo Alto (California ) start-up, named Nanosolar Inc., founded in 2002,
claims that it has developed a commercial scale
technology that can deliver solar electricity at 5 cents per kilowatt-hour."

Slashdot link:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid /02/28/1224245&tid2&tid

Some Hindu News link:
http://www.hindu.com/seta/2005/02/03/stories/2005020300431600.htm

 
    NanoSolar has a web page.
    http://www.nanosolar.com/
    
<fwiw>
-het



--
"We need a wake up call. We need it desperately. We need basically
 a new form of energy. I don't know that there is one."
-Matthew Simmons, energy adviser for President Bush, May 23rd 2002

PV FAQ: http://www.autobahn.mb.ca/~het/energy/pv_faq.html
H.E. Taylor  http://www.autobahn.mb.ca/~het/

 "The flagship product, Nanosolar SolarPly, is a 14 feet x 10 feet solar
electricity module delivering 120 watts per square inch at 110V. The company
is now offering solar panels at below $1 per peak watt."


about every 6 months some "news" like this comes out , never to be heard
from again ... last time I checked , the sun is 1 kW meter/sq output hitting
the earths surface ...

 I believe that was a simple misquote. The writers for many of these
publications often get things completely wrong and rarely do more
than copy press releases.

Nanosolar's website seems to lack that particular detail (wattage) so
one can only make the assumption that it's either a 120 watt panel or
it produces 120 watts per square meter. 120 watts per square meter
would be consistent with the claims of 12% efficiency for the cells.
A 10 x 14 foot (13m^2) panel would then produce some 1560 watts.

If, on the other hand, it produces 120 watts total then it would be
less than 1% efficient or comparable to various organic thin film
solar PV cells in development.

I do agree that announcements like these are common, while the real
products are not. I'm not going to hold my breath.

Anthony

Solar Guppy wrote:

 They are a bit vague on the actual technology, so hard to say at this point
just how viable it is. In the past 30 years or so we have seen dozens of
"breakthroughs" in solar tech, but so far none have hit the market.

On the surface, nano technology seems to hold some real promise (unlike 95%
of the other schemes), but I think there is also a good chance it will turn
out to be yet another interesting lab creature that cannot survive in real
life.

The fact that there has been no real news about actual production or
research progress for almost two years leads me to believe that things are
not going all that well....

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