
Solar panel made with ion cannon is cheap enough to challenge fossil fuels - mrsebastian
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/122231-solar-panels-made-with-ion-cannon-are-cheap-enough-to-challenge-fossil-fuels
======
ck2
That is some amazing technology right there, almost fun to read because it
sounds like science fiction but it's real.

And privately designed/built/owned particle accelerators? It's definitely a
new era.

What if one day the other side of the globe getting sunlight powered the grid
for the other half? Of course this would require very peaceful nations on each
continent, so even if we had the cost-effective technology now, it would take
hundreds if not thousands of years to happen politically.

~~~
jsilence
Transportation of electricity around the globe is not neccessary. Electricity
usage is considerably lower during nighttime. Thus solar and wind fit in with
our natural rhythm quite nicely. And it is also produced near the place there
it is being consumed. Another plus.

But still the author is right, we need ways to store electricity and we will
also need a much more flexible grid than the one we have today.

The neo liberal FDP here in Germany is trying to kill off the solar market by
drastically reducing the fee you get for feeding solar electricity into the
system. But we already have net parity, therefore it is feasible to put up a
photovoltaic system on your house, when you size it carefully and consume much
of the energy by yourself. It simply reduces your utility bill. If this new
technology really halves the price of modules, people for sure will continue
installing new systems. Yay!

~~~
TeMPOraL
> Thus solar and wind fit in with our natural rhythm quite nicely.

It's not that nice, because power output from wind/solar plants is random
(depends on things like cloud cover or wind strength) and it causes problems
in power grid, where power demand must meet the supply exactly, or bad things
will happen.

"Without Hot Air"[1] covers this, and other renewable-related issues quite
nicely and with real data. I recommend it, it's a good read. It has some good
ideas on how to solve power supply/demand problems.

On TED2012 there was a talk about a new kind of batteries designed to solve
those kind of problems in the power grid; the video from the talk is not yet
up, though (but I think it should be soon, at [2]).

[1] - <http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/>

[2] -
[http://www.ted.com/talks?lang=en&event=2012&duration...](http://www.ted.com/talks?lang=en&event=2012&duration=&sort=newest&tag=)

~~~
ctdonath
_power output from wind/solar plants is random (depends on things like cloud
cover ...) and it causes problems in power grid, where power demand must meet
the supply exactly_

The biggest power cost for us in warmer climates is cooling. When the sun is
out, we need lots of power; when it's not, not so much. Solar power sufficient
to run A/C from rooftop panels costing less than grid electricity would be
wonderful, lining up perfectly with the inconsistencies of available sunlight.

~~~
robomartin
I would start with better home design and energy efficiency enhancing
improvements before throwing a Carnot-limited solution at the problem.

Last summer I ran an experiment. We live in a two story house in California.
We usually see low temperatures at night (sub 70deg F) and highs in the range
of 105+ degF during the day. At night I opened all of the windows downstairs
and used a small industrial fan (about 2000CFM) to pump cold outside air into
the house. In the morning I'd shut down the fan and close all windows.

I could get the lower part of the house down to below 70F on most days during
the summer. Cold enough to have to wear a sweater. Even with the outside
temperature hitting highs above 105+ the thermal mass of the house succeeded
in maintaining a very comfortable inside temperature (max around 77F). We did
not use the air conditioner at all last summer, saving tons of money. The fan
costs pennies a day to run.

This summer I am looking at what efficiency improvements I can make to this
arrangement. I'm itching to throw a micro-controller at it, but I want to
learn a little more before I take that path. There's a lot to do in the roof.
Think about it, you have this huge solar heat collector --the roof-- reaching
ridiculous temperatures during the day and radiating that right into the
house. Sure, there's attic insulation, but that's a ton of energy to deal
with.

I'm thinking that some forced ventilation of the attic with a small fan might
just do wonders.

~~~
ars
That only works in desert type environments (i.e. little to no cloud cover)
where the temperature goes up and down each day.

Where I live if it gets hot it says hot, day and night. And most of the
country is the same.

Although, obviously, incremental improvements are great even if only some
people can use them.

