THIN FILM SOLAR PANELS

Archive for September, 2011

Thin Film Solar Panel Forecast

Thin Film Solar Markets at $2.9 billion in 2010 are set to grow to $44 billion by 2017, with the total solar energy market reaching $ 1 trillion sometime in the middle of 2021.

‘Thin Film Solar Technology Market Shares, Strategies, and Forecasts, Worldwide, 2011? study has 496 pages, 189 tables and figures. Thin film solar energy units are evolving vacuum based solid state technology.

The worldwide demand for energy is steadily increasing, doubling every 15 years. The major effort is to sustain growth in the electricity supply without causing irreversible harm to the environment. Solar energy has rapidly grown as a clean, renewable alternative to limited fossil fuels. Recognition of the need to reduce reliance on coal and fossil fuels is driving interest in solar energy.

Thin film solar panel and systems market segments include CadTel. CadTel is attracting more attention than CIGS thin film. Thin film silicon solar cells use significantly less silicon, about 1/100th the thickness of the normal silicon layer. The thin film silicon solar cells production process is far shorter than that for crystalline silicon solar cells. Therefore thin film silicon solar cells are expected to greatly expand the potential of solar energy.

According to the lead author of the study, “grid parity has been reached by thin film solar energy products for many areas of the world.” When thin film solar systems are looked at over the 25 year useful life of the systems they provide very attractive payback.

First Solar Cuts Costs to Beat China PV Makers

First Solar Inc. (FSLR), the biggest U.S. solar company, is cutting costs out of its production process and boosting efficiency as it seeks to extend its price advantage over a rival technology promoted by China.

First Solar has developed a cell that converts 17.3 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity, a record for the technology, and those techniques may yield conversion rates of 15.3 percent in mass production, said Chief Technology Officer David Eaglesham. That compares with 11.7 percent the company achieved on average in the second quarter.

“There were about a dozen changes that we’ll be phasing into production,” starting in the fourth quarter, Eaglesham said in an interview at the company’s factory in Perrysburg, Ohio, on Sept. 2. He didn’t give details of the changes.

The reductions may make First Solar the first company in the industry to compete on price with fossil fuels without subsidies, said Mark Bachman, an analyst at Avian Securities LLC. That would be a victory for President Barack Obama, who is under fire for supporting Solyndra LLC, a competing company that received $535 million in U.S. loan guarantees before filing for bankruptcy on Sept. 6. First Solar has $5.35 billion in federal loan guarantees.

Industry Slump

First Solar shares have fallen 34 percent this year, outperforming the 50 percent slump in the Bloomberg Industries Large Solar index. Solar companies tumbled as demand slowed and subsidies were pared in Germany and Italy, two of the biggest markets, and prices for panels dropped.

Already, First Solar has the lowest costs in the industry, producing so-called thin-film solar panels for 73 cents a watt. The higher efficiency levels will drive those costs down further, making the panels more attractive than traditional photovoltaics.

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has mostly avoided funding polysilicon, betting on thin-film to drive down the installed cost of solar power to $1 a watt by 2020, a 75 percent reduction from the current industry average. That would make solar cheaper than buying power from utilities that mostly consume coal and natural gas.

Independence Day for Thin Film Solar Panels

San Francisco With the high-profile collapse of Solyndra placing the wider thin film community under scrutiny, PV Insider has been examining how the industry intends to fight back by reducing its costs and develop new innovations.

This is one of the coolest stories I’ve seen in awhile. It was shared with me by one of CleanTechnica’s great readers on our Contact page, but I couldn’t get to it for awhile. Luckily, as I started writing on it, I found out that the technology and its 19-year-old inventor just got a $275,000 boost!

Eden Full’s SunSaluter — Summary

Eden Full, a 19-year-old Princeton University mechanical engineering student has developed a non-toxic, cheap, recyclable device made out of metal and bamboo that allows solar panels to follow or track the Sun without the use of an electric motor. This does two things: 1) it boosts the output of the solar panels by about 40% (huge) and 2) it does so using a much cheaper and simpler method than traditional trackers commonly used in commercial projects (her technology costs $10, a lot less than the typical $600 solar tracker).

