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Solar Power Now Cheaper Than Coal?

By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Science, Technology

A company called Nanosolar says they’ve cracked the code by creating a way to manufacture solar cells 100x faster and 100x thinner.

From solve climate:

While other companies have been focusing their efforts on increasing the efficiency of solar panels, Nanosolar took a different approach. It focused on manufacturing.

Essentially, they’ve figured out how to print solar cells on thin sheets of aluminum with a printing press.

And they have momentum…

IBM’s top manufacturing executive has joined Nanosolar

The company raised $100 million to build a factory, and has secured more than 600,000 feet of manufacturing space.

It already has orders for the first 18 months of manufacturing capacity

Oh, and the biggest news? The power costs $1 a watt.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 23rd, 2007 and is filed under Science, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Solar Power Now Cheaper Than Coal?”

Edward Says:
December 24th, 2007 at 7:19 am
It may need to move past a sole-manufacturer/proprietary-deal stage in order to see some real widespread use.

But still, very promising.
Ziusudra Says:
December 26th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
Indium availability might be a problem for wide spread use.

They’ye pretty tight lipped about the top electrode, but with CIGS there’s more options, so component availability probably isn’t an issue there.

Their panels apparently have a 25-year warranty which I think is a little less than current tech but still long enough.

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