First panels come off production line at NanoSolar

[garybeck]

I just got word that NanoSolar's (NanoSolar.com) new manufacturing plant just produced their first few thousand solar panels and shipped them out today. This is great news - I've been watching this company for years as they have been releasing information about their plans.

In the 19 years I've been in the solar industry, I've seen many promising technologies written up in articles and companies claiming to have a new breakthrough. I remember about 15 years ago Texas Instruments announced they discovered a way to make PV panels from metal grade silicon and they started building a manufacturing plant. they never were able to completely explain to me why they abandoned the project. But suffice to say I'm skeptical of these things. NanoSolar has interested me more than the others, partly because of their backing, which includes the owners of Yahoo, Google, and IBM. This is for real.

The other reason I am optimistic about this company is that their innovations are not solely based on new breakthrough technology. They get much of their cost savings in scale of production. Their new manufacturing plant will be able to make solar panels faster and more efficiently than any other on earth. Like cars and radios in the past, they were very expensive at first but came down in price when they started increasing production. This is very promising.

They believe their thin-film technology panels will eventually sell at $1 per watt, roughly 1/5th the going price, which will make solar energy competitive with other forms of "conventional" energy production. When that happens, all bets are off. Even republicans will be clamoring to put solar panels on their roof.

Note to all you Coal-lovers who lurk on this website - they state specifically:

"We are aiming to make solar power stations up to 10MW in size. They can be up and running in six to nine months compared to 10 years or more for coal-powered stations and 15 years for nuclear plants."

I'm going to try to get more info and share it soon.

[ixion]

1. woohoo!

that's excellent news!

[jpak]

2. K&R

:thumbsup:

[TheMadMonk]

3. Slight disingenuity there given the usual capacity of coal/nuclear plants.

In all three cases it works out to roughly a month of construction time per megawatt of generated power.

Given that it is now possible (albeit still in the lab) to build a tabletop device capable of generating a dense beam of neutrons of specific energies, the price and construction times on small scale nuclear plant should plummet dramatically.

Same tech can also "incinerate" nuclear waste and generate fuel from thorium and depleted uranium.

[garybeck]

5. no offense, but

please take your thorium and depleted uranium, uranium mining and all that CRAP to some other planet away from me and my kids. we don't need it.

there are people DYING today, as we speak, from the toxic mess created from uranium mining, and nuclear power plants. I've had just about enough of that.

thanks and have a nice day.

[TheMadMonk]

17. No offense, but actually learn something before you spout off.

In the 60 plus years since the first plant was fired up under that squash court, the total number of deaths due to radioactive pollution from nuclear reactors is less than the annual death toll just amongst the miners who drag the coal we burn for power from the ground. And a fraction of the numbers of deaths that can be directly attributed to pollution from coal fired power plants.

The total number of confirmed deaths to date from Chernobyl (last time I saw) was in the high 50s IIRC. In 2006 45 died in US coal mines alone. Yes there will be more deaths. But they will be "statistical lives" lost. (40 lives shortened by 2 years = 1 death sort of thing.) Chernobyl's contribution over the course of a full century will not come within a bulls roar of what coal kills every single year.

You might also want to look at the impact of some of the green alternatives. Many, including solar are intermittent generators, they require some sort of storage facility to keep the juice going 24/7. Storage accumulators (batteries), the current best available option, require up to a hundred kilograms of toxic metals per person, just to satisfy domestic demand alone. The manufacturing of solar panels also involves the use of some very, very nasty chemicals.

I am not disparaging these alternative energy sources, they all still beat what we need to replace hands down, except in one rather crucial factor. Capacity. Tens of megawatts sounds like a lot, but compared to the hundreds of megawatts that a single coal fired plant generates it's not very much at all. It will take hundreds of factories like the one mentioned in the OP just to meet the increase in demand for power, let alone start replacing existing power plants.


I do ask that you take a good long hard look at the faults in your own "champions". And I do respectfully ask that you refrain from making unfounded, erroneous and uniformed accusations against something which even in its current primitive form is nowhere near as unsafe as you believe.


