I am not sure if there are any other companies still trying to make a go of this but last I checked -- a couple of years ago -- there were two or three others.
A number of people realized that they could lay down really thin films of CIGS materials and process the cells reel-to-reel. Imagine loading up a 10 ton roll of thin stainless steel in the morning and having 200 acres (or some crazy number) of solar cells by evening. If they had been able to sort the process technology out it would have been INCREDIBLE.
But of course the devil was in the details. This was a hardware based company so it's not terribly surprising that their R&D time went out past their funding. Look at how badly hardware Kickstarts do on average, blowing multiple "deadlines" because often-times hardware is more difficult than software. Not that it's impossible, but it's definitely unforgiving.
When it absolutely has to be exactly right the first time it's going to take a lot longer than you think, even once you account for the fact that its' going to take a lot longer than you think.
The article mentions Gallium Arsenide and that it's prohibitively expensive as a straight up replacement for Silicon. They're tinkering with the form factor to figure out the best way to focus more light on small bits of GaAs.
One of the commenters on the article lives in rural Texas where it's too expensive to run electricity.
He lives comfortably on ~300 watts and recently bought a 100 watt panel for $130 shipped. His biggest expense? Batteries. Solar panels last, but batteries have to be constantly maintained and replaced.
Without a cheap, reliable storage medium, solar is useless or extremely expensive. All the more so at power plant scale. Maybe solar+hydro combination installations would work.
You mean in the far-from-norm situation you mentioned, is solar "useless" without storage. And even in that context, you're wrong. Many off-the-grid electricity consumers use diesel or fuel-oil based generators, there are already many solar systems that feed into such systems, backing off fuel usage when solar resources are available, then getting out of the way when it's not. No storage necessary.
In the "real-world", solar is connected to the grid, and the grid acts like the storage.
Storage becomes an actual concern when solar becomes a large fraction of the grid usage. Or in somewhat contrived situations such as an off-the-grid home using solar as the sole source of power.
Actually the grid has the same storage problem. On a small scale you can dump power into it and it is just a drop in the bucket. But on a large scale, you can't store power easily.
The most efficient alternative is to pump water up, then drop it through a turbine later. But world wide the total storage is only 3% of instantaneous generation capacity. So you can absorb/produce less than an hour's worth of electricity. Good for evening out a little fluctuation, but not a big one.
This is why natural gas is catching on. You can spin it up and down quickly, to accommodate the fact that wind and solar fluctuate quickly. By comparison both coal and nuclear require boiling a big tank of water. That's slow to heat up, and slow to cool down, so it doesn't adjust very fast as external power changes.
Fracking might have more to do with its sudden resurgence it than peaker plants, although granted it is probably the easiest power source to scale up and down.
"Without a cheap, reliable storage medium, solar is useless or extremely expensive. All the more so at power plant scale."
Really? Why is it more so at power plant scale? When you're connected to the grid you have the benefit of being attached to more users, which seems like it'd increase the probability that someone somewhere could use the power. Lots of power plants - e.g. anything fossil fuel based can simply burn less fuel - can reduce their output fairly simply, so until they all bottom out it seems you wouldn't have a problem getting the energy to someone who wants it.
Where this starts to fall apart is transmission losses; there is benefit to having the consumers and producers be closer together, in terms of resistance. It's possible that high-Tc superconductors may help in this space in the coming decades.
Did you read the article? The panels already got cheaper, but the cost of installing and using them didn't, and are making up a bigger and bigger part of the total cost for PV systems. At some point, making the panels even cheaper doesn't make the cost of the energy so much cheaper:
I did read the article. The problem is, panels got cheaper, but they are nowhere near cheap enough.
Note that installation costs can be dwarfed by panel costs if you are in a third world country, where wages are lower.
I agree about the rest of the infrastructure required. Batteries, charge controllers and inverters are very expensive still. More appliances need to use DC, so that we can use less inverters.
This is how you optimise software as well. Find the function that is the bottleneck and optimise it. After doing that, some other function will be the bottle neck. Rinse and repeat.
We seem to be in the first iteration of optimisation right now (from what I understand of the article).
Eventually you hit a wall - because the other costs mount up and the efficiency point has a lower bound it can't get past. Solar is stuck with only being productive at most < 50% of the day. It's like designing a super-efficient aircraft, but one that can only fly during the middle of the day. It has to be more than twice as efficient as a regular aircraft, and even then, airlines aren't likely to touch it. because the gains wouldn't be worth it. You have to have an order-of-magnitude increase in efficiency in not only the panels, but also in storage. But the kicker is that improvements in power storage efficiency would also benefit many other power generation methods.
The price of non-silicon cells I think is largely dictated by the extra processing. I think the hardest thing you need to do for silicon is grow it as a single crystal, but even that isn't 100% required (but it will boost efficiency). And you've got abundant, cheap raw material.
Other types of cells have more complex growth and fabrication processes, often requiring a vacuum, tight stoichiometry/growth control, and expensive/finnicky/dangerous precursors.
Comments
What about lower efficiency, but much cheaper panels? What is it that drives price up so much? Production capacity? Market forces?
That's exactly the direction some folks have gone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_indium_gallium_selenide_...
One of the startups, nanosolar, seems to have failed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanosolar
You can actually pick up some nanosolar stuff on ebay right now.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/151190922913?lpid=82
I am not sure if there are any other companies still trying to make a go of this but last I checked -- a couple of years ago -- there were two or three others.
