Made in USA

[K6JEK]

Nanosolar has broken radio silence with a nice video. The thin film photo voltaic factory in San Jose, CA is now operating.  The highly automated panel manufacturing plant in Germany seems to be going too. 

http://www.nanosolar.com/company/blog#66

Everyone in the video seems to have a German accent except the good looking blond.  But the first  factory is in San Jose, honest

I can't blame them for having the second factory in Germany.  Germany represents 43% of the world market vs 18% for the US of A.

They're competing with First Solar, the #1 thin film company, HQ AZ, factories in Ohio, Germany and Malaysia. 

Watch the video. Some of it's recycled but some is new and cool.

[Bill, KD0HG]

Checked out that company on a web search.
Very interesting..Seems that solar electric using their thin-film technology costs around 30 cents/watt, a real breakthrough.

A 500-megawatt coal fueled power plant costs more than a billion bucks to build these days, the raw cost for 500 MW worth of Nano's panels is a fraction of that. And the fuel is free forever.

Problem is as I see it, 500 MW of solar is gonna use a *lot* of real estate on the ground, unless it's distributed on top of existing buildings and the like.
The NIMBYs would have a field day like they do now with wind power.

Heck, I see they're complaining about solar projects in the Mojave. They don't want no coal, no wind, no oil, no solar, no nukes. They can move into their caves.

Nevertheless, this looks like a promising piece of a possible energy future. I'd hang their panels over in a minute at $300/KW.

[Ed/KB1HYS]

Funny, but the first place I would think you would WANT to build a solar farm would be in the middle of a desert.  Think about a few thousand (go big or GO HOME)  acres of solar panels in Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. 360 days of sunshine per year.  they say 16% efficient so at ~1kw/m^2 solar at the surface thats 160 watts per square meter of panel. so a one mega watt plant would require about 6250 sq meters or about 1.5 acres of surface.  Pad that for conversion efficiency (inverters heat up) and losses due reality, structures etc, so figure 2 acres per megawatt, put 500 acres under panels and you have a competitive (on an output basis) power generation plant.  I wonder what the cost per square foot or meter is?

Of course there is  the whole what do you do when it's dark thing... Thats a LOT of batteries.

[Bill, KD0HG]

Of course there is  the whole what do you do when it's dark thing... Thats a LOT of batteries.

They've been using pump hydro for that here for decades. The Cabin Creek project at Georgetown, CO consists of two mountain lakes, one is higher in altitude than the other. When there's a surplus of power available, water is pumped into the upper lake, when power is needed, the equipment is reversed, pumps become generators as in a conventional hydro system. They can also take advantage of lower rates on the spot power market, say, at night or weekends during the summer and turn the generators on during the day's peak demand.

The Cabin Creek plant was originally built, in part, because of the great New York blackout of '77 when multiple power plants tripped off-line. Coal plants use a lot of power to operate, giant blowers, conveyors, offloading rail cars, coal crushers and etc. So there is a need to provide a lot of electric power to jump-start the area infrastructure in a similar emergency.  The nice thing about hydro is that it always works, all you need do is open the water spigot. You generate AC and don't need monster inverters.

In any case, there's a set of 115 KV lines running from the plant, tied into the grid in the Denver area.

Batteries not included. 

In other places, I suppose that you could pump sea water up to an elevated reservoir of some kind.

Here's a picture of the two lakes of the Colorado project, scroll the picture to the north and you can see the power lines heading to Denver along I-70. Neat stuff.
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/2727290

[K6JEK]

Checked out that company on a web search.
Very interesting..Seems that solar electric using their thin-film technology costs around 30 cents/watt, a real breakthrough.

A 500-megawatt coal fueled power plant costs more than a billion bucks to build these days, the raw cost for 500 MW worth of Nano's panels is a fraction of that. And the fuel is free forever.

Problem is as I see it, 500 MW of solar is gonna use a *lot* of real estate on the ground, unless it's distributed on top of existing buildings and the like.
The NIMBYs would have a field day like they do now with wind power.

Heck, I see they're complaining about solar projects in the Mojave. They don't want no coal, no wind, no oil, no solar, no nukes. They can move into their caves.

Nevertheless, this looks like a promising piece of a possible energy future. I'd hang their panels over in a minute at $300/KW.

I'd have to check my figures but I don't believe the installed cost is competitive with coal.  They predict what they call "grid parity" in a couple of years.  These thin film guys boast they will be cheaper than coal in a couple of years.

You are right about real estate, and your comments about Mojave echo my sentiments exactly.  Come on.

But here's a story for you.  My nephew is wandering around  near Sacramento looking for places to put little PV farms.  The Sacramento utility company (city owned utility) wants to buy PV power.  It turns out ranchers often have some funky chunk of unfarmed, ungrazed land near enough to the HV lines that they are more than happy to lease out.   This is about the last thing he thought he would be doing when he graduated from engineering school last year, but what the heck. It's work.

[k4kyv]

Rubles for Wrecks