"Discovery may spur cheap solar power"

[Shyriath]

Someone once told me that solar power would never amount to anything, and that we would always have to rely on oil and gas. To them, I say: Buhahahahaha!

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/biztech/10/02/solar.cells.reut/index.html

"AMSTERDAM (Reuters) -- A major European chip maker said this week it had discovered new ways to produce solar cells which will generate electricity twenty times cheaper than today's solar panels.

STMicroelectronics, Europe's largest semiconductor maker, said that, by the end of next year, it expected to have made the first stable prototypes of the new cells, which could then be put into production."

Also according to the article, the company's (eventual) target is to get this to the point where using them will drive the electricity cost down to $0.20 per watt (current solar panels are about $4 per watt, burning oil and gas costs about $0.40 per watt).

Energy that is not merely renewable, but cheaper than the traditional hydrocarbons. If they can do it, my faith in human ingenuity will be restored!

[bif]

1. Set 'em up in the desert

out West and we're golden!

[LibInternationalist]

2. I hope this is real

and doesn't get quashed by someone

[LearnedHand]

3. This company offer stocks?

<grin>

[Old and In the Way]

4. Great news!

I am convinced that a great American economic/social renaissance could be created by focusing a public/private investment in renewable technologies....it would address our national security by stopping our over reliance on ME oil, provide new industry opportunities to create jobs, etc.

I don't understand this statement "(current solar panels are about $4 per watt, burning oil and gas costs about $0.40 per watt)." Seems like this is the wrong method to compare costs. Sure 1 watt of solar may cost $4.00/watt today, but shouldn't this be measured over time? Assuming these numbers are per hour, wouldn't the same solar watt = the cost of gas in 10 hours and be cheaper every hour, thereafter?

[Shyriath]

7. True.

The article doesn't say anything about cost over time. :shrug: It is a curious omission, though...

[Throckmorton]

14. The $0.40 per watt for fossel fuels is pure fiction, and a false metric

A better comparason is the cost of purchased electricy verses the cost of solar power per Kwhour.

In my section of the USA, electricty cost $0.12 per killowatt hour. That is $0.00012 per watt, included in that price is the cost of fuel, geberating plant debt service, delivery, and profit.

Now, according to the DOE, the average day in my part of New England has 4.2 hours of sunlight. So, this hypothetical $0.20 per watt solar array will produce 4.2 watthours of power per day. It will take 238 days to generate 1 KWhours worth of energy, or a payback of 397 days at the cost of $0.20 per installed watt of array. After that, the array would be paid for and the energy would in effect be free. There would always be some cost for maintenance, but even if it was %10 of the installed cost be year, the array would still be paid off in under 795 days. If the array has an installed life of even 10 years, the cost per KWhour from it would still be under 2.7 cents.

The payback for the system at todays prices would take 21 years, assuming no maintenance costs at all. If you applied the same 10% of the installed cost per year for maintenance that was used in the above example, it has a negative payoff.

I suspect this breakthrough is something of a pipe dream. If the claim was a two fold, or ever 3 fold reduction in cost, I'd be less sceptical. Not many things have had a 95% price reduction in one jump, not even de-regulated airline seats :)

[bahrbearian]

15. $300 billion so far , for an oil war , How many live's ?

[Throckmorton]

19. I truely don't understand your question,

Does that somehow make oil cheaper? Anything that adds to the price of oil only makes solar more attrcative, not less.

Based of 12 cents per KWhour, Photovotaics require 21 years to payoff in my part of New England. This period is based on PV being $4.00 per watt to install. Anything that raises the price of electricity sortens this payback time.

If your suggesting that spend 300 billion on alternate energy research would lower the price of these alternate sources, I'd say there is little doubt about this.

All this being true, I still feel the a 95% reduction in cost in a single jump is a pipedream.

[jody]

5. Wonderful news. With this, we wouldn't have invaded Iraq eom

[stoystown]

6. This is awesome - turn the bedus back!

It would be a great thing to restore the middle east to the pre-WWII rate of wealth it so richly deserves.

Then we could not have to deal with those spoiled brats.

[Melsky]

8. I'll be following this story with interest

I live out in the desert, and would like to go solar!

