Nanosolar, a private company backed by SAC Capital and a variety of respected venture investors, has begun to ship a new type of solar panel that it believes could be a game changer.  The company combines CIGS and roll-printing technologies to produce thin film panels that it sells for 99 cents per watt.  This is a price that the company believes to be competitive with coal on a utility-scale installation.  While unproven, the technology is a potential threat to other solar panel competitors and a potential boon for utilities and governments that want to produce clean electricity. It also fits neatly into the prediction made a few years ago by MIT’s Technology magazine that nano-technology will allow solar PV to become incorporated into standard roofing materials

The following piece released on The Energy Blog provides further details:

December 26, 2007

Nanosolar Ships First Panels

In one of the most significant announcements in renewable energy for the year Nanosolar, producer of CIGS solar cells made using nanoparticle ink and roll-printing technology, announced that it has shipped its first product and received their first check from product revenue. They are already sold out for the next 12 months and are working to scale their production capacity as fast as possible. The advent of low cost thin film cells, that according to Nanosolar will be able to be produced sold for $0.99 per Watt, should mean that low cost solar can be produced at the lowest cost ever and can be produced at sites that are more distributed than from thermal solar. When this cost is achieved, it will mean that solar is competitive with all other forms of power production and only geographical limitations — lack of sun — will limit its proliferation — and of course the problem of storage of energy.  This moves the development of energy storage technologies to the top of the list of priorities for renerwable energy technologies, where it should have been for some time. It has 647,000 sq ft of manufacturing capability in the U.S. and Germany. 430,000 Mw of capacity per year in CA according to this CNBC video. Could this be the begining of the end of all other forms of solar power.

In the December 18 Nanosolar Blog Martin Roscheisen, CEO of Nanosolar writes:

Our product is defining in more ways I can enumerate here but includes:

- the world’s first printed thin-film solar cell in a commercial panel product;

- the world’s first thin-film solar cell with a low-cost back-contact capability;

- the world’s lowest-cost solar panel – which we believe will make us the first solar manufacturer capable of profitably selling solar panels at as little as $.99/Watt;

- the world’s highest-current thin-film solar panel – delivering five times the current of any other thin-film panel on the market today and thus simplifying system deployment;

- an intensely systems-optimized product with the lowest balance-of-system cost of any thin-film panel – due to innovations in design we have included.

Today we are announcing that we have begun shipping panels for freefield deployment in Eastern Germany and that the first Megawatt of our panels will go into a power plant installation there.

Also on December 18th, 2007:

Nanosolar Inc.and Beck Energy, announced that they had won a highly competitive public selection process for a solar power plant located on a former landfill owned by one of the largest waste management companies in Eastern Germany.

The initial size of the plant is 1MW, an amount sufficient to power approximately 400 homes. The Nanosolar Utility Panel™ is Nanosolar’s first product as part of its award-winning PowerSheet™ product line – recently named the Top Innovation of the Year 2007 by Popular Science Magazine – and the company’s solution for building solar power plants on free fields at the outskirts of towns and cities.

“This is the first time that a solar electricity cell and panel has been designed entirely and specifically for utility-scale power generation," said Martin Roscheisen, CEO of Nanosolar. "It will set the standard for green power generation at utility scale."

Solar-electric power plants have advantages over concentrating solar-thermal plants as well as coal-fired and other conventional plants in that they can be deployed in a much broader range of possible field locations, a much broader range of possible sizes, and with much shorter project planning and implementation cycles. They now can be very economical as well, giving municipal power producers and utilities a new option for generating and delivering cost-efficient green power.

Email this • Technorati Links • Add to del.icio.us • Digg This!

December 26, 2007 at 11:54 PM in Solar-thin-film | Permalink

Tags: energy investments

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 at 8:06 am and is filed under Solar PV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.