Solar power's new style is thin — and thin is in because it’s cheap:
Solar producers measure their costs in terms of dollars per watt of energy produced, a formula that’s a combination of the cost of producing a module and its power efficiency. Right now the best crystalline-silicon makers can sell modules at $3 to $4 a watt; First Solar can sell at around $2.40 a watt, a price the company expects to reduce steadily. “They’ve really pushed this industry over the threshold,” says Travis Bradford, author of The Solar Revolution. “They possess great technology.”But First Solar doesn’t generate the most buzz. That notoriety belongs to the start-up Nanosolar, which shocked its competitors in December when it announced it would begin profitably selling thin-film panels at $1 a watt. That figure is solar’s holy grail, the point at which power from the sun becomes generally cheaper than coal, without the help of subsidies.
Nanosolar ceo Martin Roscheisen, who, like many new solar kings, has roots in Silicon Valley, says he can achieve radical cost savings by directly applying photoactive chemicals with an ink composed of nanoparticles. Nanosolar’s PowerSheet cells roll off the machines like pages of newspaper in a printing press, at the rate of several hundred feet a minute. Roscheisen, an intense Austrian, says Nanosolar’s first 18 months of production have already been purchased. “We’re looking for a 35% market share in the next couple of years,” he says. “The simple truth is, we can scale a lot more product out for a lot less.”
Roscheisen’s competitors are, to put it gently, dubious about his claims, pointing out that the cost of raw materials alone should make it impossible to produce $1-a-watt panels profitably. “Of course they doubt it,” he says. “Otherwise it makes a joke of their business models.” Nanosolar’s claims should become more transparent as the company scales up and either meets demand or fails to; in the past, it has suffered production delays.
I guess we have to wait and see.