Nanosolar Powersheets - reliable solar power
Wouldn’t you love cheap solar energy wherever you are and incredibly flexible ? Well, this could be made possible with the Nanosolar Powersheet. The greatest fact at this technology is that you can put the sheets on your roof, windows and anywhere you want and generate cheap solar energy for all your needs.
Until now, the silicon and glass panels were generating energy at $3 per watt, which is very high, but the Nanosolar Powersheets could generate the energy at a rate of 10 times less, at 30 cents a watt, but that’s not sure. If they only manage to get the energy with $1 per watt, they can compete with coal and the solar energy could finally become profitable to use.
The Nanosolar Powersheets are revolutionary, due to their low cost energy generation and high functionality, so we shall soon find them in stores. It’s expected especially companies to use them, due to tax breaks and rebates, along with running cost reuduction.
What makes it also cheap are the materials used in it’s productions, being made of an Aluminum foil for stability, Molybdenum electrode, an ink made of indium, copper, selenium and gallium, a semiconductor that doesn’t absorb light and a clear Zinc oxide semiconductor.
A solar panel manufacting factory has been built in San Jose, being the biggest in the world and it may produce solar cells to generate more power than all the US, meaning 430 megawatts.
Whoa. That’s invention of the year! (so far)
$.30 per watt? Do you mean $.30 per watt-hour? You can’t really pay an amount of money for something that isn’t measured over a period of time.
No, they mean watt. It is a measure of the peak power of the solar cells, not of the energy output. Here is a back of the envelope calc for energy cost if you buy 10Kw of panels.
The warranty on these panels is 25 years, according to Nanosolar, and I’m guessing on installation
(10000W*.30$/W)=3000$+10000$(installation)=13000$
10kW*8h/day*365day/year*25year=73000kWh
13000$/73000kWh=.00548$/kWh~.6 cents/(kilowatt*hour)
I made an error, that should say 730,000, not 73,000. Also, that averages at about 30,000kWh, per year, which is at least 5 times what an average house would use (I think). I really just pulled the installation cost out of my ass, since I have no idea how much it would cost. This stuff will no doubt be much cheaper to install than fragile glass or silicon panels though.
Pricing and cost of electricity can be confusing at times because sometimes it is specified as a rate or an actual amount. Electrical rate is measured in watts or kilowatts or megawatts, which is how much is produced per amount of time. The confusion is because one watt is really one joule per second, so watt is a rate, even though the term doesn’t specify time explicitly. So watt or kilowatt or megawatt is a rate of energy production. As an analogy, if you were to build a factory making widgets, you would talk about how much that factory could produce, that is, a rate of production (e.g, 1 million widgets per year). It’s easy to comprehend because you explicitly mention the “per year” part.
As consumers of electricity, we get billed in kilowatt-hours, which is an amount of electricity that was used in a billing period. That’s why the time is in the numerator, so a kilowatt-hour is really a certain number of joules, in this case 3,600,000 Joules.
So when they talk about this technology being cheaper than coal, they are comparing the cost to produce a rate of electricity over the life of the technology. It is based on the cost to build and install the technology and its operating cost over its lifetime. Coal plants have a fixed install cost AND an operating cost the cost of the fuel (coal). But solar technology has little or no operating costs but does have an installed cost - sometimes called “first cost.”
It’s this installed cost that is the tough hurdle for consumers because it involves a capital investment, something consumers don’t find sexy or desirable, but it sure would more than pay for itself at 30cents/watt.
So the calculation above that guesses on installation cost is probably incorrect because the installation cost should already be part of the calculation as it is surely baked into the figure for coal-powered generation. So if a user would require 25kw-hr, you are talking about $7,500 to buy and install these. The downside is solar is never 100% - you have perhaps 5 hours a day on average where it is producing. This is a big step for solar for sure, but not a panacea until we find a way to store generated power.
I hope what they claim doesn’t hide anything negative.
Now, the challenge is how to store electricity for cloudy and rainy days, and how to smooth out the power grid for flutuations.
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