The neutron beam technology which I mentioned in my previous post makes a Chernobyl style accident absolutely impossible in reactors employing it. Turn off the neutron beam triggering it and the reactor stops stone cold dead. If by the most determined of efforts some idiot did manage to get the "fuel cell" hot enough to cause it to melt (as close to a melt down as is physically possible with this configuration of reactor) the result could be safely caught in a sand filled bucket.

And as I mentioned, the same neutron beams can be used to "incinerate" nuclear waste and render it non-radioactive. That it also opens up access to a fuel supply which is good for at least 10,000 years is ultimately neither here nor there. Fusion power and beamed power from space based photovoltaics should kick in long before we've exhausted the existing stockpile of depleted uranium and spent reactor fuel.

One technology (albeit still in the first stages of development) all on it's little lonesome eliminates two of nuclear powers biggest drawbacks: Waste/Spent fuel; and An active element that worked by virtue of being kept forever on the verge of explosion.

Furthermore it opens up the possibility for practical small scale nuclear reactors which can be safely sited exactly where there is demand.
Reactors which could in a single generation bring the third world well and truly into the 21st Century.
And which could be safely used to power all forms of freight and mass transit vehicles.


For the foreseeable future, ground based solar, wind, wave and tide, biofuels and all the other alternative energy sources available to us today, at best, will allow the world to stumble along, business as usual and only slowly bring the 21st Century to developing nations.

Safe, portable, nuclear power, would make it possible to accelerate the pace of human development on this planet astronomically.


Whatever the source, (I'm betting on nuclear) the one single answer to the World's woes is power. Essentially unlimited, easily convertible, raw energy opens up the major survival bottlenecks: water from the sea and crops from high rise farms and even animals grazing on pastures grown under artificial lights.

With sufficient power every single domestic unit on this planet could have it's own 1/4 acre (1/10 hectare) block under open sky and our total ecological footprint as a species would still be far smaller than it is today.

And with sufficient power, preventing our ecological messes and cleaning up our old ones becomes a far easier task.


We will not get to where we need to be, a universal high standard of living with a sustainable, green ecological footprint, by scrimping on the power we use. By all means it is very much in our interest to use that energy as efficiently as is practicable.

But that alone is not enough. We need to find a way to generate power to burn: To illuminate crops and pastures; To reduce our waste stream to it's constituent elements for recycling and for safe disposal; to entertain us; To sieve the ocean for the trace elements we need to build our new global lifestyle.

[garybeck]

23. hmmm. not sure where to start with my response to that.

You start spewing off all this comparison to COAL and how nuclear causes less death than COAL. I am not a COAL advocate. I am a SOLAR advocate. Why are you comparing nuclear to coal for me? Is that relevant? My OP was about solar, not coal, right? So if you are going to try to tout NUCLEAR ENERGY to me, don't tell my why it's better than COAL, ok?

That seems to be contageous here in this forum. I post something about solar energy and nuclear advocates attack me, explaining that nuclear is better than coal. Seems like standard diversionary tactics to me.

Now, lets' get to the facts, which you are ignoring. One of my main beefs with nuclear is the mining of uranium which I mentioned in my previous post. You didn't mention the dangers and deaths due to uranium mining whatsoever. Instead you talked about how nuclear is better than coal.

That is what we call DIVERSION from the facts. Either you don't know about the dangers of uranium mining or you're diverting from the facts which will only make you lose credibility.

I invite you to do some research on the how many people have died from uranium mining and how many other people have been sickened with terminal diseases. Add that to your Chernobyl numbers, which seem to be the only deaths from nuclear you recognize. This is simply wrong. We don't know how many people have died from the use of nuclear power but it's much higher than that and I can tell you people are dying right now as we speak from it. Next, take a look at the cancer rates for communities nearby nuclear reactors, nationwide. Talk to people who live in these communities. Now you take a guess at how many people are sick and have died from your nuclear power and add that guess to your total.

Your theory about zapping the nuclear waste with "neutron beams" is completely theoritical. If it were proven safe and approved, I'm sure we'd be doing it here in Vermont instead of stockpiling our toxic juice.