I was always under the assumption that Gallium Arsenide was the future after silicon.
What's the difference between GaAs and CIGS?
A number of people realized that they could lay down really thin films of CIGS materials and process the cells reel-to-reel. Imagine loading up a 10 ton roll of thin stainless steel in the morning and having 200 acres (or some crazy number) of solar cells by evening. If they had been able to sort the process technology out it would have been INCREDIBLE.
But of course the devil was in the details. This was a hardware based company so it's not terribly surprising that their R&D time went out past their funding. Look at how badly hardware Kickstarts do on average, blowing multiple "deadlines" because often-times hardware is more difficult than software. Not that it's impossible, but it's definitely unforgiving.
When it absolutely has to be exactly right the first time it's going to take a lot longer than you think, even once you account for the fact that its' going to take a lot longer than you think.
The article mentions Gallium Arsenide and that it's prohibitively expensive as a straight up replacement for Silicon. They're tinkering with the form factor to figure out the best way to focus more light on small bits of GaAs.
that's a damn shame about nanosolar -- they had a really cool process that made a lot of sense.
One of the commenters on the article lives in rural Texas where it's too expensive to run electricity.
He lives comfortably on ~300 watts and recently bought a 100 watt panel for $130 shipped. His biggest expense? Batteries. Solar panels last, but batteries have to be constantly maintained and replaced.
Without a cheap, reliable storage medium, solar is useless or extremely expensive. All the more so at power plant scale. Maybe solar+hydro combination installations would work.
You mean in the far-from-norm situation you mentioned, is solar "useless" without storage. And even in that context, you're wrong. Many off-the-grid electricity consumers use diesel or fuel-oil based generators, there are already many solar systems that feed into such systems, backing off fuel usage when solar resources are available, then getting out of the way when it's not. No storage necessary.
In the "real-world", solar is connected to the grid, and the grid acts like the storage.
Storage becomes an actual concern when solar becomes a large fraction of the grid usage. Or in somewhat contrived situations such as an off-the-grid home using solar as the sole source of power.
Actually the grid has the same storage problem. On a small scale you can dump power into it and it is just a drop in the bucket. But on a large scale, you can't store power easily.
The most efficient alternative is to pump water up, then drop it through a turbine later. But world wide the total storage is only 3% of instantaneous generation capacity. So you can absorb/produce less than an hour's worth of electricity. Good for evening out a little fluctuation, but not a big one.
This is why natural gas is catching on. You can spin it up and down quickly, to accommodate the fact that wind and solar fluctuate quickly. By comparison both coal and nuclear require boiling a big tank of water. That's slow to heat up, and slow to cool down, so it doesn't adjust very fast as external power changes.
Fracking might have more to do with its sudden resurgence it than peaker plants, although granted it is probably the easiest power source to scale up and down.
Fracking makes it economical. But its ability to be a counterbalance to renewable is one of the reasons that environmentalists get behind it.
"Without a cheap, reliable storage medium, solar is useless or extremely expensive. All the more so at power plant scale."
Really? Why is it more so at power plant scale? When you're connected to the grid you have the benefit of being attached to more users, which seems like it'd increase the probability that someone somewhere could use the power. Lots of power plants - e.g. anything fossil fuel based can simply burn less fuel - can reduce their output fairly simply, so until they all bottom out it seems you wouldn't have a problem getting the energy to someone who wants it.
Where this starts to fall apart is transmission losses; there is benefit to having the consumers and producers be closer together, in terms of resistance. It's possible that high-Tc superconductors may help in this space in the coming decades.
HVDC solves the line-loss issue with current technology. It's still expensive to install new transmission lines though.
Did you read the article? The panels already got cheaper, but the cost of installing and using them didn't, and are making up a bigger and bigger part of the total cost for PV systems. At some point, making the panels even cheaper doesn't make the cost of the energy so much cheaper:
SSSSSSSSSPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP
SSSSSSSSSPPPPPPPPP
SSSSSSSSSPPPPPP
I did read the article. The problem is, panels got cheaper, but they are nowhere near cheap enough.
Note that installation costs can be dwarfed by panel costs if you are in a third world country, where wages are lower.
I agree about the rest of the infrastructure required. Batteries, charge controllers and inverters are very expensive still. More appliances need to use DC, so that we can use less inverters.
This is how you optimise software as well. Find the function that is the bottleneck and optimise it. After doing that, some other function will be the bottle neck. Rinse and repeat.
We seem to be in the first iteration of optimisation right now (from what I understand of the article).
Eventually you hit a wall - because the other costs mount up and the efficiency point has a lower bound it can't get past. Solar is stuck with only being productive at most < 50% of the day. It's like designing a super-efficient aircraft, but one that can only fly during the middle of the day. It has to be more than twice as efficient as a regular aircraft, and even then, airlines aren't likely to touch it. because the gains wouldn't be worth it. You have to have an order-of-magnitude increase in efficiency in not only the panels, but also in storage. But the kicker is that improvements in power storage efficiency would also benefit many other power generation methods.
The price of non-silicon cells I think is largely dictated by the extra processing. I think the hardest thing you need to do for silicon is grow it as a single crystal, but even that isn't 100% required (but it will boost efficiency). And you've got abundant, cheap raw material.
Other types of cells have more complex growth and fabrication processes, often requiring a vacuum, tight stoichiometry/growth control, and expensive/finnicky/dangerous precursors.