Start of Another Installation
February 12, 2009
By Martin Roscheisen CEO
Type: Municipal Solar Power Plant. Location: Europe.
Feeding In Renewable Energy Breakthroughs
January 21, 2009
By George Sterzinger Executive Director Renewable Energy Policy Project and Martin Roscheisen CEO Nanosolar
At a time when many folks in Washington are running around with their hair on fire looking for schemes to dramatically increase renewable energy use by mid-February at the latest, let’s consider that what renewable energy really needs is a shift to permanent, effective policies to pursue and develop its potential.
The recent inclusion of the Federal Investment Tax Credit for solar energy through 2016 is a good example of this type of policy. But, it is just the start.
In our view, renewable energy’s greatest potential and competitive advantage is its ability to evolve rapidly and offer technologies that produce electricity at lower and lower prices with no carbon emissions, subsequently decreasing our dependence on foreign fossil fuels.
Here is one effective, low-cost approach to encourage innovation: Create a set of national Standard Offers or Feed-in Rates for new, significantly better renewable technologies. This policy would offer predictable compensation to any renewable energy generator in the form of long-term power purchase contracts, creating a streamlined administrative national framework that makes developing renewable energy projects and manufacturing new technologies highly investable for entrepreneurs and private capital alike.
The great virtue of offering a national price for renewable energy is that it would be immediately transparent and open to any technology company/developer. Currently, developing utility-scale renewable energy projects requires dealing with hundreds of private and public utilities all operating under strikingly different state regulatory requirements, and often requiring substantial upfront investments just to respond to requests for proposal.
The feed-in rate we are proposing would be set below what current renewable technologies deliver in order to focus support on breakthroughs that will drive the price of renewable electricity down in order to replace more and more traditional, fossil fuel based electricity generation. The national feed-in price could be adjusted periodically by the policy’s governing board in order to move renewable electricity through the price points that would deliver greater market share to renewable generation while avoiding excess or windfall profits at the expense of the taxpayer. For example, the set of feed-in rate price points could be set by (1) on-peak natural gas fired generation to (2) combined cycle natural gas –fired generation to (3) base load coal generation with an adjustment to reflect the cost of CO2 emissions.
Setting an initial feed-in rate at $.15 per kWh for 20 years for solar projects, for example, would draw out multiple breakthrough technologies and greatly advance their market penetration.
[...] Continue — Read the complete article on greentechmedia.com
On the evening of Obama’s inauguration, PBS aired the fourth chapter of its NOVA program “The Big Energy Gamble” with the following topic:
“NUCLEAR TO THE RESCUE? While California Assemblyman Chuck DeVore wants the state to build more nuclear power plants, a company called Nanosolar is betting on new ways to harvest sunlight.”
The segment also containts statements by Dr. Steven Chu, now confirmed as the Secretary of Energy.
Watch the video.
1kg CIGS = 5kg Uranium
December 16, 2008
By Martin Roscheisen CEO
The notion of a kilogram of enriched Uranium conjures up an image of a powerful amout of energy. Enough to power an entire city for years when used in a nuclear power plant, or enough to flatten an entire county when used in a bomb — that’s presumably what many people would say if one asked them about their thoughts.
In our new solar cell technology, we use an active material called CIGS, a Copper based semiconductor. How does this stack up against enriched Uranium?
Here’s a noteworthy fact, pointed out to me by one of our engineers: It turns out that 1kg of CIGS, embedded in a solar cell, produces 5 times as much electricity as 1kg of enriched Uranium, embedded in a nuclear power plant.
Or said differently, 1kg of CIGS is equivalent to 5kg of enriched Uranium in terms of the energy the materials deliver in solar and nuclear respectively.
The Uranium is burned and then stored in a nuclear waste facility; the CIGS material produces power for at least the warranty period of the solar cell product after which it can then be recycled and reused an indefinite number of times.
Tubular PV?
December 10, 2008
By Martin Roscheisen CEO
One of the great things about solar cells manufactured on a flexible substrate, such as Nanosolar’s, is their versatility: they can be assembled into all sorts of forms and shapes of solar panel products, and — by only changing the back-end assembly — panels of different form factors and packages can be introduced rapidly and responsively to meet dynamic market requirements.
This makes it possible to deliver solar panel products of all sorts of widths and length, from tile to multi-sqm size; panels that use a glass/glass package for the cells (fire safe, etc.); panels using a glass/foil package (lighter weight); panels that are rollable altogether by virtue of packaging flexible solar cells with flexible foil encapsulants; etc.
With Nanosolar’s flexible solar cell technology, we can also create panel products of more exotic shapes and forms. For instance, we can create tubular solar panels — by rolling our flexible cell strings into cylinder shape and affixing them inside a protective glass tube.
(more…)
Time Magazine just published its list of the 50 best inventions of the year 2008 and named Nanosolar’s thin-film technology one of them.
