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Friday, June 20, 2008

Nanosolar’s coating machine: Better than printing money?

Solar energy at a buck a Watt – Nanosolar grabbed headlines last year when it pegged the target price of its printed solar cells at $1/W.

This week, Nanosolar put up a video of its 1GW (in annual production) solar ink coating machine, which the company says costs $1.65M. The coater, which works in a normal factory environment, and coats metal film with a proprietary ink based on a Copper-Indium-Gallium-Diselenide (CIGS) compound, is just a continuous-process printing machine, and is inherently cheaper and simpler than traditional silicon wafer deposition processes used in today’s photovoltaic cells. True, the efficiency of the Nanosolar technology is less: 14% compared to ~25% silicon wafer efficiency. But 14% is still very practical.

So, in essence you have a machine you pay $1.65M for and feed in CIGS ink and metal foil, and at the end of the year you have produced 1GW worth of thin-film solar cells which you sell for about $1/W, or about $1B worth of product. Yeah, I’m beginning to see Nanosolar’s business model.

Here’s another interesting energy number from the Nanosolar site: Energy payback time is the time that a solar panel has to be used in order to generate the amount of energy required to produce it. The energy payback time for a Nanosolar panel is less than two months. A typical silicon wafer solar panel has an energy payback time of around three years, and a typical vacuum-deposited thin-film cell has one of 1-2 years. (Which makes me wonder what the energy payback time of a coal-fired plant is, or a nuclear?)

Video of the solar ink coating machine:

Related entries in: Power Sources/Controllers | Solar/Photovoltaics |

Reader Comments

(Add your comments)

at 6/20/2008 11:57:20 AM, Meredith Poor said:
"(Which makes me wonder what the energy payback time of a coal-fired plant is, or a nuclear?)". Coal is easy: the amount of coal it takes to melt, roll, transport, and bake the steel, concrete, and other materials used in the plant... probably well under a year. Nuclear is ghastly: some estimates are that it takes as much energy to separate and refine the the fissionable fuel as one gets from the resulting power production. Nukes are about like ethanol in that respect, there really is no positive payback.

at 6/20/2008 12:01:50 PM, Meredith Poor said:
"Better than printing money?". Which would you rather have: the solar panels or the equvalent surface area printed in $100 bills?

at 6/20/2008 2:17:01 PM, RY said:
I wonder why the machine costs only 1.65M if it can produce 1B worth of product in a year ! So much for the business model and the claims !

at 6/20/2008 2:20:47 PM, DJP-B said:
When will we, the consumers, be able to buy panels made with this technique?

at 6/20/2008 2:27:33 PM, W17053 said:
First, all the numbers quoted are from the supplier (not an independent lab). Second, if they instead sell the solar cells for $0.10/W, they would still yield $100M worth of product (still a hefty sum). This would not only make it affordable for virtually everyone, but also put all of their 25% efficient competition out of work – maybe even some “Edisons”.

at 6/20/2008 2:36:18 PM, Alan said:
Meridith is promoting another anti-nuke fallacy. Here''s the real info: From Wikipedia on U235: Gaseous diffusion requires ca. 60 times as much energy as the gas centrifuge process

at 6/20/2008 2:46:42 PM, MR said:
In a sense, coal plants never pay back - they require a constant stream of coal as input, so you can never output as much energy as is contained in the fuel you put in, much less make up for the construction of the plant and energy expended in mining and transporting the coal.

at 6/20/2008 2:54:42 PM, Carl Swift said:
The machine may cost $1.65 mil. as a capital expenditure to be amortized over time. The key question is how much are the materials such as the metal film, ink, transparent conductive overlay (last time I checked you needed two terminals), mounting, interconnect, etc per watt. I suspect they are not zero and I suspect the payback is a bit more than 2 months, but it may be quite good. If the payback on the list price is 2 months, they would be fools for selling the machines, they should be selling the solar cells and investors should be shoveling money in their door. Xerox didn''t get where it was (note the past tense) by selling machines, they rented the patented machines, included the supplies, and sold copies. Lots and lots of copies, at pennies each and the company, their employees and their investors did very well thank you.

at 6/20/2008 3:36:01 PM, SV said:
Everybody who has every printed a page at home knows that the cost of printing is not the printer, but it is the ink. Hence, whether the machine is $1.65M or even if the machine comes for free, it is not going to make much of a difference. The cost is the ink anyway.

at 6/20/2008 4:03:22 PM, george said:
its a scietific fact that the materials used to produce CIGS are very rare reputable scientists have stated that CIGS will only ever make up 1% of the solar market because of this and nanosolar make no mention of the fact that the product they have shipped to germany also has to be encased in glass

at 6/20/2008 4:35:17 PM, MSimon said:
No process can ever pay back the energy put in it. Second law. The question is: how much delivered energy does it take to produce a quantity of deliverable energy?

at 6/20/2008 5:30:39 PM, DKelly said:
About that ink. When did you say we are going to run out of Indium?

