Nanosolar’s coating machine: Better than printing money?

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

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.

"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.

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.

Sorry, remove "regarding" in the 1st sentence above.

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).

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.

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.

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

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?.

When will we, the consumers, be able to buy panels made with this technique?

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 !

"Better than printing money?". Which would you rather have: the solar panels or the equvalent surface area printed in $100 bills?

"(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.