I love the bit in the video below where she says that she could teach Kenyan children how to construct and fix the device if it breaks. That’s the way to help the world!

SunSaluter Winning Awards Left & Right

Eden and the SunSaluter (being developed by her company, Roseicollis Technologies, now) have won a number of big awards for this ‘simple’ device. As mentioned above, she just won $275,000, in the 2011 Postcode Lottery Green Challenge. She also won $10,000 in the the EcoLiving 2011 Awards a few months ago, and she’s also won a $100,000 fellowship from the Thiel Foundation this year. More on that from Tyler Hamilton of Clean Break:

On May 25, Full was one of 24 students under the age of 20 to win a $100,000 fellowship from the Thiel Foundation, set up by PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor (read: super rich dude) Peter Thiel.

It’s not just a handout, however. To get the money, Full must commit to taking a two-year break from her studies at Princeton so she can dedicate herself full time to developing her product, which she calls the SunSaluter.

Full is taking the plunge. In mid-August she is packing her bags and moving to Silicon Valley, where she’ll be mentored by a network of entrepreneurs and tech experts working with Thiel. She’ll be learning how to develop her product, but also how to build a business and raise money.

She emphasized that the $100,000 award doesn’t necessarily go toward technology development. It covers living expenses, allowing Full to throw herself into her work without worrying about paying bills.

“The money will give me a chance to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes,” she said.

I asked her if she was nervous being parachuted into this high-tech heartland.

“I do feel very intimated, not only by the calibre of the other projects, but because there’s a huge standard to meet and a lot of hype around it,” she continued. “But a little pressure is good. It will make me perform better.”

How the SunSaluter Works

Hamilton does a good job of explaining the technology as well, as much as is possible until Eden receives her patent and can safely reveal more:

The concept is simple, really. Steel expands at a different rate than aluminum when exposed to heat. Full has combined steel and aluminum into bimetallic strips, which are attached to an axel running across the back of a solar panel.

She won’t go into too much detail until her patent on the invention is published, but when the sun hits the strips the resulting heat causes the aluminum part of the strip to expand more than the steel part. This causes bending and twisting of the strips.

Full has figured out a way to configure and control her system so that the bending strips keep her panels, for the most part, directly aimed at the sun.

How the SunSaluter Came About (And Did I Mention that Eden Built a Solar-Powered Car When She Was 9?)

Here’s a little more on where the inspiration for this device came from, via Eden’s Green Challenge page:

I built my first solar-powered car when I was nine years old. I fell in love with the idea of clean technology that was better for our planet. As I grew older, I became frustrated with how solar panels were not optimized to collect their maximum potential. I began building prototypes for different tracking systems and the SunSaluter was born!

My parents instilled a sense of responsibility towards the environment when I was younger and I carried this value with me throughout my life. I had the opportunity to travel to the Canadian Arctic two years ago where I witnessed the depressing lack of sea ice as a result of climate change, which made it hard for animals to find food and land. On a Zodiac boat ride, I had a chance to get within five metres of a polar bear that was so desperately hungry he didn’t even bother to turn away from us. This was an emotional moment for me when I realised that I had a chance to help prevent this problem from getting worse. I would have to help with the reduction of CO2 emissions.

More from Eden

And since she is such an inspiration inventor and do-gooder, here are a few more quotes from Eden. From the same page:

The Green Challenge prize will make all the difference in my work. I will be able to deploy more pilot projects in both emerging and developed markets, and design a subsidized financial model so that people in developing countries would be able to afford the SunSaluter as well. With the SunSaluter, the 65,000-panel solar fields in California could generate 40% more electricity to sell to the grid. This would increase the value of solar energy in the renewable energy market and help to reduce CO2 emissions. A family in rural Kenya could power one additional lightbulb in their hut at night since the SunSaluter is more affordable than a traditional $600 motor. If many panels harness 40% more energy consistently, then 40% more of the community can benefit from the electricity. For emerging markets, this will eliminate the need for kerosene lanterns, encouraging communities to pursue sustainable development.

And from EcoLiving: “When I realized that I could invent a technology for social good, I fell in love with tinkering with something that mattered.”