[Vogon_Glory]

9. Cheap Solar Power--Cool. Also a Boon to the Third World As Well

My congradulations to the boffins at STMicroelectronics. I genuinely hope this article is true.

I'm doubtful that this development could make the US an all-solar economy, but it does look to have several positive benefits. First, it could help lower most people's energy bills as many people install solar panels to help power their homes and small businesses. It also is a big kick to the groin to those right-wingers who have insisted that busting into ANWR and also many "Lower 48" wilderness areas is essential to "energy independence."

More to the point, I'd like to see energy production move away from the Middle East. While this development wouldn't put the Saudis out of business, it might mean less petrodollars to fund Wahhabism and its political expression through al Quaeda and the Moslem Brotherhood.

I also think that cheaper solar panels would be a boon to much of the third world. They could be installed to run lights (flourescent and also light-emitting diode technology, run fans, small refrigerators and help Third world countries also become less dependent on imported oil. That, in turn, would help their economies.

[hatrack]

11. Exactly!

Why go to the trouble of building bulky, expensive transmission lines when reasonably priced remote power systems for clinics, schools, villages would make one hell of a lot more sense in places like rural Botswana, Burma or Ecuador?

[cprise]

10. EU will be renewable energy kings

Between Wind and this solar technology, they're going to make our economy look pretty sorry.

[Vogon_Glory]

12. Next Thing The Euros or Asians Might Do Is...

As a follow up to developing cheap solar voltaic panels, I wouldn't be surprised to see either the Europeans or some smart cookies across the Pacific develop inexpensive fuel cells that cost far less than the ones currently on the market and that can run on fuels like alcohols or methane. The Europeans (On one end of Eurasia) and the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese (on the other side of Eurasia) are both energy importers interested in keeping a positive balance of payments and aren't nearly so beholden to the oil companies as BushCo and its majority-controlled subsidiary, the United States of America.

In the abstract, it's marvellous to see what engineers and scientists can do when their's both incentive and a lack of political obstructionism. In real life, I'd be thoroughly pissed off that the inventors weren't Americans working here in the USA.

[mastein]

13. Answering questions

The per watt numbers quoted in the article have got to amortized over the life of the panels. That is the only sensible answer. There are two issues that I see remaining for this to become a truly reasonable way to conduct business here in the US:

1) Unless you have somebody administering the output of the cells or there is a major breakthrough on the battery side of the technology regulating the output both over a 24 hour cycle and between season is going to be a significant challenge. Most of the solar banks I have seen have been installed for large commercial buildings. While the cells are good, the secondary infrastructure (such as the steam piping, which generates the electricity) was very difficult to manage and maintain.

2) The economic mechanisms to break free of the state granted monopolies in electricity without compromising service. Yes, I saw what happened with the Enron caused blackouts in CA and the havoc they wreaked with deregulation. So how now do we convince the power companies that this is a reasonable way to proceed? Does the cost have to be half of current modes, 3/4's? And that doesn't even address the Good Ole' Boy Networks that constitute the cartels we now have. If you want an idea of what I am talking about here, look at what has happened with ethanol production for vehicular use, or the use of wind farms in the western US.

[Loyal]

16. Solar energy must become mainstream

n/t

[JohnyCanuck]

17. We will need some real breakthroughs to reduce our need for oil.

The problem for us is that oil is a very condensed source of energy and relatively easy to extract and refine into useful products. While the goal is to replace our dependence on oil with alternative sources of energy, it will be difficult to accomplish.

Currently we expend some money and energy to produce a gallon of gasoline (dig oil wells, pump out the crude, ship to a refinery, refine into gasoline). However the gasoline we have produced is well worth the cost because we get so much more energy and economic value from it than what was invested to produce it. The ratio of inputs to outputs is relatively low (i.e. small energy/money inputs but larger energy/money outputs). However alternative sources of energy, including to date photo-voltaic cells, require much more upfront investments in money and energy compared to the outputs of energy produced by the end product. When compared to fossil hydrocarbons the input to output ratio is significantly higher and in the case of the existing solar cells, my understanding is that it takes more energy to produce the solar cell than the solar cell itself produces over it's estimated lifetime.

