Photovoltaic solar cells have been part of renewable energy planning for as long as such planning has existed, with most of those solar cells made from crystalline silicon with energy conversion efficiencies above 20 percent. But crystalline cells are expensive and take a lot of energy to create, reducing their net energy contribution. Fortunately there are other types of solar cells including thin film, amorphous, plastic, and others. All of these are cheaper than crystalline cells though they also tend to have shorter working lives and lower efficiencies. We care about them, though, because organic plastic solar cells in particular offer the prospect of producing the cheapest electric power of all. That is if one of our Startup Tour companies — Solarmer Energy Inc. — meets its design goals. I think they will.
Solarmer is effectively a Chinese company operating in America. Located in Baldwin Park, CA, Solarmer’s management is entirely from Taiwan, though many U. S. nationals are employed at the company. Solarmer is well funded, has been operating for several years now, and is moving relentlessly toward the goal of creating very large plastic solar cells that are 10 percent efficient, have a 10-year service life, and can be manufactured for $0.50 per watt or less.
Crystalline solar cells last for 25 years or more, but plastic or polymer solar cells have traditionally operated for only 2-3 years. Through the use of special UV-resistant coatings, Solarmer is attacking this longevity issue, though since the cost of plastic cells is so much less than silicon, 10 years is good enough.
Solarmer is steadily pushing cell efficiency, too, with their current world record in excess of eight percent efficient. Their goal is 10 percent and I believe they will make it.
Solarmer’s target of $0.50 per watt is based on low material cost and especially on low cost of production. The capital cost for producing Solarmer plastic cells is almost nothing as you’ll read below.
Plastic solar cells are made with a roll-to-roll printing process that starts with a clear plastic substrate on which multiple photo-sensitive semiconducting layers are printed, followed by a clear coat. Solarmer has a pilot printing plant operating in a clean room at its facility, though the world record cells have to this point been mainly built by hand.
Solarmer didn’t invent plastic solar cells, nor are they the only manufacturer. Another company — Konarka Technologies Inc. — is already producing such cells that can be found in many products. Both companies make flexible plastic solar cells, but there is a significant difference in their manufacturing strategies that made one company more interesting to me than the other (both were nominated for the Startup Tour).
Konarka builds its plastic solar cells in a 250,000 square foot former Polaroid photographic film plant in New Bedford, MA. With total control of its own production Konarka is already selling product where Solarmer is not. Unlike Konarka’s Big Factory strategy, Solarmer says it intends to license its technology to commercial printers. The difference between printing Parade magazine for your Sunday paper or printing hundreds of thousands of plastic solar cells per day is the addition of an extra drying stage at the output end of the web printer.
That’s why Solarmer quietly works-away, relentlessly pushing its technology to produce a little more power for a lot less cost. Once the specs are where the company wants them to be, their process will be released to a magazine publishing industry that has been slowly dying, killed by a combination of economic recession and Internet publishing. Hundreds of web printers originally costing tens of millions each will be repurposed for inexpensive energy production at that target $0.50 per watt — not just grid-parity but a quarter the cost of power from coal.
Flexible plastic solar cells will go everywhere the sun shines, produced in long rolls, covering roofs and even windows (the cells can be made transparent). Efficiencies are lower, sure, but so will be the cost. Any structure can produce at least some of its own energy. And though the plastic cells will have only a 10-year life, that’s longer than a paint job lasts in Charleston.
It’s a strategy of ubiquitous good-enough solar power that I find very compelling as part of our energy future.
sweet – if the cost gets low enough, you could print solar cells on mulchfilm and have farmers generate off-season profits on fallow acreage.
Well, a 15-year life would be better – as that would match the life expectancy of most roofs in the US, and then it’s just a matter of melding it together with the various roofing materials.
That said, it seems like they are attempting a similar strategy that Transmeta did, which ultimately (sadly) failed. Transmeta had some really cool tech, but no supply chain; no way to move product; and ultimately no way to compete with Via, Intel, AMD, Motorola, and everyone else. They now license their technology to AMD and likely Intel as well; but they have pretty much gone out of business, with what little remains being a patent troll; though a very quite one.
Remind me again who these folks are competing with? I don’t think the Transmeta analogy is valid.
The average roof in Texas only lasts 8 years due to hail storms, wind storms, and tornadoes.
If the cost of the photovoltaic cells can be installed for about what the average person pays to air condition their house during the summer($1000-$2000) you would have a complete conversion within a much shorter time frame. Assuming the power lobby does not have them outlawed that is.
Having lived in Oklahoma and Texas all my life, an 8 year average life for a roof is patently absurd.
