The next killer app? How about three of ‘em?

the solution for two of killer apps have you heard of ENER, they have patents for PCM which samsung and numonyx are putting into production have you heard of ENER they own unisolar they have a vacuum deposition system for a-si thin film, real company,ral product, real profit. it rolls on flat to a buildings roof apparently you can put a bullet through it and it still works

The people legislating a 'carbon tax' on silicon refining will do so while swigging their (aluminum) cans of diet cola. Or polyethelyene water bottles. Or polycarbonate pitchers with the shiny 'chrome' (aluminized) 'plating'.

jim: The IMS is not all about military microwaves anymore. There is that segment, but most of the show is about RF, and a cell phone as well as a netbook has 3 radios (main+GPS+Bluetooth) and the netbooks have Wi-Fi and maybe WiMax as well. No there is plenty of RF in phones. Those phones need massive RF infrastructure for base stations and back-haul. Meridith-- you mean silicon production boils off carbon dioxide? Don't tell anyone. It will get banned. I love Bob Witkow's comment because he blends that special talent for science and economics required of a great engineer. I sure see your point Bob. I guess we are down to what-- 35 nanometers-- these days. I only hope the cost of fabs justifies the money they can make. When I consulted to Applied Materials I gave a boss some guff about charging 1.4 million dollars for a machine that had 100 grand of parts in it. He pointed out that I forgot about the vacuum pumps, so it was more like 120 grand for that cluster-tool etcher, but then he pointed out: "Intel pays it off in 9 months." That's when he explained that Applied does not sell machinery. they sell a process and you have to buy their machine to hold the process. I hope the process pays out but your scepticism is well-placed.

Note to Inquisitive: silicon is purified by a method not all that different from aluminum. Essentially, two graphite electrodes are placed in a molten bath of quartz (silicon dioxide) and a potential is put across the bath. One electrode slowly combines with the oxygen in the melt and boils away as carbon dioxide. Over time, all that remains is the silicon. Needless to say, precursor minerals are likely to have impurities, so this isn't as easy as it appears.
That being said, as wind turbines and PV become more efficient, the cost of making silicon from RE sources will go down. This is the opposite of 'peak oil' in that in the long term PV inherently gets cheaper and cheaper the more it is used.

The ROI is more than labor for installation plus capital cost and the efficiency quoted. It's also lifetime reliability (and degradation over time), sensitivity to ambient and operational temperature (year round, of course), maintenance (dust sensitivity) and of course system weight (especially on a roof). Take also the impact of how direct the light is vs indirect. How effective are these in cloud cover vs direct? How much snow and ice on the system does it take to impact the performance? I would not make a general statement that a 20% efficient system is better than a 10% system. It's the total system and system life cycle that counts. Oh....life cycle: when it's time to discard, can it be recycled or is there a hazardous waste disposal issue (and cost)?

If there isn't enough Gallium to make all the CIGS panels in discussion, is there enough to make the quantity of GaAs wafers that your response above alludes to?

Good points Meredith and Tony. I also got wind of FirstSolar, who makes thin-film panels but uses cadmium tellurium (CdTe) chemistry. They have a revenue statement and sold a half a billion dollars of _something_ last year. I also found www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/nrel-confirms-miasols-solar-panel-efficiency-1130/ that shows both CIGS and CdSe both get about 10% efficiency in the real world. That is half what Sunpower gets. That means you are doubling your labor cost for the same power installation.

What does a blond say when she wants to make love? "I can't believe I am so drunk!" What does a brunette say when she wants to make love? "Are there any blonds left?" Nanosolar is the brunette of the solar industry. And if Nanosolar was in full-scale production they would say: "Are there any Sunpower panels left?" Since the German government feels it is good policy to take money from taxpayers to subsidize solar installation that don't make any sense economically, well yeah, there is a pretty good market over in Germany. First off, I am not some consumer asking to buy a panel. I am an editor for a magazine with hundreds of thousands of technical readers. Companies with real stories always go crazy to reach and tell the story to the press. Second off, I have a pal that works for a direct competitor of Nanosolar, and he says that they learned to not do what Nanosolar does and brag about all their tech prowess before they can do high-volume manufacturing. Scientists and venture capitalists love to paint a picture of how successful things are, but real engineers know that going into high-volume manufacturing is the real challenge. Anybody can get something to work once in a laboratory. I see pictures of machinery that is supposed to make these panels and it looks like prototype stuff that could make a megawatt a year. Go look at Nanosolar website. The last real press release is December 18 2007. It announces the first production run. Great, but where is the press release saying exactly how many megawatts of panels are shipping every month? There is a title "1GW CIGS deposition throughput achieved" in the press release page but that just points to their blog entry. That talks about a machine that can coat a gigawatt worth of panels per year. Great, but why are they not shipping a gigawatt, a full year after that blog entry? Because the coating machine is a simple adaptation of a web machine (web in the sense of printing and film handling). That is like saying you have a can of paint and a sprayer and that you will be selling houses any day now. OK, look at Nanosolar blog again. The last entry is that they are hiring. Great, but look at the jobs-- They sure seem to be hiring a lot of R&D positions for a company that acts like it has figured everything out. And even more interesting is noting that all the manufacturing jobs are in Germany. Wait a minute, what about the press release two years ago that they bought an old Cisco facility here in Silicon Valley? I bet Germany gave Nanosolar a big bunch of cash to put the factory over there, another subsidy on top of the price subsidy. All I want to see is how many megawatts a month they are shipping. From what I hear over beer with my buddy is that the other companies in this CIGS tech think Nanosolar has done the whole industry a great disservice by talking smack about how great things are going, when really there is still a ton of work to do. I really wonder if the cost of the panels justifies the lower energy you get from them. As we use more smart phones that will push the use of III-V semiconductors like Gallium Arsenide. Those are direct-band-gap semiconductors that are used to make panels for spacecraft. Once we create the infrastructure to make 8-inch III-V wafers, there will be a tech even better than crystalline silicon that will put more cost pressure on the CIGS tech. Printing semiconductors has been a desirable dream for decades but they still make LCD TVs in a vacuum process. And don't think there are not smart people looking at adapting that machinery to make huge solar panels. I am not saying CIGS is worthless. Far from it. Everything is analog and there is a place for all creatures, great and small, in this planet. But there is a constantly changing cost dynamic and you have to look at the 25-year hit of poor efficiency versus the sunk cost of labor versus the cost of the panels themselves. And remember, the reliability of all these CIGS panels is surmised-- conventional solar has really been out there for 25 years so manufacturers understand the failure dynamics much better. No, like I say, when we can buy it in the Digi-Key catalog and measure in my backyard, I will believe all these CIGS claims. Until then my hopes remain with silicon PV. By the way, there is not enough known gallium in the world to make all the panels these CGIS folks brag about, but I am a Julian Simon kinda guy so I have faith we will find more.

Nanosolar is putting in utility scale production in Germany. They sell to panels to utility companies, this is not (yet) a consumer offering. You expect them to waste their time replying to a consumer email when they have 100% of production sold and no consumer products in the pipeline? Also, suggesting that Si will beat thin film long term is pretty ignorant. Remember this post in 5 years. The only metric that matters is cost per watt.

The link below is a patent on making methanol from electricity (note the date: 1976). Since the electrolysis cell runs at 1.4 volts, one needs a 500 amp power supply to produce roughly 12Kwh per day worth of methanol. Seems like that would consume a lot of solid state components, regardless of what they are. patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=3959094.PN.&OS=PN/3959094&RS=PN/3959094