To get a good understanding of how significant this new development in solar technology is going to be, as well as the economic cost of the solar cell, we have to concern ourselves with the energy cost as well. In other words does it return a significantly higher amount of energy than it takes to produce it. It would be interesting to see how this new development in photo-voltaics stacks up in terms EROEI (Energy Returned over Energy Invested).

For more info on this topic, check out:
The End of the Road

Even a cursory survey of the economic developments of the past century and a half reveal the strong connection between oil and economic growth. The complexity and sophistication of the western economic system was built on a foundation of oil and it requires a huge leap of faith to believe that it can be maintained in the face of a substantial and prolonged decrease in the stability of that foundation. Assuming that a suitable replacement for oil were available, and assuming that western economies implemented full-force efforts to employ such alternatives, the chances for success would be slim, given the lead-times required. But alternatives are not up to the task. Most experts agree that a comprehensive exploitation of all forms of alternative energy would result in the production of only one third of the energy currently consumed in the US. Only thirteen percent of the US landmass is suitable for the development of wind turbines. Perhaps forty percent is usable by solar arrays and the rivers have been damned nearly to their total capacity. Wind energy is dependant, obviously, on the sporadic nature of the resource, an while advances have been made in the field, the ability of wind to provide consistent, wide-spread energy is still very limited. Photovoltaic energy is still nothing more than a dream. While it does work, the energy required to produce a photovoltaic cell exceeds the energy that the cell can recover over any reasonable amount (dozens of years) of time. Hydro-electric energy is clean and relatively cheap, but most of the usable dam sites have been used. The tar sands and oil shales of the US mid west are often touted as a plentiful future, once the price is high enough, but a critical review of the physics leads to a different conclusion. Walter Youngquist, of the Colorado School of Mines writes:

“Perhaps oil shale will eventually find a place in the world economy, but energy demands of blasting, transport, crushing, heating, adding hydrogen, and the safe disposal of huge quantities of waste material are large. There appears to be a positive net energy recovery from oil shale processing (Penner and Icerman, 1984), but it is low and does not compare with net energy from conventional oil well drilling.” (Youngquist 243)

While these “near oil” sources do exist, and may be usable, they do not offer the advantage of the high net energy that more traditional sources provide. Oil may indeed be available for alternative sources but not in the quantities or prices necessary to keep the world economy functioning at more than a fraction of its present level.

Further, for an alternative energy source to replace oil in a way that would guarantee a continuation of the present economic systems, it would have to share substantially all of the qualities of oil. Alternative forms of energy would need to be inexpensive to exploit, both in financial and thermodynamic terms. They would need to be easily stored and transported, and they would need to have the ability to be easily converted to many types of products. These are all properties of oil that western economies not only exploit, but also rely on to a degree that is not commonly appreciated by the general public. A tank of wind in one’s car is not particularly useful, and about the only other energy form that wind can be converted in to is electricity. Electric vehicles are feasible, but not yet practical (and without huge advances in battery technology may never be) and the cost of converting the world’s auto fleet to electricity would be immense. This single cost could be enough to bring western economies to their knees. And that conversion is only one of hundreds that will have to be made.


Also 9 Critical Questions About Alternative Energy

1. How Much Energy is Returned for the Energy Invested (EROEI)?

Have all energy costs been taken into account? This is where too many alternative energy sources fall flat after the simplest examination.

Commercial hydrogen offers one clear example of how it takes more energy to produce the fuel than can be obtained from burning it. The current feedstock from which hydrogen is produced is natural gas. The natural gas is then treated with steam. Steam is water that is boiled using more natural gas, oil, or coal, either in the form of direct fuel or to generate electricity which is used to boil the water. Common sense dictates that this cannot be a solution because it still relies on fossil fuels.

Converting water to hydrogen is done through electrolysis. Scientist David Pimentel has established that it takes 1.3 billion kWh (Kilowatt hours) of electricity to produce the equivalent of 1 billion kWh of hydrogen. (BioScience, Vol. 44, No. 8, September 1994.)

