Very cool, first I hear about that one. I definitely feel like solar PV technology will improve much in the coming years, and at the same time fossil fuel prices will keep climbing.

Functional, Eviromentally friendly, and nice to look at, sign me up for one.

Anyone know if these will combine with lens concentrators for even more light amplification.

That was weird... Not 30 seconds before I found this article, I was pondering the relationship between surfact area and intensity in photovoltaics (I'm at a coffee shop in Southern California with free wireless, and a low battery). I thought a collector would be great, but one with a form factor the size of a credit card (folded) would be even greater. Thanks for the tip.

*drool*

I've seen dozens of these types of breakthroughs over the last 20 years. None of them have helped the solar industry much.

The problem with solar isn't cost of collectors, it's the cost of superstructure, power lines, and power storage. Those will never change. Solar is a dead end technology.

You say "The problem with solar isn't cost of collectors, it's the cost of superstructure, power lines, and power storage. Those will never change. Solar is a dead end technology."

Yes, this is a problem if we're planning to make solar a big business option to replace power plants. Solar becomes cost effective when you introduce it on a local level.

The ideal balance point for solar energy would be one solar installation for a neighbourhood of 10-20 houses.

Solar is cost effective on scales like this. It is low maintenance, it requires no resources to keep it running, and it is reliable with no moving parts.

I agree, these new panels are elegant and beautiful. I'd much rather have a patio covered in these than traditional panels. I hope to see them in production soon.

This could really be pretty game-changing. Everybody's been waiting for a great new concentrator technology, and I wish these guys the best of luck. I've got my fingers crossed for them.

If they can hit $2.40. . . hallelujah. The best part about it is you can see through 60% of it too! You can curtain a building in this stuff and still see through the windows.

Do it guys! I'll be rooting for you.

Solar is anything but a dead end technology. It is an important part of the future. If it was truly dead end, the business would have died forty years ago when the cost of PV was astronomical.

'I've seen dozens of these types of breakthroughs over the last 20 years. None of them have helped the solar industry much.' I disagree. There have been breakthroughs over the past twenty years, but only in the past few years has one seen breakthroughs in concentrating light on PV cells. The amount of solar energy that silicon cells have been able to convert to electrical energy has not increased much over these past twenty years (conversion efficiency remains below 20%, I think). But this technology doesn't try to improve the conversion efficiency, it tries to improve the amount of solar energy falling on the PV cell. And all of the breakthroughs in the past twenty years have helped the industry by reducing production costs of PV cells and improving efficiency. Demand for PV is so strong that the industry as a whole is substantially increasing capacity to meet a shortfall in supply. New companies are being formed almost weekly. It happens to be a hot technology in the stock markets. TreeHugger has just announced that GE will build a 60 hectare PV plant, the worlds' bíggest, in Portugal using what I assume to be currently available PV panels (not these much cheaper ones). The cost of electricity produced by PV plants remains above those from fossil fuel but the costs have been declining steadily these past 20 years. And when you consider both that the price/kWH produced by PV plants will continue to fall and possibly steeply, as this technology shows, and that fossil fuel prices continue to soar, the day is fast approaching when it will be cheaper to produce electricity from PV plants than from fossil fuel plants. At that point, PV plants will quickly displace existing fossil fuel plants as consumers, including all those that couldn't care less about the environment, start buying the cheaper PV electricity. Even now, PV plants are springing up all the time in Spain, mostly as one reader said to power small communities.

'The problem with solar isn't cost of collectors, it's the cost of superstructure, power lines, and power storage. Those will never change.' All energy plants have high superstructure costs. I do not know but I seriously doubt that these costs are significantly higher for a fossil fuel plant than for a PV plant. In any case, I believe these costs are factored into the calculations for the price/kWH of PV electricity, since as we all know the company does not have to pay for the sunshine, it has to pay for the investment. As for power line costs, I don't believe those would be significantly higher from those of a fossil fuel plant - if they are higher at all. Storage is an issue since PV plants only produce energy during the day, luckily for us the vast majority of energy is consumed during the day when people are awake and working. As opposed to, say, a nuclear plant which produces electricity more or less constantly. Why do many places have cheaper nightly rates? Because many (most? all?) areas produce energy 24 hours a day and demand is concentrated during working hours. So while storage is an issue, it is not a deal breaker. And the storage issue is changing. Storage technologies are being developed all the time. Latest I heard of was ultra-capacitors. When will such storage technologies become commercially available and affordable. I don't know, but I am sure it will take a lot less time than it took for PV to reach the point at where it is now. Superstructure costs, too, will continue to fall as new technologies make the products more efficient and the production process leaner. The same goes for power lines.

