[ExI] [tt] Smaller, cheaper, faster: Does Moore's law apply to solar cells?

Kelly Anderson kellycoinguy at gmail.com
Mon Mar 21 07:17:04 UTC 2011


On Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 12:21 PM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> Smaller, cheaper, faster: Does Moore's law apply to solar cells?

Yes. Great article. Thanks for sharing Eugen. However, the cost of
solar cells are half of the expense of a single home system. The other
half are batteries (which are on a similar cost reduction curve) and
inverters (which to my knowledge are not).

Nanosolar is investing in 100 house sized installations that live in a
field nearby, not on your own roof. There are a lot of benefits to
this approach, since people don't need their own inverters or
electrical storage systems. For this type of installation, the cost of
the cells themselves becomes much more important, and Nanosolar and
the other continuous film producers are getting the cost down at a
very quick clip.

So my view of the future is not so much solar on every rooftop. At
least not for quite a while. Even though it's on my roof top, but for
unusual reasons.

-Kelly



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