Your figures on solar energy toxicity are just wrong. Batteries do use lead but lead is recycleable, and not toxic unless ingested. That is very different than uranium and nuclear waste. Also you fail to recognize that in a solar future we will not be using batteries for the most part. We will most likely be using hydrogen as energy storage, which is completely non-toxic and requires no mining whatsover. Even today most medium to large scale solar energy systems sold do not use batteries.

stick to the facts. don't divert the issues.

have a nice day.

[TheMadMonk]

24. Why bring coal up? Because for the foreseeable future...

...Solar will only supplement a primarily coal based infrastructure. It's a long way off just keeping up with increasing demand. Nuclear has the potential to replace it entirely if people would just stop shying at imaginary demons. And as safe as it is, it could be a hell of a lot safer still if operators were allowed to replace fifty year old reactors with more recent designs.

Dangers and deaths due to uranium mining? I'd say a good deal of that would come down mining practices and not the material itself, since we have fuck bad shit going down here in Australia, one of the largest uranium mining nations on the planet.

It's been a while since I read it, but there was an article (in SciAm IIRC) on the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster several years on. The articles authors were expecting to find things to be a whole lot worse than what they actually found. They did the number crunching, they counted the sick. And then they went back and did it again, because the numbers were so low.

The nuclear power industry is one of the safest industries on the planet. You are more likely to die in just about any other job you care to name.

Back to coal for a moment. More radiation is released into the environment from burning coal than comes from nuclear energy. Spend much time around granite? Your wigglers are frying, esp if you sit on it. Concrete? Fly ash from coal plants makes it a bigger source of radiation than mans contribution. Mans contribution to mans total radiation exposure is just a few few percent of that total.

Which communities would those be? Russian ones for the most part I suspect, because I have read articles talking of some of the horrors happening there. Since the authorities in the old USSR knowingly and deliberately ignored the dangers associated with nuclear energy. Using the same logic, I can argue that recycling is a danger to us all because of how it's done in China.

No, the ability to generating a tight and tuned neutron beam is a demonstrable scientific fact. As is the ability for such a beam to transmute one element into another sufficiently efficiently for it to be a practical method of waste disposal. It is demonstrably safe. Lack of approval keeps it from being put into the hands of engineers to turn it from a laboratory process into an industrial one.

I strongly suspect one of the biggest reasons that this is not being pushed aggressively is that, yes, it can be used to manufacture plutonium and other weapons grade fissionables. I'd say this is also the reason that breeder reactor technology was never developed, as they logically should have been, to the point where it could have been "incinerating" nuclear waste decades ago.

Cadmium is toxic and IIRC so is lithium. Hydrogen as a storage medium? Not likely while it's a shitload easier to use the coal fired grid as a load smoothing mechanism. Yes this reduces greenhouse gas emissions, but it can't eliminate them, which needs to be our ultimate goal.

I notice you skated over the issue of the toxic chemicals used in the manufacturing of solar cells, or just about anything else made of silicon.

Learn some facts.

You too.

[Nihil]

25. Good post BTW ...

> Lack of approval keeps it from being put into the hands of engineers
> to turn it from a laboratory process into an industrial one.

What's the latest on this technology please?
I remember reading about it being announced as functional at a lab level
but that's about it until your post upthread. Whose approval is lacking?

[TheMadMonk]

32. DoDed perhaps? Same a the scramjet.

I just did a quick Google on neutron beam accelerators + transmutation and didn't recognise anything as being obviously related to the original article I mentioned. However, there's still a lot of interesting info to be found.

Who's approval? AEC, USG, whoever regulates the construction of nuclear facilities I presume. Though it does appear from my brief Googling that things are beginning to move in India and other places around the globe.

[bananas]

35. The inventor recently signed an agreement - this looks very good!

The inventor of the neutron beam nuclear energy technology is Carlo Rubbia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_amplifier

Energy amplifier

In nuclear physics, an energy amplifier is a novel type of nuclear power reactor, a subcritical reactor, in which an energetic particle beam is used to stimulate a reaction, which in turn releases enough energy to power the particle accelerator and leave an energy profit for power generation.