A quick question for anyone that might be able to answer it. I plan to build a large greenhouse for vegetable and herb growing and plan to incorporate systems to automatically regulate heat, irrigation, lighting, and insect control. A number of these will require some amounts of electrical energy and I would like to attach solar panels to the greenhouse. I am now thinking of possibly buying some of these panels in a year (if they are out by then) and using them rather than normal glass. Will the glass in these panels allow through the infrared heat of the sun's rays? And will these panels be safe/adequate for use as glass in a greenhouse?

Solar panels will be all over the place in the near future. Unless some other more advance technology becomes more efficient, I can definitely see cell phones covered in solar casings. Cars with solar windshields and holographic paint. Sky scrapers where the whole building is covered in solar panel. I have some where in my favorites a site where some company made solar panels out of clear glass that you can use as your windows. I’ll add it to my site in a few days www.turktech.us

Turk

I've read about that solar PV glass. Actually, I think I read about it here at TH. But if I remember correctly, that stuff is pretty expensive. Do you remember how much the programmed selling price per watt is once they start selling (if they haven't already)?

Thanks for the interesting responses.

However the cost of infrastructure, power lines, and yes for storage technologies for solar power is an order of magnitude higher than for fossil fuels. This is because of the simple, and vexing problem that there are basically very few watts of power per square meter of sun. Until someone figures out how to move the earth closer to the sun, to increase the solar flux, all solar power systems will be constrained by this very difficult and insurmountable obstacle. The fact is, it takes HUNDREDS OF SQUARE MILES of solar panels, even at the highest imaginable efficiency rating, to produce ANY significant percentage of the needs of an average power grid. Very few solar advocates who I've talked to have really sat down and considered just how much concrete, steel, water, land preparation, and maintenance infrastructure will be required to build and maintain such a gargantuan project.

Low-maintenance? Sorry, anything but. You're talking about hundreds of square miles of struts, panels, wires, glass, and other materials. One good howling sandstorm or hurricane and your solar farm is a tangle of damaged goods. Compared to that, a fossil or nuclear plant is compact and easy to maintain.

Now let's talk about the spectacular size of the infrastructure requried to build all those solar chips or concentrators. We're talking about an enormous industry that would be required to build the billions of square meters of fragile solar components required.

Then let's talk maintenance. Hundreds of square miles = a huge workforce of technicians, trucks, wires, and a massive dumping ground of old broken equipment. (I live near a big wind farm. Half the turbines are out of commission at any time and they are constantly being patched. Many of them are getting grimy and covered with fiberglass patches. Looks like crap. Very low long term output. Very short lifetime.)

If this is done on a neigborhood basis, none of these problems go away, they are simply dumped on the backs of the homeowners, who then must spend a significant amount of their time fiddling with their solar gear. IF they are technology wizzes who like that kind of fiddling, fine. But the vast majority of the public have neither the expertise or the interest in that kind of work.

In comparsion to all this, an average nuclear plant or fossil fuel plant is a dream. Compact. Easy to site. Infinitely fewer constrtuction materials required to build (remember again, an average solar planet = hundreds of square miles of steel and concrete. A nuke plant is a few dozen acres.) Hell, we could double the nuclear output of the US easily...just double the size of all the existing reactors. You can't do that with solar. Or, look at France. In 25 years they converted 75% of their electrical generation to nuclear power.

It's all about energy density friends. Solar has the lowest energy density of any energy source bar none. It's fickle, sporatic, and frankly, completely lame. Totally unsuitable for a modern high-energy society such as the one that we enjoy. (Do you have any idea how much electricity is required to keep servers humming so we can post on this web site? An astronomical amount).

And to top all this off, about 1/3 of the human race, currently in povery in India and China, are now demanding a modern lifestyle, which will just about double the total energy consumption of this planet. Even if we could deny those billions of fellow citizens a healthy, rich life, is it morally acceptable for us to do so? If we want them to stop overpopulating the earth and destroying the ecosystem, don't we have to give them a society that allows this? A society with plenty of energy to keep their hosptials and computers running 24X7? And where is that energy going to come from?

Not solar. Look at any honest projection. Most nations are planning to burn coal. Trillions of tons of it. And solar doesn't even make the list, for the simple fact that any good competant economic planner can add up the total raw materials required to build a significant solar infrastructure, and they can see that the raw material requirements would break their society. They aren't even going to try, nor should they try, because it would break them.

Yeah, solar is great for a few remote areas, and for a bit of middle-of-the-day load balancing in hot season. Maybe it will get 5% penetration to the energy economy, over the next few decades. But that's it.

