solar pv moving towards undercutting coal......


http://www.celsias.com/2007/11/23/nanosolars-breakthrough-technology-solar-now-cheaper-than-coal/
"Their mission: to deliver cost-efficient solar electricity. The
Nanosolar company was founded in 2002 and is working to build the
world?s largest solar cell factory in California and the world?s
largest panel-assembly factory in Germany. They have successfully
created a solar coating that is the most cost-efficient solar energy
source ever. Their Power*** cells contrast the current solar
technology systems by reducing the cost of production from $3 a watt
to a mere 30 cents per watt. This makes, for the first time in
history, solar power cheaper than burning coal.

....The Nanosolar plant in San Jose, once in full production in 2008,
will be capable of producing 430 megawatts per year. This is more than
the combined total of every other solar manufacturer in the U.S."


see also....about 1/2 a big power station
http://www.abelard.org/briefings/replacing_fossil_fuels.htm
keep in mind that pv cannot function on a 24 hour basis....
http://www.abelard.org/briefings/photovoltaics_solar_cells.php
.....

from a leading pv company with many interesting links:-
http://www.nanosolar.com/technology.htm
* The First Wave started with the introduction of silicon-wafer
based solar cells over three decades ago. While ground-breaking, it
is visible until today that this technology came out of a market
environment with little concern for cost, capital efficiency, and the
product cost / performance ratio.

Despite continued incremental improvements, silicon-wafer cells
have a built-in disadvantage of fundamentally high materials cost and
poor capital efficiency. Because silicon does not absorb light very
strongly, silicon wafer cells have to be very thick. And because
wafers are fragile, their intricate handling complicates processing
all the way up to the panel product.

* The Second Wave came about a decade ago with the arrival of the
first commercial "thin-film" solar cells. This established that new
solar cells based on a stack of layers 100 times thinner than silicon
wafers can make a solar cell that is just as good. However, the first
thin-film approaches were handicapped by two issues:

1. The cell's semiconductor was deposited using slow and
expensive high-vacuum based processes because it was not known how to
employ much simpler and higher-yield printing processes (and how to
develop the required semiconductor ink).

2. The thin films were deposited directly onto glass as a
substrate, eliminating the opportunity of
o using a conductive substrate directly as electrode (and
thus avoiding bottom-electrode deposition cost),
o achieving a low-cost top electrode of high performance,
o employing the yield and performance advantages of
individual cell matching & sorting,
o employing high-yield continuous roll-to-roll processing,
and
o developing high-power high-current panels with lower
balance-of-system cost.

* The Third Wave of solar power consists of companies addressing
the above shortcomings and opportunities. Most every of the new
companies address one or the other of the above aspects. One company
-- Nanosolar -- brings together the entire conjunction of all seven
areas of innovation, each break-through in their own right, to deliver
a dramatic improvement in the cost-efficiency, yield, and throughput
of the production of much thinner solar cells.

http://www.nanosolar.com/7areasofinnovation.htm
At Nanosolar, we have taken the highest-performance and most durable
photovoltaic thin-film semiconductor, called CIGS (for "Copper Indium
Gallium Diselenide"), and innovated on all seven critical areas
necessary to reach a breakthrough cost reduction in solar cells,
panels, and systems.

As opposed to using slow and expensive high-vacuum based thin-film
deposition processes, we developed a proprietary ink (1) to allow us
to use much simpler and higher-yield printing (2) for depositing the
solar cell's semiconductor.

We use a highly conductive yet low-cost foil as a substrate (3), which
allows us to avoid the need to separately deposit an expensive bottom
electrode layer (as required for a non-conductive substrate such as
glass).

The foil furthermore allows us to

* apply the superior economics of high-yield continuous
roll-to-roll processing (4),

* achieve a lower-cost high-performance top electrode (5),

* assemble cells by individually matched electrical
characteristics (6), and

* develop high-power high-current panels (7) with lower
balance-of-system cost.

regards...

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