US:The holy grail of renewable energy came a step closer yesterday as thousands of mass-produced wafer-thin solar cells printed on aluminium film rolled off a production line in California.
The solar panels produced by a Silicon Valley start-up company, Nanosolar, are printed like a newspaper directly on to aluminium foil; they are flexible, light and, if you believe the company, expected to make it as cheap to produce electricity from sunlight as from coal.
Yesterday, Nanosolar said its order books were full until mid-2009 and that a second factory would soon open in Germany.
"Our first solar panels will be used in a solar power station in Germany," said Erik Oldekop, Nanosolar's manager in Switzerland.
"We aim to produce the panels for 99 US cents a watt, which is comparable to the price of electricity generated from coal."
Oldekop said the first panels the company was producing were aimed for large-scale power plants rather than for homeowners, and that the cost benefits would be in the speed that the technology could be deployed.
"We are aiming to make solar power stations up to 10MW in size. They can be up and running in six to nine months compared to 10 years or more for coal-powered stations and 15 years for nuclear plants."
Nanosolar is one of several companies in Japan, Europe, China and the US racing to develop different versions of "thin film" solar technology. It is owned by internet entrepreneur Martin Roscheisen who sold his company to Yahoo for $450 million and, with the help of the founders of Google, the US government and other entrepreneurs, has invested nearly $300 million in the technology.