This is off-topic, but just want to clarify what happened to Transmeta. It licensed some of its technologies to Toshiba, NEC, Sony, Fujitsu, and later, to Nvidia and Intel. In early 2009 it was sold to Novafora, which, a few months later, ceased operations. So Transmeta is completely gone, but some of the technologies survived. And many of the people who created and worked on it are now at Google, VMWare, Apple, Nvidia, and Intel.
“Solarmer is effectively a Chinese company operating in America. Located in Baldwin Park, CA, Solarmer’s management is entirely from Taiwan…”
So, you mean that Solamer is Taiwanese, no?
The island of Taiwan is the current home of the Republic of China. We should never have given up recognition of Taiwan as ‘China’.
So the residents are ‘Chinese’.
I think we are asking about the geopolitical connection not the ethnicity of the people. Google operates in Taiwan not mainland China.
Please don’t call Taiwanese people Chinese. It’s like calling American British. It’s rude.
Canadian (and Brazilian and Chilean etc etc) are American too. But don;t can us that either!
Thinking along the lines of “Chinese” company operating as a “U.S. company” …
– – – – – – – – –
NYTimes : Technology
Chinese Telecom Giant in Push for U.S. Market
[Huawei Technologies] , which is trying to expand its reach in the United States, has 17 research centers around the world, including one in Santa Clara, Calif.
“HOW MANY ENGINEERS would you like for your team? SEVERAL HUNDRED? That’s not a problem,” the recruiter said, according to the engineer.
When the software manager turned down the offer, the Chinese executive was undeterred and asked for the name of the engineer working under him.
– – – – – – – – –
I thought there was still an issue with solar cells on how clean they are. Dust and dirt build up dramatically hurt their effectiveness. How are these firms getting around this? Will these require constant washing? If so DOA, most people cannot access their roofs and paying people to wash them each year will eat into your savings.
You must have a flat roof. If you have a pitched roof, dirt rolls right off it.
No but every spring I get a ton of pollen and it sticks to everything. I was just curious how panels work with this type of build up.
Don’t be so sure. I have a membrane roof with a mild, 12:1 slope. The membrane is white, I clean it annually and it’s nearly black before I clean it. And we get about 40 inches of rain annually.
Ugh. Here come the self-promotion posts. “Here’s a company on my tour!” Go ahead, do your thing, it’s your blog.
I’ll unsubscribe from your RSS and come back later, if I remember, or care.
Stories like this are exactly one of the reasons I read this blog.
Re-purposing existing printing plants and creating renewal power generating capability feeds our technology hunger in more ways than one.
Imagine if this could also be used to create self-powering hand-held paper thin screens!
So you object to Mr. Cringley writing about the companies that he visits? Why? Is it not his business to write about such things?
Your rapier-like insights (“it’s your blog”) will be missed; thank you for taking the time and effort to tell us that you don’t care.
I think most of us would like to hear more details about the Startup Tour here.
BTW: What blog isn’t about some form of self-promotion?
We’ve been waiting patiently to hear about the companies visited on the tour. What planet have you been living on AynRand?
Actually Ayn Rand’s dead so it doesn’t quite know what it’s talking about.
This type of power sounds like a dream. I hope the UV-resistant coatings actually hold up. I am, of course, 100% for this type of effort.
Just curious: what’s the energy conversion efficiency rate for solar power plants? (i.e. the use of mirrored sunlight to make steam to turn turbines)
FABulous! A new use for old manufacturing capacity! If California or Mass is tired of them, send them to Upstate New York; our vacant factories and warehouses await! Our support-base of Office Supply Firms, Industrial Spray Paint to Small Sub-assembly houses is not yet rust-belted. Our skill-sets are fresh & sharp!
I love upstate New York. There is a problem though. New York taxes and laws have become very business hostile. There is a saying — the easiest way to cut one’s taxes is to move out of New York.
When I visit upstate New York one cannot help but notice miles and miles of empty factories and facilities. It is really quite sad. Unfortunately something caused the exodus of business. Until the politicians in Albany and Washington get their act together, business will be slow to return.
Well, there are any number of Police States where capital can migrate to. Wait, that’s what sent them South, then Mexico, then India, then China. If capital manages to force all labor to work for $1/day (or less), there won’t be anyone who can afford all those gimcracks corporations make. Capitalists are the most short sighted bunch of knuckleheads; in fact, just plain evil.
I recommend you read a very interesting book by a man named Adam Smith. It has a very long title. “An Inquiry into the causes and effects of the Wealth of Nations”. He provides a very complete coverage of the issues that are causing the problems you are talking about. I highly recommend the book.
