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The Future of Solar?
Posted by Jason Pelletier, Low Impact Living
There’s a huge amount of hype out there about solar, but as any walk around your neighborhood will show the number of homes and businesses powered by the sun is still exceedingly small. In order for solar to be part of the solution to our energy and global warming woes, clearly some things have to change! Better rebates and higher electricity prices will certainly help, but the true solutions will ultimately lie in technology.
Today’s solar panels suffer from one critical shortcoming: cost. Each watt of solar capacity installed today costs around $8, and a typical home in the US will require 5,000 - 10,000 watts of capacity to produce 100% of its electricity needs (depending on how much sun there is where you live). Rebates can sometimes cut this price in half, but even with that you’re still talking about $20,000 - $40,000 per household!
Why is this so expensive? About half of the cost of solar today comes from the panels themselves (the rest is installation and other equipment). The vast majority of today’s solar panels are made from silicon, the same material that computer chips are made from. The manufacturing process is expensive, there’s more global demand than supply right now, and today’s panels are relatively inefficient: even the best turn only 15%-18% of the sun’s energy into electricity. That all leads to a high cost per panel.
There are at least three key ways to cut that cost. Number one, you can reduce the manufacturing cost. Number two, you can increase the efficiency of each panel, which allows a panel to convert more of the sun’s light into electricity. Or, number three, you can integrate solar PV technology into other building materials that you would have to buy anyway, such as rooftops and windows (like the cool solar shingles from SunPower Corp at left). Companies and researches across the globe are frantically working on all three (and some combine them all). Over the next few weeks we’ll highlight top companies focusing on each approach, starting with reducing manufacturing costs today.
Reduce Solar Manufacturing Costs
One of the most exciting sectors of the solar industry today is thin-film solar - venture capitalists have dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into solar companies (must be nice!), and the companies are the darlings of the green blogosphere. This technology involves depositing a thin film of pretty exotic materials onto a conductive backing. These panels are less efficient than today’s silicon-based ones, but they are so much less expensive to manufacture that they might cut the cost of each watt of solar capacity by up to 75% (to the $2 / watt installed range)!
One of the most promising companies in this area is Nanosolar, which has just finished building a 200,000 square foot factory in Northern California. If they deliver as promised, they could be a major step towards bringing solar costs into the realm of traditional power plants. Unfortunately for us, the company’s first year (at least) of production has already been reserved for the German market, so you might have to wait a few years if you want Nanosolar on your rooftop.
Another hot company is HelioVolt. HelioVolt uses materials similar to Nanosolar (often called CIGS, an acronym for copper indium gallium selenide, the compounds that form the solar coating), but employs a different process that can be used to deposit the coatings on metal, glass, and even composite surfaces. They aren’t nearly as far along as Nanosolar, though, so it will be some time before HelioVolt will come to a window near you!
We’re rooting for these companies, for they seem to offer a clear path to truly inexpensive solar. Look for our pieces on some other options over the next few weeks.
March 2nd, 2008 in Global Warming, Energy use, Solar permalink
