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OK, now things are starting to really roll (pun intended). A 1 GW production line (per year) for $1.65 million. Hummm, what would happen if we shifted Iraq war spending over to producing these lines? What would one day's worth buy us? Well, we are spending around $200 million a day (probably much higher if you take into account all the support needed when everything is over) or about 2 GW worth of production every year for every US state! Since those panels will produce for an average of 5 hours a day we get the nuclear power plant equivalent of around 24 nuclear power plants worth of production each year for every one day of spending in Iraq. So McCain’s plan of putting up 45 reactors (that will take 10 years to build at minimum) Can be substituted for solar production with around 2 days worth of Iraq war spending ($400 million). Those lines will produce 45 GWs worth of nuclear equivalent power every year! These line will be good for many years and will only get better over time. In ten years these lines will have produced 450 GW worth of nuclear energy production! All these panels quietly sitting in our deserts producing clean renewable energy.
I would rather spend less on solar and start getting energy production in a year then having to wait ten years for nuclear power generation that will only cost more as uranium (a non-renewable) gets more expensive every year. Hey McCain, Please wake up!
Will we do this? No, it makes too much sense to move in this direction. It looks like we will have to rely on venture capitalists and a tiny company to get us going. As our government is focused on silly useless strategies like more drilling, more resource wars, more nuclear and more hydrogen, solar will very slowly and quietly eventually solve the problem. The stupidity blows my mind. Not really, I know the geopolitical considerations are the reason.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-9972306-54.html
Also from the company blog:
"Most production tools in the solar industry tend to have 10-30MW in annual production capacity. How is it possible to have a single tool with Gigawatt throughput?
This feat is fundamentally enabled through the proprietary nanoparticle ink we have invested so many years developing. It allows us to deliver efficient solar cells (presently up to more than 14%) that are simply printed.
Printing is a simple, fast, and robust coating process that in particular eliminates the need for expensive high-vacuum chambers and the kinds of high-vacuum based deposition techniques from industries where there’s a lot more $/sqm available for competitive manufacturing cost.
Our 1GW CIGS coater cost $1.65 million. At the 100 feet-per-minute speed shown in the video, that’s an astonishing two orders of magnitude more capital efficient than a high-vacuum process: a twenty times slower high-vacuum tool would have cost about ten times as much per tool.
Plus if we cared to run it even faster, we could. (The same coating technique works in principle for speeds up to 2000 feet-per-minute too. In fact, it turns out the faster we run, the better the coating!)"
http://www.nanosolar.com/blog3/
I would rather spend less on solar and start getting energy production in a year then having to wait ten years for nuclear power generation that will only cost more as uranium (a non-renewable) gets more expensive every year. Hey McCain, Please wake up!
Will we do this? No, it makes too much sense to move in this direction. It looks like we will have to rely on venture capitalists and a tiny company to get us going. As our government is focused on silly useless strategies like more drilling, more resource wars, more nuclear and more hydrogen, solar will very slowly and quietly eventually solve the problem. The stupidity blows my mind. Not really, I know the geopolitical considerations are the reason.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-9972306-54.html
Also from the company blog:
"Most production tools in the solar industry tend to have 10-30MW in annual production capacity. How is it possible to have a single tool with Gigawatt throughput?
This feat is fundamentally enabled through the proprietary nanoparticle ink we have invested so many years developing. It allows us to deliver efficient solar cells (presently up to more than 14%) that are simply printed.
Printing is a simple, fast, and robust coating process that in particular eliminates the need for expensive high-vacuum chambers and the kinds of high-vacuum based deposition techniques from industries where there’s a lot more $/sqm available for competitive manufacturing cost.
Our 1GW CIGS coater cost $1.65 million. At the 100 feet-per-minute speed shown in the video, that’s an astonishing two orders of magnitude more capital efficient than a high-vacuum process: a twenty times slower high-vacuum tool would have cost about ten times as much per tool.
Plus if we cared to run it even faster, we could. (The same coating technique works in principle for speeds up to 2000 feet-per-minute too. In fact, it turns out the faster we run, the better the coating!)"
http://www.nanosolar.com/blog3/