Common Sense’s Recent Comments

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  Shipping to whom

  Nanosolar's first panels are being shipped to Beck Energy for installation at a municipal plant in the former East Germany. On New developments in solar power make 'clean coal' look even dumber posted 1 year, 10 months ago 35 Responses

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  Analyst -->dog ate his homework

  1. Solar efficiencies for CIGS are less than for crystalline polysilicon, but are in the range of 10%.

  2. I don't know their cost per watt, but they just started shipping the first of a megawatts worth of cells. Ask again after a year's production has flattened their learning curve and you'll probably be heading towards that buck.

  3. You claim to be paying attention to the thin film arena so why haven't you seen the high quality people that have flocked from other Silicon Valley firms to Nanosolar. This is a home grown product with a raft of patents and hard won know how. Their real secret is a willingness to toss conventional wisdom out the window and turn their young and very bright scientists, engineers, and technicians loose on the multitude of technical problems they have to solve. The fact that they have begun commercial shipments is a great milestone.

  What really makes this a great month for breakthrough energy announcements was that in addition to Nansolar's news, Stanford scientists announced an order of magnitude improvement in energy density for lithium ion batteries. It's not a commercial product yet, but this is the kind of development to turn solar and wind into more reliable energy sources and to make electric cars practical for nearly all uses.

  Happy New Year!  
  On New developments in solar power make 'clean coal' look even dumber posted 1 year, 10 months ago 35 Responses