I think Businesses tend to have an irrational aversion to taxes, since rich people tend to look at taxes as a “punishment”. Atleast in the US, most taxes are on profit, not on gross, so taxes are never going to make a profitable venture un-profitable.
Sure, it depresses return, but I suspect it’s a pretty minor factor compared to facility cost.
Is that assessment hypothetical, or do you have experience as chief cost strategist for IBM, GE, etc?
The taxes you are referring to being on profits and not gross are just one tax of dozens any business must pay, to say nothing of the economic distortion caused by poorly thought out subsidies, regulations and tax incentives; for instance, the housing bubble or sky-rocketing college tuition.
Let me throw out a thought here….
Lets start with a low cost, light solar cell I could use to cover the roof of my house. In my basement or garage I would put in a modest sized battery bank which the solar cells would charge. I would then convert part of my house to DC power. It would power my LED lighting, my (DC) electronics, and through an inverter of some type some of my AC appliances.
I would not anticipating putting any energy back onto the power grid. Instead I would greatly reduce the power I buy. I suspect I would use utility power for my major (power hungry) AC appliances. On cloudy days I may need the power utility to supplement the power I am not getting from the sun.
If you eliminate the need to convert solar power to AC, you open up a world of opportunities!
Thomas Edison stubbornly insisted that DC rules.
He was demented. DC is the killer current.
Exactly right.
All depends on the voltage. Edison liked the electric chair – it used Westinghouse’s AC power.
Maybe a dumb question but can ‘organic plastic solar cells’ be recycled once they complete their life?
As I read your description of Solarmer Energy, I reminded me of one of Robert Heinlein’s short stories — Let There Be Light.
Your mention of transparent cells reminds me of a startup I followed for many years — XsunX. I heard about XsunX and Konarka probably 6 years ago, and was instantly impressed by their goals. Konarka’s goal at the time was flexible solar “fabric” such that you could set up a tent in the middle of nowhere, and that tent would provide its own power (think military applications). XsunX’s goal was “power glass”, the idea of a thin solar film on glass. Since so many skyscrapers these days have a glass skin, it’s easy to see how a large building could use this to generate a lot of its own electricity.
After years of watching, Konarka seemed to make progress, albeit very slowly; slower than they’d hyped at the beginning. And XsunX? I’m convinced that company was a sham, nothing more than a pretty website designed to get VC money. Nothing concrete ever seemed to come out of it.
I’m excited about the prospect of Solarmer’s goals. Distributed generation would go a long way to helping with various energy issues. But bear in mind the power lobby has deep pockets, and won’t give up without a fight.
The power lobby likes this. In my area (metro Phoenix), the power industry will even install the solar arrays for you. They then get to use your excess generation. They pay you for it. You pay them when you need more power than yo generate. The solar cells cost less than 1/10th the cost of the batteries to store power, so you will want to be on the grid.
Don’t assume that the Utilities won’t find ways to profit from the new technology. They already do.
A roar of YES. I would assume in the Petro/Coal world there is sound of NO and let’s STOP this as in arrange to lay up the gas barges in ’73.
For Cringely to shine light too bright on the Corporate IT world -could be, at times dangerous. To shine a light on coporate energy groups could be….
KEEP IT UP!
Can someone please help me out and tell me what “$0.50 per watt ” means in real life terms?
Thx.
It means this:
You buy a solar panel for $100 that gives you 200W
$100 / 200 W = $0.50 / W
It has nothing to do with watt-hours or some other measure of energy. It is cost per maximum-output-wattage of the device.
Am I missing the size of a panel? i.e. in square feet?
I am trying to find out whether 50 cts/watt is very practical.
Basically:
The sun puts about 1000 1300 watts of power onto every square meter of your roof when perpendicularly above it, on a sunny day. The technology was mentioned to be about 10% efficient, meaning a square meter panel would produce 100 to 130 watts around noon, less earlier or later. A house uses about 3000 watts average, and if the house was off grid would need batteries. It is is likely the price is for bare cells not place into a panel, which would raise the cost.
The calculations are complex, but the underappreciated fact is that the paying grid itself is about half the cost of utility power.
Great! Thx.
“…the cost of renewable energy down to 12-15 cents/kWh and less than $1/Watt, ”
per Solamar at its web site.
Unfortunately, installation costs for residential-scale systems remain substantial, at least $4/watt (under 10kW)
Unless this product is integrated into windows, or siding, or roof coverings you’ll still be paying nearly $5/watt installed.
Sounds good, but Taiwan is NOT China!
Some solar trade associations: https://www.ases.org and https://www.seia.org
In addition to Solarmer and Konarka, there is also Nanosolar (https://www.nanosolar.com).