The concept is credited to Carlo Rubbia, a nuclear physicist and former director of Europe's CERN international nuclear physics lab.

He recently signed an agreement for development of his technology:

http://inglele.blogspot.com/2007/12/solar-thermodynamic-signed-agreement-in.html

04 December 2007

Solar thermodynamic, signed agreement in Italy with Nobel Carlo Rubbia

Experimental solar thermodynamic panels. The mirrors concentrate the sun's rays on a tube within a highsalt liquid, that can keep high temperature. The heat is used to produce electricity.

More information are available on the POWERSOL Project website

What? The inventor of this nuclear beam technology is working on solar energy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Rubbia

Current Activities

His research activities are presently concentrated on the problem of energy supply for the future, with particular focus on the development of new technologies for renewable energy sources. During his term as President of ENEA (1999 - 2005) he has developed a novel method for concentrating solar power at high temperatures for energy production, known as the Archimedes Project, which is presently being developed by industry for commercial use.

Carlo Rubbia is currently principal Scientific Adviser of CIEMAT (Spain), Adviser of the Italian Minister of the Environment, Land and Sea and one of the members of the high-level Advisory Group on Climate Change set up by EU's President Barroso in 2007.

LOL!

[kestrel91316]

27. ROFL. Are you related to NNadir????

[TheMadMonk]

31. Nope. Never heard of them until you mentioned them.

Sounds like a person I'd like though.

[garybeck]

29. "keeping up with increasing demand"

have you ever heard of energy efficiency?

are you aware that we could actually REDUCE our energy demand with reasonable energy efficiency measures?

the answer is not in finding new ways to meet our rising energy demand. we can keep our energy demand stable along with our population growth.

[TheMadMonk]

34. Yes increasing demand. WORDLWIDE demand.

I am fully aware of the concept of energy efficiency. And I'm sickeningly aware of just how much the US could reduce its demands with some not particularly onerous initiatives. Presuming of course that one could convince the average Amurikan that deliberate and conspicuous wastefulness does not imply possession of a dick suitable for clubbing elephants to death.

Further, as great as that wastefulness is, curbing it would not free up enough energy to meet the expected demands of a rapidly developing world.

Many of the "alternatives" would (apart from eliminating CO2 emissions) serve only to increase our ecological footprint. None offer any great hope of reducing it by any significant amount.

Nuclear's potential capacity to supply essentially limitless quantities of power would allow us to find ways to reduce our ecological impact by an enormous amount.

[garybeck]

30. "Lack of approval keeps it from being put into the hands of engineers"

that's my point. solar is here now. this new solar technology is coming off the assembly line, today.

if you want to talk about future technology, that's another subject.

again you fail to address uranium mining, showing you never have even looked into it, and you completely ignore the facts about communities close to nuclear power plants and increased cancer rates.

you also show you have no understanding of the potential of hydrogen for storing and transporting energy created by solar cells. maybe you should look into it sometime.

[garybeck]

33. and did it ever occur to you that maybe there's a reason it's not approved?

by the way, solar energy is approved.

[TheMadMonk]

37. And when there's at least another 1000 odd assembly lines up and running...

...solar might begin to make a dent.

Actually I have looked at the dangers associated with uranium mining and the facts about communuties close to nuclear power plants. And I gave my personal thoughts on the subject in an earlier post. Statistically you're full of shit. It is perfectly possible to find cancer clusters and two headed babies :hyperbole: entirely unassociated with nuclear power plants (or indeed other presumed/known risk factors). It is not possible (or at least last time i looked) to make a definitive statistical link between proximity to properly managed nuclear power plants and increased cancer rates.

Having said that: I accede the possibility and even probability, that there is some slight risk. However, that risk is demonstrably lower than living in close proximity to a busy road and I am not referring to a person's chance of being skittled by an inattentive idiot paying more attention to his cell phone than the road. It is lower than any number of risks that we willingly (or with blithe ignorance) face every single day. Charcoal chicken anyone? Living in Denver (or at high altitude anywhere) exposes people to more radiation than would living inside a nuclear facility.

