[ExI] Inkjet printing could change the face of solar energy industry

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 12:57:11PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> I hate to disagree with you twice in one day Jeff...
> 
> But NanoSolar has been in production with a continuous printing
> process for a couple of years now. The high cost of solar
> photovoltaics really isn't so much about the panels themselves, but
> all the equipment to store and distribute the electricity thus

You can safely ignore storage for another 15-20 years.
Distribution is a semi-solved problem.

> generated. The cost of batteries, inverters, and so forth swamps the

No batteries for next 15-20 years. When people are talking
about grid parity, they're comparing turnkey systems. All
costs factored in.

> cost of the panels themselves in small scale applications (like MY
> house). Nanosolar proposes to solve this problem by creating
> neighborhood sized installations covering a few acres and serving a
> few hundred homes. This gets the required economies of scale for the
> parts of the system that are not the panels themselves.

Make building-integrated part of building code. That will keep
you up to your ears in work and solar growth maxed out for the 
next 20 years.
 
> I would get really excited if someone figured out how to make
> inverters cheaper, or batteries. Working on the panels themselves is a

There are panel-integrated inverters.

> yawner.
> 
> Here's the thing. If solar panels were absolutely 100% FREE, it
> wouldn't come close to solving the problem. More than half of the
> current costs are in the batteries and inverters.

If panels were free, solar PV would be cheaper than dirty coal,
and you wouldn't be able to get panels at all because they
would be even more sold out (try buying CdTe or CIGS panels) 
than now.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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