. . . and I thought all those dying magazine publishers were given contracts by the Fed to print money. 🙂
First off, I’m glad someone clarified that “price per peak generating capacity” thing.
Second, let me do a little “back of the envelope” thinking to see if this makes sense, using myself/house as a (typical?) test case. I pay basically $0.14 per kilowatt hour (KWH). If the final, installed cost of this system is, let’s say, $2.00 per kw generating capacity, and I get, say, 5 good hours a day averaged across the year of generation, how long does this take to pay off? 1 kw = $2,000 (That’s way too low for a fully installed system, but let’s go with it.) At $0.14/KWH, that’s 14,285 kilowatt hourss generated to pay for the system. At 5 kilowatt hours per day, pay off is in 2857 days, or 7.8 years. Houston, we have a problem. If the lifespan of the cells is only 10 years, then there’s almost no payoff on the system.
Remember, everyone wants PV cells up on their roof. A very few roofs have the right angle from horizontal and face in the right direction for close to optimal generating. In most cases, particularly on “flat” roofs, the cells will project up and away from the roof – these create large sails. You may actually have to alter the structure of the building to hold the cells DOWN when the wind blows. On some buildings this is no problem – on others it’s a huge (expensive) hassle. Add on to that the issue of penetrations of the roof membrane/shingles, and the electrical work to integrate the PV system, and the costs get way out of the realm of possibility. Tax credits are nice, but we still have a bottom line when running our economy.
Third and finally – generating is one thing, but these intermittent renewables (solar, wind) need mass storage to work well on the grid. Remember – in electricity, you must always match supply and demand pretty closely. When everyone gets home on a hot summer evening (with the sun and wind dying down), they crank up the AC, turn on all the electronics and start making dinner. Generating capacity on the grid needs to fire up to match demand or you get a brownout (or worse). More PV is nice, but we need real advances in mass storage such as hydro pump storage, kinetic (flywheel) and others. We may get Bob’s (unlikely) superconducting national grid, but the inherent inefficiencies of storage systems may put us right back where we started in terms of the percentage of the electricity generated initially versus the amount that’s really available to meet instantaneous demand.
I think a possible way forward for this technology is to sell rolls of the transparent version, in kits, for sticking onto windows. Many windows (in England at least) come in more or less standard sizes. Each kit could comprise the roll, with the fastening medium, plus wiring and an interface unit where you could plug in power cells for lamps, laptops, phones etc. I’d certainly buy it.
Bob,
Here’s a plan for a long term sustainable system. Coat this stuff on aluminum/vinyl siding electrical subsystem. Install the siding on the east, south and west sides of houses, hooking up as grid tie. In ten years when the efficiency drops, re-apply the coating as if you were painting the siding. Ten more years of electricity without having to reinstall the electricity gathering sub-system.
And in Kenya, we have plenty of sunshine and if the cells are cheap enough, I see the potential of lighting villages not on grid power. To charge phones and for lighting!!!!
So, watching and waiting for the cells to land here.
Andrew
OK, they are developing a pilot clean room to try to get it working … then they will allow your local newspaper to license the tech to print rolls.
Does any printing company operate anything like a clean room? Not in my experience. Would the local newspaper have to renovate to clean room specs? Or is the clean room Solarmer is building only for research purposes?
Then again, 10% efficiency is more important than you think. I mean, the average US household uses a lot more than 100% of the sunlight that falls on the building. Most people to go offgrid must radically drop their power usage. The difference between an efficiency of 10% and 22-25% is a lot.
I see PV tech as only a helper, until modern man learns to use a lot less energy to support his lifestyle. But paradoxically only such a lifestyle maintains the industrial civilization that makes PV efforts such as this possible.
I wish them luck, though. Every little bit helps.
Economies of scale in power generation are always going to beat out the cost to distributed generation at the homeowner level. This product might make economic sense in some commercial applications, like high rise buildings that are not shaded by other high rise buildings. particularly if it can be applied to window surfaces easily – al la billboard membranes. The real breakthrough will come when large solar power installations can be produce power at lower cost than combustion turbines burning natural gas. Most utilities don’t dislike wind and solar power per se, what they dislike is being required to use more costly generation than is otherwise available. Of course, those with big investments in coal plants don’t want to see those investments become non-competitive, but there will be plenty of existing and new generating companies jumping into the business if it can really make money without subsidies.
The best solution to the worlds energy needs is Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors.
http://energyfromthorium.com/
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When I was a child, I attempted to do the same thing and damn near ruined myself.
thanks for help! I will try.
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