For more on the technology, Eden’s success, and her company’s goals, check out this submission of hers to the Dell Social Innovation Competition.

Congrats to Eden! And good news for the world. Hope to hear more about this technology and Eden soon. Drop us a line if you run into anything new.

This is a truly wonderful post from The Oil Drum by Goddard College’s Charles Eisenstein (licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 U.S. License). Giving more depth to peak oil than the good infographic on that presented yesterday, but also delving deeply into the problems of our economy and how they are linked to our energy and environmental crisis, this 3-pager is my recommended reading of the month, at least. The concentration of power (increasingly obvious to us) and how that is linked to our energy infrastructure is, in particular, a very interesting part of it all for me, and piggy-backs on John Farrel’s excellent pieces on democratizing our electricity system.

I was just listening to this great cover of a great Rolling Stones song — Bitter Sweet Symphony — while reading this and thought it was actually a good match for the piece, so let’s start off with that:

(Thanks to Andrew Burger for recommending we republish this article, and thanks to my good friend Jacek Fior for reminding me of this great song and video.) 

by Charles Eisenstein

When theorists approach the peak oil problem from the perspective of finding a substitute that will allow us to maintain our present energy infrastructure, their conclusion is one of despair. There may be many substitutes for oil as a concentrated form of storable energy, but none of them are nearly as good as oil itself. Those invested in the status quo would, quite understandably, like to maintain it, but it is becoming apparent even to the most highly invested that the status quo is doomed; that it can be maintained only temporarily, and at a rapidly accelerating environmental cost.

The transition before us is not merely a transition in fuel types. It is also a transition in the whole energy infrastructure, both physical and psychological; a transition away from big power plants, distribution lines, and metered consumers; away from capital-intensive drilling, refining, distribution, and consumer fueling stations. More broadly, it is a transition away from centralization, concentration, and all the social institutions that go along with it.

Both the energy system and the money system are based on accumulation and the concentration of power. Not only our energy infrastructure, but our dominant yet invisible way of thinking about energy, presupposes a centralized system of distribution based on a highly concentrated energy source. Many alternative energy technologies have made little headway, not because they are technologically unfeasible, but because they don’t fit into our present physical, financial, and psychological infrastructure.

There is a causal as well as a metaphorical parallel between the concentration of power in oil and in money. A concentrated power source that can be stored allows social and political power to concentrate in the hands of those who control it. It generates very different social dynamics from an energy source that is universally distributed and constantly renewed.

For one thing, the profit potential of the latter is intrinsically less. Once you have sold the geothermal pump or the PV array, the buyer is self-sufficient, unlike the electrical power consumer who has to pay the metered rate in perpetuity. Energy dependency and economic dependency are closely linked.

A similar pattern holds in other fields as well. In medicine, for instance, the universal, endogenous medical knowledge of several centuries ago that employed common weeds as medicine has given way to a system in which both knowledge and pharmaceutical medicines have been purified, abstracted, and concentrated in an exclusive domain.

There is little profit potential in dandelion or burdock, nor did the village herbalist or country doctor of yesteryear make much money. We might apply the same analysis to the migration of legal power from informal community-based mechanisms of dispute resolution to the centralized, codified, and therefore in a sense concentrated mechanisms of the law. So also for education, entertainment, and news.

In all these realms though, the trend toward increasing concentration is nearing its peak, or has peaked already. The peak manifests in many different ways. In some areas it reflects resource depletion; in others, demand saturation; in others, it is due to technology. For example, thanks in large part to the Internet, a tide of decentralization and disintermediation is erasing the producer/consumer divide in the areas of news and entertainment. That more and more of our time is spent watching “content” produced by amateurs suggests that we are approaching “peak Hollywood,” in parallel with peak healthcare, peak pollution, peak advertising, peak fisheries, and peak oil.

It should not be surprising, since the profit motive has been the primary driver towards these peaks, that we should be approaching a peak in the realm of money as well, a peak that we might call “peak debt.” The crisis in money is ineluctably related to the crisis in everything else, because the viability of our money system depends on growth: the conversion of nature into goods, and relationships into services. This conversion cannot proceed much farther, due to resource depletion and the inability of society and biosphere to sustain more damage.

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