Cheap Solar Panels Made With An Ion Cannon

MrSeb writes "Twin Creeks, a solar power startup that emerged from hiding today, has developed a way of creating photovoltaic cells that are half the price of today's cheapest cells, and thus within reach of challenging the fossil fuel hegemony. As it stands, almost every solar panel is made by slicing a 200-micrometer-thick (0.2mm) wafer from a block of crystalline silicon. You then add some electrodes, cover it in protective glass, and leave it in a sunny area to generate electricity through the photovoltaic effect. There are two problems with this approach: Much in the same way that sawdust is produced when you slice wood, almost half of the silicon block is wasted when it's cut into 200-micrometer slices; and second, the panels would still function just as well if they were thinner than 200 micrometers, but silicon is brittle and prone to cracking if it's too thin. Using a hydrogen ion particle accelerator, Twin Creeks has managed to create very thin (20-micrometer), flexible photovoltaic cells that can be produced for just 40 cents per watt; around half the cost of conventional solar cells, and a price point that encroaches on standard, mostly-hydrocarbon-derived grid power."

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Baloroth]

Because the story comes out when the technology is still in fairly early stages of development, and then it takes 5-10 years from that point for people to work out the engineering difficulties to actually bring it to full-scale production (or it turns out not to be practical).

Also, oblig xkcd [xkcd.com].

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[TheRaven64]

I looked at solar panels for my house two years ago, and I looked again recently. The efficiency of the available cells has increased by about 50% for the same cost. So saying nothing has changed is a bit misleading.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Teppy]

The prices we're seeing today are based on discoveries/improvements made several years ago. Look at how module prices have (mostly) dropped over the years: http://solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices [solarbuzz.com]

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[TheRaven64]

Uh, what? Customers don't pay for power, they pay for energy. $0.40/watt, assuming 8 hours of useable sunlight per day, means about 3kWh/year. Customers pay $0.10/kWh in places where electricity is cheap. After one year, customers would pay at least $0.30, so the payback period is one and a third years, make it two years to cover installation / transmission costs and so on. In some places in the USA, electricity costs $0.40/kWh, so this would pay for itself in 4 months.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

*ahem*:
"Complete Hyperion 3 systems are available for shipment."
from http://www.twincreekstechnologies.com/technology/hyperion.html

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[englishknnigits]

If only we had such devices: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_generator [wikipedia.org]

Re:Watt vs KW/hr

[MrQuacker]

No. The $/watt number refers to the cost of the PV chips. So it costs them $0.40 to create a chip that outputs 1 watt.

At $0.40/w you're paying $400 for a 1Kw panel. At that cost it will take 4000 Kwh @ $0.10/Kwh to pay for itself. That's about 2 years if it gets ~8hrs of sun a day. Everything produced after that 4000Kwh is "free". If grid electricity costs more than $0.10/Kwh, then payback is even faster. (I'm assuming perfect efficiencies to keep the math simple, but you get the point)

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[MrQuacker]

The $/watt number refers to the cost of the PV chips. So it costs them $0.40 to create a chip that outputs 1 watt.

At $0.40/w you're paying $400 for a 1Kw panel. At that cost it will take 4000 Kwh @ $0.10/Kwh to pay for itself. That's about 2 years if it gets ~8hrs of sun a day. Everything produced after that 4000Kwh is "free", and since panels last for 10, 15, even 20+ years, that's a lot of "free" power. If grid electricity costs more than $0.10/Kwh, then payback is even faster. (I'm assuming perfect efficiencies to keep the math simple, but you get the point)

and i'll bet you....

[Lumpy]

They also last half as long as today's cheapest cells.

the ONLY cells that have any longevity are the grown crystal types. The garbage that you see at the low price end lose 20% of their power generating capacity each year.

the 45 watt harbor freight kit will be generating 2 watts in 4 years, even in a northern climate.

Call me when these new "cheap" solar cell techniques will last 40 years under airizona sun. I still have 4 old panels from the 80's that have turned dark brown and they generate 70% of their new rated capacity, and they were retired from a solar farm in 1993.

Re:Isn't light absorption the problem with Si?

[cyfer2000]

30 micron is good enough, people actually measured this [amazon.com].