And again, no amount of clever engineering will make much difference, because the limiting factor cannot be changed. Energy density. Watts per square meter. The laws of thermodynamics will rule, and they declare that solar power cannot exceed a certain economic level.

On the other hand, nuclear power has a LONG way to go, and can be optimized FAR beyond what it currently runs at. Unlike solar, nuclear power has few hard limits in terms of efficiency improvements. There are already reactors built today that squeeze 20 times more energy per pount of uranium, and produce 60X less waste. Plant cost could drop 5X easily.

Once the new nuclear power industry really wakes up and starts to boogie, in the next few decades, solar will never keep up, except on a small scale.

And so I still predict: it's a dead end technology, at least in terms of the large scale. Wind is probably the same although it might do a bit better.

But... keep working on it! Maybe I'm wrong! :)

"Maybe I'm wrong!"

You are, and I'm going to enjoy spending the rest of my life proving it.

Tom. I'd like to thank you for giving a thought out explanation for your opinion. This type of discussion helps me to refine and improve my own thinking on such issues and your comments have helped. I agree with most of the information and reasoning you present and many of your conclusions. But I have a difference of opinion on some important points and because of these come to a different conclusion.

'However the cost of infrastructure, power lines, and yes for storage technologies for solar power is an order of magnitude higher than for fossil fuels. This is because of the simple, and vexing problem that there are basically very few watts of power per square meter of sun....it takes HUNDREDS OF SQUARE MILES of solar panels, even at the highest imaginable efficiency rating, to produce ANY significant percentage of the needs of an average power grid.'
The solar constant is 1370 watts per meter square per hour, on earth it is about 1000. Assuming a 20% conversion efficiency for single crystal silicon PV, you get 200 watts. Assuming a location with a yearly average of 6 hours per day, one square meter of PV would produce an average of 1200 watts per day per meter square. To produce one megawatt per day would require 834 meters square. Let us round that to 1000 meters square. To produce 1000MW per day would require one million meters square or one square kilometer or 100 hectares. A typical new nuclear power plant reactor is rated at around 1000MW; at a 90% capacity factor this is 900MW per hour which means it produces 21600MW per day. To produce the same as one nuclear reactor requires 21,6 km square or 8.4 square miles. In 2005, the US produced 782000000MW of nuclear energy with 103 nuclear power plants (~20% of total electrical energy produced in the US that year). This is 2,142,466MW per day. To produce this amount of electrical energy per day with PV would require 2142 km square or 827 miles square. 827 square miles to produce as much as all the nuclear reactors in the US. And I was addressing in my previous post the far more numerous stock of fossil fuel plants, not the nuclear ones. This is about 1/2 the size of Rhode Island (which is 1545 m sq). Or to put it more visually, it is basically the same land area as the city of New York and Los Angeles put together. If we managed to build and maintain those two cities, it should be infinitely cheaper and easier to build up the same land area with PV panels. The Mojave desert of southern California is 25,000 m sq. To produce all of the US's electrical energy needs in 2005 would have required around 4000 mi sq; less than 20% of the Mojave.

'Very few solar advocates who I've talked to have really sat down and considered just how much concrete, steel, water, land preparation, and maintenance infrastructure will be required to build and maintain such a gargantuan project.' 834 m sq of PV panels versus 103 nuclear power plants. Both require gargantuan resources to build. The same can be said of the hundreds of fossil fuel plants required to produce the same amount of electrical energy as 103 nuclear plants. In the end, the resources consumed in constructing and maintaining either a nuclear power plant or fossil fuel plant or PV plant is (supposed) to be reflected in the kWh price that consumers pay (in a capitalist economy). As has been mentioned, this price has been falling constantly for PV plants and will continue to do so while that of fossil fuel plants will continue to rise due to continuing fossil fuel price increases. At some point the price curves will cross. As for subsidies and government support for PV distorting these prices, the same goes for fossil fuel and nuclear.

'Low-maintenance? Sorry, anything but. You're talking about hundreds of square miles of struts, panels, wires, glass, and other materials. One good howling sandstorm or hurricane and your solar farm is a tangle of damaged goods....Then let's talk maintenance. Hundreds of square miles = a huge workforce of technicians, trucks, wires, and a massive dumping ground of old broken equipment....If this is done on a neigborhood basis, none of these problems go away, they are simply dumped on the backs of the homeowners, who then must spend a significant amount of their time fiddling with their solar gear.' I live in the middle of nowhere in central Spain. My electricity comes from PV panels and a wind generator, both of which I have installed alone with my own hands (and I am not an electrician). I have one small PV sytem for my DC well pump. Those two 60W PV panels are located on top of a brick structure 6 meters high. The house electricity comes from four 120W panels mounted on a passive solar tracker 2 meters off the ground. In the three years they have been up and working, I have never had to do a single minutes worth of maintenance. I have not had to clean them as the wind and rain do that. And there have been days where the wind was so strong that it knocked down perfectly healthy pine trees of 30 meters height. There have been days when hail has come down so hard and big that it has knocked down trees and almost damaged my car. But not one strut, panel, wire, glass or other material has been negatively affected or needing of maintenance, much less repair or replacement, in those three years. A properly installed PV system requires no maintenance. The worst possibility is vandalism or theft. I do not know what source of information you relied on to conclude that PV systems require maintenance, but that source has misled you.

'We're talking about an enormous industry that would be required to build the billions of square meters of fragile solar components required.' This is true. A huge industry. Just like cars have become a huge industry to meet our transportation needs even though horse drawn buggies and trains met them quite well a 100 years ago. Just like a huge industry is needed to extract fossil fuels and transport them. And another huge industry for nuclear. And biomass. And wind. And mobile phones. And computers for the Net. And so on and on. That's technological advance. And this industry is growing quickly, very quickly. But obviously it will not appear overnight. It will take some time. In the meantime, the huge increases in energy that are being demanded now must come from somewhere, and my gut feeling tells me that the only way to meet this demand quickly without increasing carbon emissions might be through nuclear. As for fragile, they are anything but. The glass on most PV panels is tempered; it is extra tough to be able to withstand the worst of climate, such as big hail balls like happened with mine one night.

'In comparsion to all this, an average nuclear plant or fossil fuel plant is a dream. Compact. Easy to site. Infinitely fewer constrtuction materials required to build (remember again, an average solar planet = hundreds of square miles of steel and concrete. A nuke plant is a few dozen acres.) Hell, we could double the nuclear output of the US easily...just double the size of all the existing reactors. You can't do that with solar. Or, look at France. In 25 years they converted 75% of their electrical generation to nuclear power.' Compact, yes. Easier to site than PV, often yes. An average solar plant requires hundres of square miles, wrong. One PV plant producing as much as one nuclear plant is 8.4 sq mi. So your assumptions of materials needed being infinitely greater is way off. A nuke plant is not a few dozen acres. Not twenty kilometers from my house is an old abandoned uranium mine that is off limits, and the site is closed off. It is dozens of hectares. My relatives in Finland live in Joensuu, and someone has bought a large tract of land for uranium mining - right next to one of the countries most important national park areas. What about the temporary and permanent disposal sites? Nuclear requires much less land than PV, definitely. But you are grossly overestimating PV land size and underestimating nuclear land size. Doubling the current size of reactors is not so easy and would require even more water than what they consume now - the gases coming out of the top of nuclear reactors is water vapor, water used to cool down the reactor. Ok next to Lake Superior, not so great in southern California. In any case, a nuclear reactor that already exists can not be rebuilt to make it twice its size. France has developed its nuclear energy over the past 40 years. PV didn't develop to the point that it can be considered for massive electrical production until this past decade. Like saying 100 years ago that cars are a joke because in the US transportation infrastructure is only designed for trains.

'It's fickle, sporatic...' The sun shines non-stop. Nothing ficle or sporatic about it. The sun shines on our planet non-stop too. Every day of every week, my solar panels give me energy. Even in the worst of weather. My solar pump can pump water even in very cloudy weather. Admittedly, at night they produce nothing. But every day brings sunshine. Whether my panels produce 100% or 10 depends on the weather, but I live in a sunny place where 80% of the days are sunny or very sunny. Obviously a wind farm goes where there is wind, and a solar plant where there is most sun. So it makes great sense to put PV in the Mojave and little in Chicago. In the good places energy production is plentiful and reliable. What is fickle and sporatic is the price of fossil fuel. Only thing one knows for sure is that the price will continue to go up over the long term.

'(Do you have any idea how much electricity is required to keep servers humming so we can post on this web site? An astronomical amount).' An energy-efficient server consumers less than 100 watts an hour - less than 2400 watts a day. My four solar panels could power one, plus have enough left over for the rest of my electrical energy needs.

'Not solar. Look at any honest projection. Most nations are planning to burn coal. Trillions of tons of it. And solar doesn't even make the list, for the simple fact that any good competant economic planner can add up the total raw materials required to build a significant solar infrastructure, and they can see that the raw material requirements would break their society. They aren't even going to try, nor should they try, because it would break them.' They are thinking about solar and wind and renewables and have been implementing them. It is not that they think it would require too many resources. It is that it would require too many today. To roll out enough PV quickly in a short frame of time would require too many resources when compared to nuclear. But China and India need lots of energy up and running now, so PV is not practical in the short-term. If people need an immediate mode of transport from the mainland to an island, they immediately build a ferry fleet. But if there is enough traffic, eventually they build a bridge or tunnel. In the short term they do what they can, in the long term they implement the best solution.

