Science & Technology (solar)

We still continue to get comments about a post we ran over year ago about South African scientist Vivian Alberts of the University of Johannesburg and his thin film solar technology. The post even spurred a new page on the PESWiki for pure energy systems. At the just 2µm the film made of copper, indium, gallium, sulphur and selenium, otherwise called CIGSSe-solar, is way thinner than a human hair. Some poo-pooed the notion as just another blue-sky prototype, but Germans are generally pretty cautious and thorough folk, so when they are the ones building a production plant to manufacture the film, one suspects there is substantial meat on this skeleton. The factory is currently going up in Brandenburg an der Havel. (check out those massive timber beams, we assume them to be Glulam monsters!) The company managing the technology, Johanna Solar, are hoping to be producing 30 megawatt worth of panels by mid 2007, and then ramping this up to double by 2009. We hope some makes its way back down to South Africa to satisfy all those chafing at the bit for some renewable energy. ::Johanna Solar.