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[necro81]

The energy stored in a flywheel is I * omega ^ 2. With the materials we have available now and the size you want to allocate to such a thing, manufacturers have found it works best to have a flywheel with a modest moment of inertia and crank the rotational rate way up high (100,000 rpm for starters). To keep the flywheel from spontaneously shattering, high speed flywheels are mostly made from carbon fiber. And with the flywheel spinning so fast, the only way to keep them from losing energy to friction is to have them spin in a vacuum on magnetic bearings. Then you add in a high efficiency motor/generator, with some serious power electronics to commute the phases at ~kW power levels. These are all proven technologies (see Beacon Power [beaconpower.com]), but compared to a bank of lead acid batteries, it isn't an affordable solution for a home.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[jklovanc]

Costs are still a bit high for flywheels. Here is a quote from this [wikipedia.org] article; "Costs of a fully installed flywheel UPS are about $330 per 15 seconds at one kilowatt." So to supply 1kW for a week it would cost 330*4*60*24*7= $13.3m.
Flywheels are great for instant power to level output but not yet viable for long term storage. A flywheel to give power overnight would even be $800k.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds more like eddy current braking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_current_brake

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[TheRaven64]

No they wouldn't. In direct sunlight, the amount of power hitting the Earth is about 1kW/m^2. The top of my laptop is 0.09m^2, so the total solar energy hitting the back (assuming I'm sitting in direct sunlight with the back of the screen perpendicular to the Sun - and have you ever tried that?) is 90W. The most efficient solar cells ever made are 45% efficient. Most are about 10-20%. At 20% efficient, that's 18W. Still not bad, but once you're out of direct sunlight and into somewhere where you can actually see the screen, that drops to under 5W. Not worth bothering with. You can, however, get parasols with solar panels on top. These will quite happily power a laptop...

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Wraithlyn]

solar panels still never even come close to putting out energy that comes close to the energy used in manufacturing the panels

Hmm. I wonder what I'll turn up if I google "solar myths".

Myth #5: Making solar panels takes more energy than it could ever produce.

A report by the National Renewable Energy Lab [nrel.gov] shows that solar photovoltaic panels actually payback the energy used to produce the panels in 1 to 4 years depending on the type of panel. Because solar panels last at least 30 years, PV systems will provide at minimum 26 to 29 years of pollution-free electricity for your home!

Source [renewableenergyworld.com]

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Iskender]

Sure, solar power doesn't produce infinite power per area. But that doesn't matter. In fact, I'd argue it still produces quite a lot.

It's been known for a long time that the price of manufacturing per watt is the important thing for solar, and that goes down all the time. There is no known lower limit to prices here.

I think you're underestimating how much space there is when you say solar isn't very dense. A good sunny day will give 1000W solar input for one square metre. There are a million square metres in a square kilometre, meaning a gigawatt of solar input. That's a typical nuclear reactor's worth. But not all of that can be used. Let's assume 10% efficiency, meaning 10 square kilometres/nuclear reactor. Add half for support equipment and it's 15 square kilometres.

That's a square less than four kilometres wide. For a nuclear reactor this would be an acceptable safety zone - it's pretty small really.

There is plenty of space for solar if it only becomes cheap enough. It is already cheap enough in places like Hawaii, and it will only get cheaper while fossil fuel prices will keep going up.

Re:Get ready for....nothing!

[Dodgy G33za]

You will only get 8 hours of usable sunlight per year if you have a solar tracker and live in a particularly sunny spot. Here in Sydney, (which is on the same latitude sun wise as LA for you North Americans) PV installers base calculations on on 4 hours at the rated value for fixed PV.

So a 200w panel costing $600 would give you 300 KW per year. At our electricity prices that is $68 a year, so paid off in 9 years and a ROI of 280% over the 25 years of installation. Sounds okay. Sounds even better when you take into account that buying grid energy from renewables in Australia commands a 40% premium on the price, and that there is a connection fee of $160 per year, and that energy prices will continue to rise.

The problem is that the cost of the panel is only about a third of the cost of the installation for home solar, even if you do it yourself. To make matters worse the batteries have a much shorter life than the panels.

Re:Hegemony, schmegemony

[FishTankX]

As far as I know the energy input and retrieval is still entirely mechanical, but the major advancements in flywheels have been magnetic bearings, and very high vacuums, which dramatically reduce friction losses.