~~~
robomartin
You might be able to use the thermal stability you have underground to help
cool the house. Granted, this is more expensive, but probably far less costly
in the long run. The basic idea is to bury a heat exchanger (coils of tubing)
deep underground and circulate a fluid to move heat from hot to cold.

You can use this two ways: You can use it to try to cool the house directly by
embedding tubing in the floor/walls or some other approach. Or, you could use
it to improve the efficiency of an air conditioning unit by providing
supplemental cooling of the A/C unit heat exchanger coils.

------
TeMPOraL
I highly recommend reading "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air"[1] to
anyone interested in topic of energy sources and use. It covers lots of things
mentioned in comments, like storing energy in pump storages or car batteries
in order to make solar/wind plants able to provide a big contribution to power
grid without breaking it.

What is important, this books talks about those ideas _using real data_ and
carefully estimates what's really feasible to do (like, how many pumped
storages you'd need if you'd like to switch 50% of your energy sources to
solar).

[1] - <http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/>

------
nextparadigms
This is why I _welcomed_ the backlash and even some of the sensationalism
regarding the nuclear explosion in Japan. Even if I realize that nuclear
energy could be safe and it's good to have an alternative that is cheap enough
to compete with coal, I'd still wish we'd spend all those billions switching
from nuclear and putting most of them into renewable energy technologies,
which should be the future.

The arguments against solar were that the tech is "not there yet", so then
it's better to just focus on nuclear. I disagree with that. I believe that if
the energy industry changed focus to solar panels and other renewable energy
technologies, we would get there a lot faster. We would have a lot more
companies exploring different ideas that make them more efficient and cheaper.

Nuclear technology will probably never be gone, or at least not within the
next century. But I just don't want it to be the holy grail of the energy
industry and see the vast majority of investments go into that. I want
renewable energy technologies to be that.

~~~
greedo
The idea that solar, wind and geothermal energy can replace nuclear power for
electricity generation in my lifetime (the next 35 years) ignores the reality
of how much electricity we consume and how it is currently generated.

Here's a link to a graph created by the Lawrence Livermore Lab that quickly
illustrates the miniscule impact of doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling
the three primary alternative energy sources.

I wish we could all live in a world powered by solar cells etc, but it just
isn't going to happen.

~~~
danmaz74
But renewable energies _could_ replace nuclear (and other sources) for new
plants that will be built in the future. Nuclear has a very high initial cost,
and shutting down current plants while they're still efficient and safe enough
wouldn't be a sound choice, but for replacements of ageing plants and for new
constructions cheaper and cheaper renewable energies could realistically
displace them in the next decades.

~~~
InclinedPlane
No. It can't.

And pretending it can is a problem.

Solar is nice. It'd be FAN-GODDAMN-TASTIC if we could use solar power as the
backbone of our power generation. But we can't, it's just not feasible.

Solar today is _half_ of a power plant. Much like wind Solar generates power
when its convenient to its own schedule, not ours, and sometimes that means it
generates _zero_ power.

This. Is. A. Problem.

It is, in fact, _the_ problem of solar and wind power. Today we can use solar
and wind serendipitously. They run on top of base power and when they provide
power they allow us to keep gas powered generators offline. That's nice, but
it's an edge solution, and we're already nearing the limits of that strategy.
In order to replace base load power we need something that provides power
reliably when it's convenient for humans. For solar or wind that means we need
to invest in vast power storage plants. Things that do not currently exist
even in designs. Things that are likely to be about as expensive to build and
maintain as solar plants themselves will be.

We do not have the technology to move to solar or wind power as a base load
power source. And it seems likely that if we did have that technology it would
put the full cost of those power sources at higher than even fission power
plants.

We can no more move to solar or wind power for the majority of our power needs
than we could move to Thorium reactors, or fusion power.

~~~
stcredzero
_Today we can use solar and wind serendipitously. They run on top of base
power and when they provide power they allow us to keep gas powered generators
offline._

Solar thermal+thermal storage could be used in climates closer to the equator.
The US ran an experimental setup with 8 hours endurance after sundown.

In the case of cooling equipment, solar coincides well with demand.

You are most certainly right that solar won't cover all our baseload power
needs. We don't need to cover it all. We just need to whittle down the
unsustainable and environmentally unfriendly parts as much as we can.