Even a small positive EROEI, if obtainable, is not a solution because fossil fuels on the whole return many times the energy invested, not just a fraction. That's why we use them.

[NNadir]

18. These are excellent points, but not the whole story.

Energy density and the term used in your reference EROEI are factors completely ignored by many alternative energy advocates. Really though the EROEI should be reduced simply to cost in dollars or Euros or whatever currency you choose.

The point of this thread is that solar energy costs are coming down. It is difficult to imagine, with a solar cell lasting twenty or thirty years, that its EROEI is all that low. The capital cost of installation is still quite high however, and the energy source is not available 24/7, which will always represent a difficult problem. Maybe this new technology will serve to reduce capital costs. We shall see.

Nuclear energy is of course the most dense form of energy known and, in spite of public perception to the contrary, is quite safe and quite clean. The fuel is so cheap, that it is practically not a factor at all, but capital costs are high, largely because of poor public understanding of the technology. In more sane countries around the world, France and Japan, for instance, capital costs are relatively low and electrical energy is rather cheap.

A big problem with nuclear energy is that it is much better suited to constant loads than it is to peak loads; it is not particularly easy for both technical and economic reasons to change the power output. As peak loads often occur during the day however, nuclear energy has a real possible synergy with solar electricity.

In places with ready access to cheap environmentally sound carbon sources, such as biomass or municiple waste, nuclear energy (in the form of high temperature reactors of types not generally used today) can be used to generate hydrogen/carbon monoxide mixtures know as syn gas. With syn gas, it is easy to make many of the compounds now made from petroleum and natural gas. Without transformation into syn gas and transformation into a form of liquifiable, easily transported fuel, I very much doubt that biomass will be in most places economically (or environmentally for that matter) acceptable.

[Kolesar]

20. Energy solutions by deprivation

The TV stations could be forced to go off the air at 10:00 PM so that people will turn off their televisions to save electricity. Rolling blackouts could force electricity conservation. If we had an electricity grid that was fed mostly by windpower, rates could be jacked up when the wind was not blowing so that people would pay higher rates when using the fossil-based make-up electricity sources.

In about forty years, when only "Saudi" Arabia is producing petroleum, people will be forced to travel less, and would be lucky to have a battery powered automobile to get to work and get to the market. Driving vacations and jetting across the country will become a thing of the past. (I use the term "Saudi" Arabia, because at the moment that country is owned by the Saudi family. I am sure that the BFEE & PNAC have plans to subvert or invade them, too. How does "Bush" Arabia sound to you folks?)

[Throckmorton]

21. Ok Spike, you win.

Now where did I put that suicide pill?

[ozone_man]

22. The report has confused power with energy.

I will try to dig up the information from the source (STMicroelectronics) tomorrow at work. What you pay for is energy not power. Energy = Power * Time. My guess is that the $0.20 refers to KWHr cost, which is the normal unit that utilities measure. In any case, we'll have to take a closer look at the source. Sounds very promising.

[ozone_man]

23. "Over a typical 20-year life span"

I see my confusion, so the $0.20 per Watt makes sense after all. If it really is a 20:1 improvement over existing cost and a 2:1 improvement over oil, that would be incredible.

Another link with some more details on this project.

http://us.st.com/stonline/press/news/year2003/t1355h.htm

[Throckmorton]

24. Still seems to be at "In the Lab" stage of development.

But, it does seem to be a promising technology. Even an installed cost of 1.00 or 1.25 per installed watt would make this economical for most private and industrial users in New England. Assuming reasonable maintenance costs of say 5% of installed price per year, the pay-off would be only 8 or 9 years. Assuming that electricity stays around the 12 cents per killowatt hour it is now. In sunnier climates, the pay-off is much quicker.

Well, we will have to wait and see.

[ozone_man]

25. I followed your examples. Nice work.

I was getting mixed up with what they were calling the $0.20 per watt, which meant the installation cost. Usually, we think in terms of KWHrs, as you point out, $0.12/KWHr is typical in NE.

This organic polymer research sounds very interesting. I think they are right in targeting the cost and not the efficiency. Leave it to the Europeans to develop this technology, while we keep our heads in the sand using fossil fuels.:eyes: