NanoSolar by Google: THE Energy SOLUTION

TheDude

What about this idea of producing it artifically in colliders?

I remember reading in 1990 that antimatter was going for a measly 4 million/gram. Bill Gates could have one boss Fourth of July with some of that.
_________________
Cogito, ergo non satis bibivi
C'mon man, who're you gonna believe?

kolm · Tar Sands Joined: May 11, 2006 Posts: 76

FoxV

Couldn't find where someone posted the press release of NanoSolar's first production panel shipments so just decided to resurrect this thread instead.

Nanosolar Achieves 1GW CIGS Deposition Throughput

Certainly more than I was expecting at this stage of the game. Its not mentioned how long they can maintain that production level or the supply chain of raw materials, so no dancing in the streets just yet. Still though, you gotta be impressed.

Now, just to find out where 1GW of nanosolar panels fits into this picture from emersonbiggins

mos6507

Schadenfreude · Intermediate Crude Joined: Jan 16, 2008 Posts: 606

picoallen · Coal Joined: Jun 20, 2008 Posts: 2

FoxV,

Lets do the sums.

Nanosolar say that their printer runs at 100 feet per minute, but theoretically could run at 2000 feet of panel per minute.

Lets be conservative and assume that they go to commercial production at 500 feet per minute.

That's 500 x 60 x 12 = 360,000 feet per day.

Lets assume that they have 50% down-time (for maintainance etc.) so they actually get 180,000 feet per day. Multiply this by 365.24 and you get 65,745,000 feet per year.

Assume that a standard solar panel is 6 foot tall, but theirs are half as efficient as standard panels, so you need 12 feet of theirs. That gives you the equivalent of 5,478,750 standard panels per year.

So to manufacture the 91,250,000 solar panels in your graphic would take 91,250,000 / 5,478,750 = 16.65 years. Lets be conservative again and round that up to 20 years.

Flipping it over, it would take 20 printers a year to create the same energy generation capacity.

However, Nanosolar's panels have a 25 year warrantee and your graphic has 50 running periods for each generator type, so you would need to run the presses a second time half way through.

At $1.6 million a piece, it would cost $32 million to build those printers. The cost of the entire manufacturing process including the factory, materials, framing the panels and installing them is anybodies guess. Lets make one and assume that the total cost is twenty times the cost of the printer ie $640 million.

Now compare this to the price of building a nuclear power station which is at least a couple of billion $. And going by that graphic of yours 50 nuclear power stations are needed to match our solar panels. Thats $100 billion, even before factoring in the fact that they need to be fueled with ever diminishing supplies of uranium.

And what is more, our twenty press factory should be able to bang out that much capacity per year!!!!

I must have gone wrong somewhere.

Otherwise methinks the future looks very sunny indeed.

Schadenfreude · Intermediate Crude Joined: Jan 16, 2008 Posts: 606

Electric_Economy_2025 · Heavy Crude Joined: Apr 01, 2008 Posts: 143

Electric_Economy_2025 · Heavy Crude Joined: Apr 01, 2008 Posts: 143

picoallen · Coal Joined: Jun 20, 2008 Posts: 2

Duh, I made those calculations unnecessarily complicated.

(And I was also mistaken in assuming in my original calculations that the printer was printing panels at full solar panel width. I think I might have that wrong. From images elsewhere on their website, I suspect it prints strips that are 10 to 20cm wide, and that these are then assembled into larger panels.)

Anyway to redo the calculations in another way:

Nanosolar brag that their printer can print 1GW of capacity per year (but don't state whether they get that by running the printers at the conservative 100 feet per minute or at 2000 feet per minute.)

1GW is approximately the capacity of one of the two generation units at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California - the size of a power station that is assumed in that 1-cubic-mile-of-oil graphic.

As explained in a post on the graphic at the Oil drum
> that cubic mile of oil is the amount of oil humanity currently uses per annum.
> rounding the numbers a little, that is the energy produced by 50 nuclear power stations (each half the size of Diablo Canyon) running for 50 years. Or by 2,500 such power stations in a year.

At 1G per year, the Nanosolar printer can print the equivalent of a nuclear power station worth of capacity per year. So it would take 250 printers 10 years to replicate the annual energy production equivalent of our current annual oil consumption.

(Note that I found on the Nanosolar website that their first factory in the US will only have a 430MW per annum capacity. This suggests that the bottleneck in production will not be the printing of the cells, but in all the other aspects of the manufacturing process. Or perhaps their printer has far exceeded their own expectations and they will at some stage announce that they are going to radically revise their output estimates.)

Now, the Nanosolar printers cost $1.6 million each. Obviously a full factury will cost a lot more to build and run.

But by comparison, the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant cost $5.8 billion to build and is being refurbished at a cost of $800 million!

Round the cost of a 1GW power station with a single Diablo sized generation unit down to $2 billion.

Lets say Nanosolar builds factories with 5 presses in each. That means we would need to have 50 such factories running for ten years to create generation capacity equivalent our cubic mile of oil.

With the $2 billion it costs to build a nuclear power station, enough factories could be built if it costs $40 million per factory - $8 million of which covers the cost of the presses ($1.6 million x 5).

Running costs? It has to be a hell of a lot less than the running costs of a nuclear power station - which includes the cost of mining and processing uranium ore, waste disposal, and eventually the astronomical decommissioning costs.

By the way, I don't see why Nanosolar needs to do the whole manufacturing process. They could just print the rolls solar thin-film and on-sell them to other manufacturers who do the assembly.

Dearth · Tar Sands Joined: Jun 21, 2008 Posts: 29

f2tornado · Tar Sands Joined: Jun 21, 2008 Posts: 51

Electric_Economy_2025 · Heavy Crude Joined: Apr 01, 2008 Posts: 143

cephalotus