Solar just got cheaper

A Silicon-Valley start-up company has produced its first commercial quantities of a new solar power technology that promises to revolutionise the industry – particularly if its claims of being cheaper than coal are proven to be true.

Nanosolar, a company backed by Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, along with other prominent venture capitalists, and therefore very well funded, announced just before Christmas that it had produced its first solar modules, which are to be shipped to Germany where it is constructing a 1MW solar plant with the industrial giant Beck.

The technology developed by Nanosolar is radically different from other solar panels because instead of using large, heavy panels lined with silicon, it prints a thin solar film directly on a metal foil – making it light, flexible, easy to install, and, says founder Martin Roscheisen – very cheap to produce.

The San Jose-based Nanosolar developed a proprietary ink that is based on "nanoparticles” of a material called copper indium gallium selenide (CIGR), which can be printed on metal foil, which is cheaper and 20 times more conductive than stainless steel.

Other companies that also specialise in 'thin-film solar' technology also use CIGRs, but require a vacuum chamber to disperse the particles. Nanosolar says its method of printing is cheaper and more effective. It can literally produce huge rolls of the product that are metres wide and up to kilometers long.

Nanosolar has constructed a manufacturing plant in California that it says has filled its order book until mid-2009, and is about to open a second factory in Germany, where government policies on solar energy targets and feed-in tariffs have made it one of the best places in the world to develop solar technologies.

Nanotechnology is part of the so called 'third wave' of solar power devices. The first used thick silicon wafer cells, but they were cumbersome and expensive. The second used very thin silicon layers, and managed to reduce the cost by half. The third wave being led by Nanosolar uses materials than can be printed directly on to conducting surfaces, and claims to be able to cut costs to one third of previous technologies.

If the company can prove that its technology is scaleable and can deliver on its cost promises, its potential impact on renewable and other energy providers will be enormous.

Production of solar photovoltaics jumped by half in 2007 to an estimated 3,800MW worldwide, taking its total capacity to around 12,400MW.

But even though it has been the fastest growing energy source in the world, the growth of the solar power industry has been hamstrung because it has cost around three times as much as coal to produce energy.

That gap would have been reduced once carbon had been priced in to the equation, but Nanosolar threatens to turns all previous assumptions about the future for solar power on their head.

Although the solar receptors can be printed onto rolls, and can presumably be easily installed on garages, household roofs, even the sides of trucks, the company sees its best application being in open or "free field” installations that might each generate 10MW of power, enough to satisfy the needs of 5,000 to 7,000 homes.