[ox-en] 0,50$ per watt photovoltaic cells
- From: magius <gmagius gmail.com>
- Date: Sat, 8 Oct 2005 14:13:56 +0200
Actually the price per watt of silicon photovoltaic solar cell is about 4$ !
Listen this (from National Geographic):
"Martin Roscheisen, CEO of a company called Nanosolar, sees thatfuture in a set of red-topped vials, filled with tiny particles ofsemiconductor. "I put some of that on my finger, and it disappearedright into my skin," he says. He won't say exactly what the particlesare, but the "nano" in the company name is a hint: They are less thana hundred nanometers across—about the size of a virus, and so smallthey slip right through skin.
Roscheisen believes those particles promise a low-cost way to createsolar cells. Instead of making the cells from slabs of silicon, hiscompany will paint the particles onto a foil-like material, where theywill self-assemble to create a semiconductor surface. The result: aflexible solar-cell material 50 times thinner than today's solarpanels. Roscheisen hopes to sell it in sheets, for about 50 cents awatt.
"Fifty cents a watt is kind of the holy grail," says David Pearce,president and CEO of Miasolé, one of many other companies working on"thin-film" solar cells. At that price solar could compete withutilities and might take off. If prices continued to drop, solar cellsmight change the whole idea of energy by making it cheap and easy forindividuals to gather for themselves. That's what techies call a"disruptive technology."
Huge strides are being made in solar photovoltaic research. Bulky,expensive crystalline silicon cells will soon be obsolete. The futurebelongs to artificial photosynthesis technology, based in thin-filmplastics and built with nanotechnology. This is not science fiction,it is a Venture Capital Reality. The European semiconductor giant STMicroelectronics is aggressively pursuing this technology, and inSilicon Valley, the founders of Google are major funding partners ofNanosolar. When these new solar panels are available on the market,solar power will be cheaper than coal.
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