We’ve all heard the hype: 99 cents per watt thin-film solar panels. Solar energy cheaper than coal. Solar energy for the masses; just roll out a few sheets of Solarply panels on your roof and kiss your utility bills goodbye! But where are they? Why can’t we buy them yet? What has Nanosolar been doing with the $500 million dollars that has been invested in their company so far?
Well, it seems they’ve been busy “building the world’s largest solar cell factory in California and the world’s largest panel-assembly factory in Germany.”
However, not one Solarply cell has been held yet in the hands of a consumer, causing many to point their fingers accusingly and shriek “vaporware!!!!” at the top of their lungs.
In a 2007 interview Nanosolar’s CEO, Martin Roscheisen, stated that:
“Our first 100,000 panels are already set to go into closed, private, utility-scale deployments, with a tall fence around them and not much accessibility to the general public.”
Indeed, much of the investment capital Nanosolar has received has been from large energy companies, such as EDF Energies Nouvelles in Europe, who are apparently eager to get their hands on dirt cheap solar energy harvesting equipment.
Nanosolar has made it known on their blog that they will first be focusing on municipal power plant installations:
“At Nanosolar, we genuinely believe that meaningful scale for solar will come foremost from utility-scale solar power plants, particularly from municipal solar power plants of 2-10 megawatts (MW) in size. These power plants consist of rows of solar panels mounted onto the ground of free fields at the outskirts of towns and cities, feeding electricity directly into the municipal power grid.
A 2MW municipal solar power plant requires about 10 acres of land to serve a city of 1,000 homes — that’s acreage generally easily available at the outskirts of any city of such size in even the most developed countries. With a solar power plant in each of several hundred cities, a Gigawatt of power is delivered locally to where it is needed, in a digestible size.”
In short: green energy utility companies have got first dibs on all of Nanosolar’s initial production.
But don’t give up hope just yet. On April 30th 2008 Martin Roscheisen posted to the Nanosolar blog:
“To those of you who are disappointed that our first product is not for residential homeowners, we can reassure you that we do have a fabulous residential solution on our near-term roadmap — one that will bring the utility scale economics of Nanosolar Utility Panel technology to homes everywhere, and completely redefine how residential solar is done.”
Not only does Nanosolar have plans to enter the consumer market sometime in the near future, but there are in fact two other companies, Solopower and Miasole, who are working to develop CIGS (Copper, Indium, Gallium and Selenium) technology similar to Nanosolar’s Solarply panels. Within as little as five years we might have several manufacturers competing in the consumer thin-film CIGS photovoltaic market.
[You may also be interested in viewing the Nanosolar video in our video section.]