Subsidizing winners isn't something the government should be in the business
of doing. However, penalizing losers is precisely what we have a government
for, and CO2 emitting power is a losing proposition for the future.

------
brlewis
The article says we still need better battery technology, and there's truth to
that. But even without batteries, just providing power on days when air
conditioners run continuously, solar could make a huge difference in the
energy picture.

~~~
saalweachter
Or only burning coal at night.

Once solar is significantly cheaper than coal and demand pricing kicks in, a
lot of time-shifting of energy use could occur. Right now, night-time
electricity is cheaper because demand is lower at night, but if the supply of
daylight electricity increases dramatically, any activity which currently
benefits from cheap nighttime electricity could be shifted back to the
daylight hours.

Data centers currently consume something like 2% of electricity -- it is
probably possible to shift at least some of that to bright, sunny days. It may
stop being cost-effective to run night shifts at factories, especially if your
manufacturing process is energy-intensive. We might end up charging our
electric cars at our offices during the day instead of over night at our
homes. It'd be pretty silly to fill a battery with solar electricity during
the day just to transfer it to another battery at night.

Even without batteries, solar energy could still pick up a lot of our current
nighttime energy usage because a lot of our nighttime energy usage doesn't
actually have to be at night.

~~~
polshaw
To be clear-- the reason energy is cheap at night is not JUST because it is
used less-- it is also because there are certain continuous energy sources.
Nuclear power, geothermal, tidal, wave and wind power are all producing energy
round the clock and if you don't harvest it, it's lost.

We are not heading towards a world where we have a single power source
(solar), and _most_ of our power uses cannot be rescheduled. As fossil fuels
are one of the few sources which _can_ be turned on and off at our choosing, I
would expect they will function to fill in temporary gaps between supply and
demand once renewables capacity is large enough to take the average load. I
don't see these gaps occurring predominantly at night.

~~~
dctoedt
> _... Nuclear power, geothermal, tidal, wave and wind power are all producing
> energy round the clock and if you don't harvest it, it's lost._

This isn't true of nuclear power plants; the fission rate, and thus the heat
generation rate, can be throttled up and down as needed. In pressurized water
reactors this happens automatically as the throttle is opened and closed, thus
increasing or decreasing output from the "steam side" of the heat-exchange
boilers, a.k.a. steam generators [1]. (In a prior life I was a Navy nuclear
engineering officer.)

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressurized_water_reactor#Contr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressurized_water_reactor#Control)

~~~
tsotha
That's true, but does this make the fuel last longer, and anyway what are fuel
costs as a percentage of total operational costs? My impression is it doesn't
make sense to operate a nuclear reactor at less than full power.

~~~
dctoedt
> _does this make the fuel last longer_

Yes. Heat is generated by fission of fissile material such as uranium. Fuel
rods have X amount of fissile material in them. Higher power -> faster
depletion of the fissile material.

> _what are fuel costs as a percentage of total operational costs?_

Around 30%, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute. This compares with 80%
for coal, natural gas, and oil.[2]

> _My impression is it doesn't make sense to operate a nuclear reactor at less
> than full power_

I would think that'd be true of almost any machinery, but that's almost a
tautology: You design your machinery for an optimized balance of performance
versus wear-and-tear, then try to operate at (what you _call_ ) "full power"
as much as you can, so as to reap maximum value from your investment.

In any event, the original comment was that excess power is inevitably
generated by nuclear plants (at least during some time periods) and therefore
must be dumped somehow. That's not the case; nuclear plants can be throttled
up and down as needed.

[2]
[http://www.nei.org/resourcesandstats/nuclear_statistics/cost...](http://www.nei.org/resourcesandstats/nuclear_statistics/costs/)

------
siculars
And this is a beautiful example of manufacturing innovation and advancement,
evolution and revolution, coming from those that actually make things. When
you make things you find a way to make them better. This is why I believe we
in the USA need to maintain a strong industrial/manufacturing culture. Not
simply to employ people but rather to be at the epicenter of where innovation
happens.

------
tlb
Any claim of something being cheaper, with a picture of some shiny stainless-
steel small-scale lab equipment, is suspect. It's not demonstrated to be
cheaper until you're producing at scale.

------
ginko
Could this method also be used to create ultra-thin wafers for
microprocessors?

------
jstalin
From the literature I've seen, the realistic maximum amount of solar energy
that can be produced through photovoltaic cells is about 40-50 watts per
square meter. Although solar is exciting, there's just no way it can be used
to replace fossil fuels, no matter how cheap it gets to manufacture. It'll
have to be a combination of renewables (why not more hydroelectric power) and
greater efficiency (like LED's).

