Nanosolar touts 1 gigawatt solar cell machine

Upstart Nanosolar says that it has built the Ferrari of solar cell manufacturing: a one gigawatt machine that prints solar cells at 100 feet per minute.

In the company blog, CEO Martin Roscheisen on Wednesday said that the one gigawatt machine is a first for the solar industry, orders of magnitude more "capital efficient" than existing production techniques.

Nanosolar is one of several companies betting on CIGS (copper indium gallium selenide) to lower the price of solar electricity. Compared to traditional silicon, CIGS cells don't require nearly as much material.

Roscheisen said that the secret to Nanosolar technology is that cells are literally printed from a liquid. From his blog:

"Most production tools in the solar industry tend to have 10-30MW in annual production capacity. How is it possible to have a single tool with Gigawatt throughput?

"This feat is fundamentally enabled through the proprietary nanoparticle ink we have invested so many years developing. It allows us to deliver efficient solar cells (presently up to more than 14 percent) that are simply printed," he wrote.

Nanosolar started manufacturing late last year and said that its first cells were destined for a solar park in eastern Germany.

Speed, as well as cell efficiency, are the name of the game when it comes to being competitive.Traditional CIGS manufacturing processes are done in vacuum chambers and are slower.

Companies like Nanosolar, Miasole, HelioVolt--and now IBM--are developing processes more cost-effective manufacturing techniques to undercut existing technologies.

[gerrrg]

That's just cool. Maybe someone will be printing flexible circuits that way too? By the way, who's tracking best practices for recycling / cleaning up the waste from solar cell production, and in particular silicon?

[galeso]

All solar cell machines are one gigawatt. Does this machine produce one gigawatt per minute, per year, ...? I assume Roscheisen meant output, since throughput seems to be used for computers & networks. Nice start but we will need 1/2 PetaWattHours added each year to keep up with the demand for electricity. So we would need a few hundred more of these plants to make a tiny dent in CO2 output.

[stlwest]

I think the government should allow the oil companies to drill and use the money from leases along with the 12.5% of the sale price that the government currently gets for land leases towards helping any company willing to allow its technology and cost structure to be analyzed and validated with money to expand thier production operations and provide special tax breaks to people who deploy and purchase thier technology.

[fuzzyllama]

So I have seen references to $0.30-$1.00/watt for CIGS solar made this way. Does that mean a 1GW printer would cost $300M-$1B a year to run??? And I thought my ink-jet supplies were expensive...

[fireofenergy]

So it finally made it, the solar printer! All the world needs is a few thousand of these machines "printing around the clock". I assume gigawatt means production capacity per year.

If the solar "foil" is long lasting like silicon cells, the costs per household would be less than a pack of cigs per day (at $2/watt) . Here's the math...
...
Consider that 50,000 sq mi will be only 10,000 square miles
actual collection after space for shadow, cleaning, habitat, beautiful rock formations, ect are accounted for. Further assume a 25% capacity factor = 2,500 sq mi, and 25% efficiency = 625 sq mi of pure 80 watts per sq ft electricity (constant production equivalent). = 5280 x 5280 x 625 * .08 (kWh per foot) * 8760 (hrs in year) = just over 12 Trillion kWh's! (3x more than the 4,000 billion we use now).

As for costs, at $2.50 per installed watt, (which would be 12,000 trillion / 8760) is 1.369 trillion x 2.5 = about 3.4 trillion. Now, since we "must allow conventionals" to play out, we should just pay as we go, thus no finaince charges (only inflation). If just every household (105,000,000) was to pay over 30 years, then that cost would be... just $3 per day (32,400 per household) which is way less than what we paid even yesterday for fuel costs!

I know, we have to give it all up because some one out there will say 'But we can't afford the extra powerlines, and what about batteries, storage, ect.'
My reply is figure on a pack of cigs a day because energy generation always costs more than its storage... Funny how CIGS also stands for a promising new breakthrough solar printing technology that might become cheaper than all those moving mirrors (but not as efficient).

Also, (way) less co2, and positive albedo, (to make up for melting glaciers)!