Solar happenings

[johnr]

There's a company in Florida that has been selling thin film panels at just 98 cents a watt for the past couple weeks now. I'm sure this is a temporary overstock sale, but if it's a sign of where prices are headed, I like it!

BTW I find this little site helpful in keeping tabs on solar panel prices: Free Solar Panel Price Survey

 

[vfx]

LOOK: SunFlowers, An Electric Garden - Look - GOOD

 

[dpeilow]

Revolutionizing Solar Energy by Taking It Underground

More on the above: Cheap 3D Solar Cells Are 6x More Efficient, Work Underground : TreeHugger

 

[Brian H]

Quick payback

Just to be on the safe side, anyone installing solar should aim for a payback in the range of 5-6 years. If, as I personally hope and expect, the focusfusion.org test and design project succeeds, cost per Watt and per kwh will drop, for ordinary 24/7 baseload supply, by around 95%. Which is maybe 97-98% vs. solar/green. With no subsidies. :biggrin:

Care to compete with 5¢/W installed, 0.25¢/kwh* from small, garage-sized, 5MW generators, emission-free?

I thought not.

*P.S. Yes, that is ¼¢/kwh. $0.0025.

 

[JRP3]

I'm not going to hold my breath. How long have we been waiting for fusion?

 

[doug]

Read this in the paper this morning. Thought it worth passing on:

Small-scale solar plan clashes with big energy - SFGate.com

 

[TEG]

SolarChargedDriving.Com

PV->EV...

 

[dpeilow]

BBC News - EADS Astrium develops space power concept

"We have reached a point where, in the next five years, we could build something which is in the order of 10-20 kW to transmit useful energy to the ground."

!

 

[codagent]

I have so much hope for solar tech, maybe to much :S

 

[dpeilow]

Tesla Switch Solar Charger to debut at Bedini conference

Interesting choice of name...

 

[Norbert]

New kind of solar cell promises much lower cost, reducing the amount of material required by orders of magnitude:

Technology Review: Material Traps Light on the Cheap

 

[GSP]

Tesla Switch Solar Charger to debut at Bedini conference

Interesting choice of name...

I took a quick look at this link. It looks like they have a magic device that provides power output 2x the power input. This would violate the conservation of energy law. No use wasting time here.

GSP

PS: To bad they used Tesla's name for this BS.

 

[malcolm]

Quantum Photovoltaics

Principally, it is the spectral breadth of sunlight that presents the greatest difficulty for efficient photovoltaic energy conversion. Useful power is delivered from the UV to near-IR and an efficient solar cell must collect as much of this incident light as possible. Conventional solar cells achieve this by indiscriminately absorbing photons above some threshold energy and discarding any excess energy as heat. This limits the efficiency of conventional photovoltaic convertors to 31%, the so called Shockley Queisser limit. The key to high efficiency is to either fabricate spectrally selective solar cells that preserve the energy of absorbed photons or modify the solar spectrum, so that its bandwidth is narrower and better matches a single solar cell.

 

[malcolm]

Q-cell announces 2009 losses (via Greentechmedia)

Q-Cells Declares 2009 Loss of $1.8 Billion; CEO Resigns Amidst : Greentech Media

The fact is that cost structures for European cell and module producers are by and large simply not competitive with those typically achieved by producers in low-cost locations. Lower labor and utility costs that Asian manufacturers enjoy are only one factor; significant benefits also come from tax breaks and lower SG&A (selling, general, and administrative) costs in the developing world. It turns out that Q-Cells actually does have a manufacturing facility in a low-cost location, namely, a wafer/cell plant with an estimated capacity of 520 MW in Malaysia, where First Solar's CdTe plant is also located. As the chart below indicates, cell conversion costs at the Malaysia fab, once fully ramped, are expected to be 30% lower than those at Q-Cell's German plant in Thalheim.

 

[AJC]

I'm a newbie thinking about installing solar panels on my home. Anyone in the Chicagoland area have any experience with or information on home solar installation? Does anyone know if your roof needs to face south, or can you put it on a west facing roof? How steep can your roof be? What are the advantages of the different types/brands of solar panels? Thanks for your help!

 

[johnr]

I'm not in the Chicago area so I can't do an installation for you, but I am in the solar business.

Solar panels perform best if they're directly facing the sun, and here in the northern hemisphere that means south. If they're facing west you'll miss part of the morning sunlight - it will still work but you won't get as much energy out of the system as you would it they were facing south. A general rule of thumb is for your roof slope to be equal to your latitude, but the roof slope doesn't make that much of a difference so long as it's facing south. If it's facing west, then the flatter the better.

Polycrystalline panels are the most popular and are quiet efficient and cost-effective. Single-crystal panels are slightly more expensive but also perform slightly better especially in warmer climates. Thin-film are the cheapest of all, but they're also the least efficient - they take up about twice as much space for the same power output.

 

[vfx]

Thin-film are the cheapest of all, but they're also the least efficient - they take up about twice as much space for the same power output.

So do they ultimately end up costing the same?

 

[TEG]

Less expensive per power output. But frequently people have limited available space with good solar exposure, so getting more power per area is worth a premium when you are space limited and have a total power output goal in mind.

Also the thin films may not have quite as long a total lifespan.
Also I heard that some thin films may drop in power output over time more than "traditional" silicon. When that happens you have to spend a bit more up front on a bigger inverter because you have to size it for the initial total power output.

Finding an expert contractor can be good since there are lots of factors to consider if you want to do it right.

 

[AJC]

Thanks for all the info. What about the flexible PV panels, like the one Uni-Solar produces? Is this the same as the same as thin film, or is this a separate entity? I heard the flexible panels are supposed to produce 15-20% more energy than traditional panels. Is this true?

 

[johnr]

The flexible Unisolar panels are thin-film. Making them flexible does tend to make them more expensive though. Also you're right about the thin film panels putting out more power. When it gets hotter and crystalline panels struggle, the thin film type do perform a bit better (remember it's the sunlight, not the heat, that solar panels covert to electricity). There are some useful charts showing the advantages of thin-film at Kaneka's site (another thin-film manufacturer) here: Why Amorphous? : Kaneka silicon PV

When you consider the added installation cost due to the higher number of panels needed and the additional combiner boxes needed (higher voltage and lower amperage per panel), it largely cancels out the lower cost per watt and the slightly better summer performance. If you have plenty of room for them and don't have any complications that would raise the installation cost, then thin-film might be the way to go - but most people have just enough space on their roof for standard polycrystalline panels, and if they pick thin film they'd have to settle for a smaller system.