at 6/21/2008 3:35:50 AM, DShap said:
To DKelly "They predict that in a mere 5 years or up to 10 years at most, the supply of indium will be gone." Full article at: www.compoundsemi.com/documents/articles/news/8411.html

at 6/23/2008 7:27:06 AM, ChrisPE said:
I always wonder why every great product has to have even greater opposition of people , who often are not well technically educated and super-ignorant."Running out" of ANY metal is only a theoretical copilation of CURRENT sources and supplies.This project is awesome and someone suspecting :why is it only $1.65 mil is that person who feeds "speculators".I think that we have to start appreciating new technologies and support them , instead of whining and criicizing.By the way - all you criticizers - did you ever developed ANYTHING in your life or are you just Masters of Complaining? This country was built on hard work and optimism , as well as expertise.LET'S CONTINUE!!! Great news Margery THANK YOU!

at 6/23/2008 12:05:15 PM, TG said:
MSimon, that's a very misleading statement at best regarding, and at worst a huge misappropriation of the 2nd law of thermo. The 2nd law describes how efficient an engine can be. No solar panel will ever be able to convert all solar radiation into electric energy, that is, attain 100% efficiency. That's OK. Same goes for all engines. It takes a certain amount of energy to manufacture the solar cell. This is rather small: as long as the cell keeps functioning, the sun will do the rest, and for a long long time (5 billion years?). This is hydrogen energy since the sun fuses 2 H atoms to make 1 He atom with a lot of energy released in the process. But then again, virtually all our energy (an exception is nuclear) comes or came from the sun. Nuclear energy came from other suns (meaning old suns that underwent supernovae explosions).

at 6/23/2008 12:07:09 PM, TG said:
Sorry, remove "regarding" in the 1st sentence above.

at 6/23/2008 12:25:49 PM, Lev L said:
While the article is a barefaced promo, good for them! They should (by law) to promote their own product, and we should comb thru the claims. Getting any decent efficiency from a printing process is remarkable. But, the rub is maintaining that in a real environment is a tough one. I have read of selenium compounds for the same purpose a couple of decades ago: good in the lab, no endurance in real life environments. For a similar process and product check out the long way to environmentally harden OLEDs.

at 6/23/2008 12:35:40 PM, Meredith Poor said:
"Indium ranks 61st in abundance in the Earth's crust at approximately 0.25 ppm [2], which means it is more than three times as abundant as silver, which occurs at 0.075 ppm." Pasted from the Indium topic on Wikipedia. I'm finding it hard to believe we'll run out.

at 6/24/2008 1:25:22 PM, DaveH said:
I think Lev L hit on my main question: what is the field reliability/longevity of these films? If the installed price/Watt is half that of Si, but the field life is also 1/2, it's a wash.

at 6/30/2008 11:14:06 PM, Mark B said:
I don't know if this is true, but a Physicist client of mine told me that the life expectancy was only five years. he pooh-poohed the whole technology. The company is privately owned and funded by the boys on Sand Hill Rd. Menlo Park. Venture Capital of the World. My understanding was they spent 450 mil to build the factory. If the printer was 1.65 what did they spend the rest of the money on.

at 7/1/2008 9:13:50 PM, jeremy said:
The building, R&D of the ink, R&D of the other coatings to protect it from the environment, R&D of the lights out auto sorting and panel production equipment. From what I''ve read the nano ink that prints properly is just the very first and one of the hardest steps. Think of it as the tip of an iceburg. There''s a lot that is going on that you don''t see after that printed sheet of foil to produce a finished PV panel. Automated manufacturing takes an incredible amount of capital to design and work the kinks out of. Even for something as well understood as say a washing machine. Not to mention a completely new way of manufacturing a new type of product.

at 7/3/2008 5:01:39 AM, Indium said:
"Silver, a less abundant element, is currently mined at approximately 18,300 tonnes per annum, which is 40 times greater than current indium mining rates." I think the stories of indium running out are somewhat exaggerated. Maybe not all of the indium in the world can be extracted economically, but if there is a rapidly growing market for it, companies will find ways of increasing supply, as they have done for Si.

at 7/7/2008 2:14:36 PM, technologist RTI Corp said:
The printer uses ink with an organic binder or glue to hold the film on to the foil. Organic binders are very suseptable to degradation by UV rays. My estimate the panel would have a usefull life of abour 3 to 5 years

at 8/20/2008 3:30:35 PM, lkelley@goruby.com said:
Boy, with all the ''experts'' here and sounding all intelligent, I''m not sure I''d want to invest in a panel from NanoSolar.I do think that Solar energy prices via Silicon Solar cells (photovoltaic) will come down mainly because REALLY big money thinks it will. Some very large companies are building extremely expensive factories to make poly silicon which is the basic raw material for solar cells. Their capacity is doubling in the next year or so. I own a company that makes very highly advanced crystals such as Ruby, Sapphire, NdYAG, Cubic Zirconia and others. (www.shelbygemfactory.com) Take a look at the factory pictures there, and you may get a good idea of how expensive my business is to operate. I use a LOT of electricity. Since I know something about crystal growth, I came up with a new way to make Silicon Solar Cells. I use about 1/30 the silicon and about 1/15th the electricity and about 1/10th the labor compared with any other company making Silicon Solar Cells. My cost for assembling them into arrays or packaging them or shipping them isn''t any less, but the silicon use is very much smaller. My process is the only new process for making Silicon Solar cells to be developed in the last 30 years. My gosh, maybe I''d better contact the boys on Sand Hill Rd. At least my panels might last 30 years. I know i set one out in the Michigan weather for over 10 years with absolutely no covering protection at all, and it sounded a buzzer when it was light outside. Finally the darn buzzer wore out.

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