Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Nanosolar Commences Mass Production







This is the real beginning of a solar energy revolution.  As I have posted earlier this year, they are promising to deliver power at a dollar per watt.  Fifty years ago, Arthur C. Clark set that price as the benchmark for broad delivery of such power in competition with what was presently available.

Whatever present limitations exist, this is a fine start and this one plant can deliver the power equivalent of a nuclear plant every year.

Solar and wind are a long way from been convenient or perfect but they are now both price competitive and now with solar strongly so,

We have not yet fully mastered the art of collecting it all efficiently and shipping it across country, but we can certainly build and install this almost anywhere to defray line loss.

If we are surrounded by an ocean of cheap power, perhaps we can figure out how to optimize its use.

There will still be technical issues and cost issues to settle out, but the bench mark they have set puts the competition on notice that they may be soon out of business.  These production tools were quoted as deliverable for several million dollars and able to displace a nuclear plant every year.

We obviously need to cover the Sahara with them.

Solar Manufacturer Nanosolar Starts Mass Production!



Cheap, Efficient Solar Cells You Can Print

For a while, everybody was talking about Nanosolar. They were the Tesla Motors of solar panels, in a way. But for the past year, they’ve kept quiet and this led some people to doubt that the company really would be able to deliver on what it had promised. Was it all hype? Well, Nanosolar has now broken radio silence and the news are good. They’ve simultaneously released information about three things, along with a very cool video that shows what the inside of their factories look like, including the brand new one in Germany.



Nanosolar 640MW Robotic Factory in Germany

The first piece of news from Nanosolar concerns a solar panel factory in Germany with a capacity of 640MW/year. The fully-automated facility is located in Luckenwalde near Berlin, and its inauguration was attended by Germany’s Minister of the Environment and the Governor of the State of Brandenburg, among others.



The 640 megawatts per year number if reached when the factory is operated 24/7 at the rate of 1 solar panel every 10 seconds! Nanosolar has also announced that serial production in its San Jose, California, cell production factory commenced earlier this year and that production would be ramping up to meet the $4.1 billion in contracts that they already have.

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