Solar Power Updates

A couple of news updates from the solar power world...

Nanosolar Achieves 1GW CIGS Deposition Throughput
What this actually means is that Nanosolar is able to print out 1GW worth of solar power sheets in a single year for about $1.65 million of hardware investment plus cost of materials, energy, labor and who knows what else - so lets quintuple the cost of these machines to get to 1GW of printing ability. Now, 1GW of power generates about enough electricity to power about 700,000 homes. According to the 2001 census there were about 120,000,000 homes in the United States. Lets say that number is now...140,000,000 (I have no idea really, and I am pretty sure the number of homes in the US hasn't grown 14% in seven years, but this is just fun remember?). That means to power the homes in the United States we need to produce about 200 GW worth of solar power.

So we could produce enough thin film solar cells to power all of the homes in the USA for about $1.65 billion. We spend more than that each day (yes, that is right - each day) on oil. Every building in the United States need to have mandatory solar films placed on their roof. Every window needs to have mandatory solar films covering them. Every car on its roof and every potential surface you can conceive of need have solar films covering them. Barack, you listening?

By Adding Impefections We Increase Efficiency
While talking about flaws and how they make the world better we could get into long philosophical discussions (the human frailty is what makes us so wonderful and if we were "perfect" to where would be evolve and what would we change?), in physics we have a very nice experiment that shows we can increase the efficiency of a solar panel by adding imperfections to it. By making a surface rougher you increase the surface area increasing the number of places for the chemical reactions to occur.

Just another discovery...