Whatever it's (currently undefined) environmental risks, properly managed nuclear power beats the living crap out of what we're willing to accept right now to power the machines through which we are having this argument. And that is assuming that we use power plants not one whit more advanced than are already in operation today. Moving on to the next generation of reactors (which have been languishing on drawing boards for decades thanks to exactly the same type of people who once believed in demons and witches) would make whatever risks there might be even more difficult to quantify.

I have a real problem with people who seem to be perfectly willing to accept the known and considerable dangers of the status quo (in any number of ways, not just regarding nuclear power) over demonstrably better options, because those better option do not meet their ideas of perfection. People will suffer until they come around. seems to be their way of thinking.

Analyse it any way you care to choose, if we were to replace coal with nuclear fewer people would die. No if buts or maybes.


Hydrogen storage? Personally, I don't have a problem with the old town gas style storage tanks, I've got one at the end of my street, and I think they're pretty cool, have since I was a kid. However I suspect most people would disagree. Which leave some rather energetically expensive choices. For mobile applications these choices make sense. For static applications they are wasteful, but, you can bet your bottom dollar that self centered wowsers will cheerfully burn all those efficiency savings you spoke of earlier, so as to avoid having their aesthetic sensibilities offended.

Then there is hydrogen's dirty little secret. There are insufficient quantities of platinum group metals on this planet to make a hydrogen economy at all possible.


BTW: Sorry for the thread hijack. But not too sorry, since it's seems to be proceeding relatively productively.

[bananas]

36. Maybe this is the Scientific American article you were thinking of?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=127595&mesg_id=127595

Scientific American Magazine - January, 2008

A Solar Grand Plan

By 2050 solar power could end U.S. dependence on foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions

By Ken Zweibel, James Mason and Vasilis Fthenakis

<snip>

The technology is ready. On the following pages we present a grand plan that could provide 69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy (which includes transportation) with solar power by 2050. We project that this energy could be sold to consumers at rates equivalent to today’s rates for conventional power sources, about five cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). If wind, biomass and geothermal sources were also developed, renewable energy could provide 100 percent of the nation’s electricity and 90 percent of its energy by 2100.

<snip>

The authors are discussing the article in the comments section: ...

[kestrel91316]

26. What garybeck sed.

[diane in sf]

4. Thank you, may the good news continue...

[LSK]

6. K&R

[pberq]

7. Thank you for posting this

I can't wait to put some panels up on my roof.

[Yuugal]

8. K&R Go solar! Go wind! nt

[roguevalley]

9. I want me some. Note to me: SHovel snow off roof.

[Yuugal]

10. Nooooooooooooooooooo!

Unless the weight is gonna collapse the roof, let that free blanket of insulation lower your heating bill a few %.

[roguevalley]

13. the only time it comes off is when it is too deep. eleven feet one year.

[Kolesar]

11. Thanks Garybeck. Please keep us apprised.

consider this thread kicked :kick:

[patch1234]

12. this place is for real. or not?

looks dubious.


no data sheet
mysterious secret ingredients

[melody]

14. Nanosolar you mean? That's Beveridge's company

They're in Palo Alto. :)

[bananas]

16. They are very real.

Some information, references, and links on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanosolar

[kestrel91316]

28. "mysterious secret ingredients". What, you never heard of

proprietary technology, aka trade secrets??

Oy. Is our children learning?

[suziedemocrat]

15. Great News! Thanks!

[bvar22]

18. K&R

We are eagerly awaiting for these low cost panels to filter down to individual consumer levels at a decent price.

[Zachstar]

19. Go Go GO!

The faster this plant turns out these panels. The bigger margin we build to hold the fort when the oil energy enconomy collapses.

Every watt towards solar is a step towards fusion in its own right.

[losthills]

20. Is it 2050 already?

[Zachstar]

21. No

2050 at current rates will see either us never having to worry about energy again. OR us being in the dark ages with no way to move around but with buggy and steam engines.

[losthills]

22. I'm not arguing...

I'm just making a hip NNadir reference....