~~~
cma
Not really a big crisis; we could shut down every nuclear plant in the US
today if people switched from drying clothes in an electric dryer to hanging
them outside. We live in a time of absolute plenty.

~~~
greedo
Sure...

Nuclear power generates 21% of the US electrical usage, of which residential
consumption is roughly 1/3 of total usage.

The math won't work...

------
hinathan
For traditional wafer processes, you consume a great deal more feedstock than
goes into the active portion of a wafer, and even then you may end up grinding
away much of the material such as in the case of backlit imaging sensors.

This 'exfoliation' approach in some ways plays into the concept Elon Musk
floated about SpaceX - the actual atoms in a booster are relatively simple,
they just need to be arranged in the right way.

------
ryanisinallofus
A case in which building your hammer to build your desk does actually add
value.

------
invalidOrTaken
I think I may have misunderstood the manufacturing process. To my reading, it
looks like they have 3mm-thick wafers, accumulate a 20mm-thick layer of
hydrogen, which then shears off in a furnace, leaving...a 3mm-thick wafer.
Which they started with. Thanks in advance to whoever explains how I've
misunderstood this.

EDIT: Oh, I neglected to pay attention to units. The above should be 3mm, 20-
_micrometer_ , and 2.98mm, respectively, which means the sheet shearing off is
0.002mm thick. This is seriously cool. Thanks for everyone's patience.

~~~
jmaygarden
They must have meant 20 micrometer thick layers since they also state that
they are "a tenth of the thickness" of standard "200-micrometer-thick (0.2mm)"
wafers.

------
sovande
_[..] cost of around 40 cents per watt, about half the cost of panels
currently coming out of China (where the vast majority of solar panels are
made)_

To me, this is the second cool part of the story. It shows that we can still
do industrial enterprises in the west by applying technology. Sooner or later
the production and assembly industry will have no more cheap labor forces to
"exploit" on the globe and production, assembly and automaton technology may
(again) be an industrial game changer for the west as it was with "spinning
jenny".

------
skittles
Is there a mistake in the 40 cents per watt cost reported in the article? I
work for an energy company and our wind-farm energy is around 4.5 cents per
_kilowatt_.

~~~
ahi
I suspect your wind-farm energy is around 4.5 cents per kilowatt- _hour_

edit: napkin math: .40 * 1000 watts = $400/kw Assuming 4380 hours of optimum
sunlight per year and lifetime of 10 years ~= .01/kwh Should be competitive
even when my ridiculous assumption meets reality.

------
evolvd
Seems like something they could scale up and mass produce.

~~~
jonhohle
Looking at Twin Creeks' website[0], it appears they are in the wafer
manufacturing business and are using solar to promote their technology. It
doesn't seem clear from their website that they would ever be the ones selling
solar panels - but they might manufacture them for a client. They are selling
their services, one application of which is solar cells.

[0] <http://www.twincreekstechnologies.com/>

------
drucken
It is not clear if glass as a protective cover is still used or required for
final production of solar cells made with this process.

Does anyone know?

~~~
ender7
Almost certainly. You could use another material, such as some clear plastic
or epoxy, but the idea is still the same (and glass has the most desirable
transmittance properties I believe).

~~~
ars
Glass blocks UV which isn't ideal since it heats things up and UV has useful
energy. But it's cheaper than quartz.