'Yeah, solar is great for a few remote areas, and for a bit of middle-of-the-day load balancing in hot season. Maybe it will get 5% penetration to the energy economy, over the next few decades. But that's it.' PV is best as close to the final consumer as possible. Solar powered appliances like garden lights, for example. Then PV on house rooftops. Then comes PV on a very local level like to power a factory or small village and so on up the chain. Eventually, there will be many large-scale PV plants in good locations. What percentage will it attain in the coming decades? I don't know, but it will be small. Even in the long term PV plants will be a relatively small percentage because there are many solar technologies available to produce electricity from the sun that are more efficient than PV and because the sun is but one of many renewable energies that are available. Solar electricity will be a very important part of a renewable energy future. But only one of a number of renewable sources. And PV will be one of amongst several solar electric alternatives. PV will be most prevalent at the smallest of levels, like a house or a factory. Or villages or islands isolated from the grid. But you will see more and more large PV plants.

Nuclear will outstrip renewables in the short term simply because the coming energy crunch won't allow renewables to fill the gap fast enough. But nuclear is not a long term solution. Nuclear is the most maintenance prone of energy technologies. Nuclear plants need strict supervision and handling for a number of reasons. You need to keep on site a small workforce of trained technicians and engineers to monitor the plant, not to mention a small army of armed guards and high-tech security systems for 'national security reasons.' Not to mention that in the long term nuclear won't last if people are afraid of it and have safe, viable alternatives. Nuclear is going to expand as a stopgag, and nothing more. How long will nuclear last is debateable and only time will tell. As for fossil fuel, its future is a slow and long-overdue death.

the average solar energy falling on the US is more than %500 times our current energy needs.

Right now because no one wants a nuclear plant, zoning and siting one is incredibly expensive. NO new nuclear plants are being built.

China and Japan are currently investing BILLIONS of dollars in building solar plants to bring energy to their starving masses.

Europe LOVES wind power.

I agree that solar isn't the answer, it can never handle our base load and be reliable unless we perfect our storage techniques, which is in the works. We will always need to rely on a larger, more reliable source for our energy. Like geothermal and hydro possibly.

All energy sources have their issues, most experts say we need a mix of all our technologies in order to make due. Don't badmouth any one type in particular,it may be all that's left someday.

Awesome stuff. It seems to me it is going to be within the next decade that we see solar panels really compete with fossil fuels as the most economical solution as well as the most environmentally friendly.

This and technology like the Sliver Cells, which can use about 10x less hyper-pure silicone than conventional cells, are very exciting. Fossil fuels won't stand a chance if these technologies end up at the right price point.

This will pave the way for Micro Generation. Homes will be able to afford to generate their own electricty. Imagine if every home would generate only 20% of their electricty, that would drop the demand for electricty from Power Plants by 20% duh.

This technology will allow solar panels to be a standard in new homes and buildings, and of course make it alot easier to sell solar systems to current homes and buildings.

Great aticle, great invention, and great discussion.

I want to point out that PV/solar panels have the advantage of being able to be installed right where the electricity is going to be used, eliminating the energy loss in transmission of power that occurs when you send power from a plant over many miles. And in addition to the fact that a clear market would favor PV much more heavily (the fossile fuel industry is heavily subsidized as far as I know), people simply do care about the environment. I just ran across a NY Times that said nearly every construction project brought up the green factor at one major conrstuction firm. The article was from four years ago.

Russel, one thing you haven't taken into consideration is that there is also a 20% loss in transmission as well, so site based energy production saves that 20% in addition to the 20% it generates for the site.

Myth 1: Solar electricity cannot serve any significant fraction of U.S. or world electricity needs.

PV technology can meet electricity demand on any scale. The solar energy resource in a 100-mile-square area of Nevada could supply the United States with all its electricity (about 800 gigawatts) using modestly efficient (10%) commercial PV modules.

A more realistic scenario involves distributing these same PV systems throughout the 50 states. Currently available sites—such as vacant land, parking lots, and rooftops—could be used. The land requirement to produce 800 gigawatts would average out to be about 17 x 17 miles per state. Alternatively, PV systems built in the "brownfields"—the estimated 5 million acres of abandoned industrial sites in our nation's cities—could supply 90% of America's current electricity.

This is from the DOE and may be found here:
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/solar/myths.html