------
gaius
And the ion cannon is powered by...? And the raw materials were extracted by
machines powered by...?

~~~
jes5199
electricity!

------
bnolsen
"fossil fuel" is likely a misnomer. Read to your heart's content here:
<http://trilogymedia.com.au/Thomas_Gold/usgs.html>

------
thefool
Similar idea (solar cell would be much cheaper if they were much thinner),
different process: <http://www.naanovo.com/home>

------
aaxp
Waiting for shills to block this technology using peer review to save petro-
dollar empire.

------
pkulak
And as an aside, companies are already pretty good at storing energy with
things like molten salt.

------
kragen
The thing I'm puzzled about here is why saving silicon makes your solar cells
cheaper. I mean, silicon is really cheap, right? Metallurgical-grade silicon
is 77 cents a pound:
[http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/silicon/sil...](http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/silicon/silicmcs06.pdf)
— and that works out to around a penny a watt.

I tried to dig into this a few years ago. Evergreen Solar's 10-K for 2007
[http://edgar.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/947397/000095013508...](http://edgar.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/947397/000095013508001256/b68105ese10vk.htm)
has some information. Evergreen's competitive advantage is supposedly that
they use less silicon than other manufacturers because they don't saw their
wafers — they grow them. They say they use about 5g of silicon per watt (in
2007, planning to reduce it to 2½g per watt by 2012), and it sounds like they
get paid about US$3.87 per watt on average (US$58M revenue in 2007, maxed-out
manufacturing capacity of 15MW/year, 276 full-time employees in
manufacturing). Their "cost of revenue" (i.e. manufacturing cost) was US$53M,
or US$3.53/W. But 5g of metallurgical-grade silicon at the price above is
US$0.008. If each employee costs US$120k per year (including health benefits,
and remembering that a bunch of them are Ph.D.s) then that would be US$2.20/W
in labor costs, which already accounts for the majority of that cost of
revenue.

But they're not buying metallurgical-grade silicon; they're buying
"polysilicon", short for "polycrystalline silicon", which is perhaps a bit of
a misnomer, since how many crystals are in each piece of silicon supplied by
their suppliers is somewhat immaterial, since Evergreen melts the silicon down
and crystallizes it in polycrystalline silicon ribbons in their "String
Ribbon" furnaces. Maybe that costs a lot more than metallurgical-grade
silicon?

It used to be hard to find that information! But it's much better now;
<http://pvinsights.com/> lists current PV-grade polysilicon prices at US$29 to
US$35 per kilogram, and [http://www.pv-
tech.org/news/polysilicon_prices_declines_will...](http://www.pv-
tech.org/news/polysilicon_prices_declines_will_continue_sector_shakeout_says_gtm_research)
explains that this is a major drop from previous prices of US$80/kg. 5 g at
US$35 per kilogram is US$0.175. But "Silicon PV Module Price Per Watt" ranges
from US$0.75 to US$1.40. Dropping 17½¢ off that price still isn't going to get
you to 40¢. And if Evergreen has really made it to 2½g/W, silicon cost is even
less of the total cost.

<http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/008483.html> mentions that in 2008
polysilicon prices peaked at US$400/kg.

Anyway. I'm obviously no expert, but I'm skeptical that peeling silicon with a
particle accelerator is going to _decrease_ the cost of photovoltaic cells.

~~~
reitzensteinm
This isn't raw silicon, it's spun ingots. The cost is almost entirely from the
process they undergo, not the raw materials. From Wikipedia:

"A typical wafer is made out of extremely pure silicon that is grown into
mono-crystalline cylindrical ingots (boules) up to 300 mm (slightly less than
12 inches) in diameter using the Czochralski process. These ingots are then
sliced into wafers about 0.75 mm thick and polished to obtain a very regular
and flat surface."

So it's a better way to slice the ingots into wafers. Those ingots are
ridiculously expensive.

~~~
kragen
Well, first of all, most solar cells are not made from monocrystalline boules;
they're made from polycrystalline boules, which are cheaper and faster.
Second, I don't think the Czochralski process costs US$400 per kilogram
either.

------
wavephorm
WARNING: it's another one of those OnSwipe mobile sites that crash your
browser.

I wish there was some way to opt out of OnSwipe and just load the desktop
version of a website on my iPad.

------
marshray
And if the solar panels don't work out, they can take four of those ion
cannons and use them as blinged-out wheels on their Escalade.