We are honored by this prestigious selection and will redouble our efforts to invent even more!
With more than 300 patents and hundreds of tightly guarded trade secrets, ranging from new three-dimensional optical nanostructures to new production tooling designs, we have always believed that investing in science and innovation is the foundation for fundamentally better technology and products.
Time Magazine Best Inventions 2008: Nanosolar Thin-Film Technology
Solar and the Credit Crisis
October 17, 2008
By Martin Roscheisen CEO
Three years ago, when asked to contribute an op-ed perspective to the solar industry’s main trade magazine, I thought it useful to focus it on how poor manufacturing capital efficiency is really a very critical issue facing the solar industry and how this is what Nanosolar is seeking to change using simple printing processes, nanotechnology, and other forms of high-productivity technologies.
Then a solar investment boom set in, and, during the past few years, it seemed as if capital is free and the only thing that mattered is rapid production capacity expansion at no matter what capital expenditure. Petrodollars and overvalued public company dollars fueled the construction of factories with readily available but incredibly capital-inefficient manufacturing process technology, that is, production technology that delivers very little product revenue relative to the amount of capital investment necessary for building the factory capacity to produce the revenue-generating product.
The most egregious examples of this have been the production tooling capital expenditure (capex) necessary for wafered silicon cells as well as the high-vacuum thin-film cells from companies such as Applied Materials where the revenue to capex ratio is barely 75 cents on the dollar in a realistic pricing environment. This means that at any revenue growth faster than 20% per year, these companies are eternal black holes in terms of cash flow; whatever cash orbits their vicinity disappears in them and is never to be seen again.
Of course, this has now begun to change — and rapidly so — through the credit crisis. Going forward, it will matter again whether someone asks a bank or an investor for $100 million or for $1 billion in capital to build a factory with each the same product revenue potential.
While already committed capital creates an overhang and presumably will still lead to the completion of a further number of factories based on low-productivity technology, subsequent expansion of such has now become more doubtful. In addition, the smartest system integrators in the industry will already react and question their strategic supply mix and security, which in turn only reinforces the healthy pressure towards more capital efficient and bankable production.
At Nanosolar, where we just recently have had our first profitable month (in good part due to frugal cost management), we are looking forward to demonstrating how fast growth and innovation in solar is possible in a sustainable, non-dilutive manner.
As part of a strategic $300 million equity financing, Nanosolar has added new capital and brought its total amount of funding to date to just below half a billion U.S. dollars.
Last December, we introduced the Nanosolar Utility Panel(TM) to enable solar utility power — i.e. giving utility-scale power producers the solar panel technology to build and operate cost efficient solar power plants.
The tremendous demand for our unique product was matched by the desire to support us in scaling its availability even more rapidly and ambitiously.
Today we are pleased to announce that we have received strategic backing by partners ideally suited to accelerate the implementation of this business — in the form of product supply agreements, strategic collaboration, and equity investments.
As part of the transaction, the boards of directors of AES Corporation (one of the world’s largest power companies), the Carlyle Group, EDF (the world’s largest electric utility), and Energy Capital Partners signed off on investments into Nanosolar through Riverstone Holdings, EDF Renewables, and simultaneously formed AES Solar. A fraction of the oversubscribed Nanosolar equity round also included financial investors such as Lone Pine Capital, the Skoll Foundation, and Pierre Omidyar’s fund as well as returning investors including GLG Partners, Beck Energy, and Conergy founding investor Grazia Equity. The transaction closed in March 2008.
The alliance for solar utility power is the outcome of a year long effort on behalf of our strategic partners examining the solar industry, investigating virtually every solar company on the planet, and conducting one of the most thorough due diligence efforts on our manufacturing operation, our scale-up capabilities, and our readiness for the level of cost efficiency demanded by solar utility power. We are honored to have been selected as the company of choice to partner with by such a distinguished and sophisticated group.
The new capital will allow us to accelerate production expansion for our 430MW San Jose factory and our 620MW Berlin factory. (Earlier, Nanosolar secured a 50% capex subsidy on its Germany based factory.)
Going All-Electric
August 7, 2008
By Martin Roscheisen CEO
The following is one of my favorite charts: How far a car can drive based on either of the following forms of energy, each produced from 100m x 100m (2.5 acres) of land:
How come that biofuel does not really cut it? Electric cars are about four times more energy efficient than fuel based cars. This is because fuel engines mostly creates heat and thus wastes the majority of the energy units available. Combine this with biofuel plants not being very efficient solar energy harvesters relative to semiconductor based solar electricity, and the result is this huge difference.
In other words, it is clear that if the goal is to maximize energy efficiency, the end point to go after is all-electric cars everywhere. Moving all of transportation to all-electric would essentially cut in half our overall energy consumption without compromising on distance to go.
I for one have vowed that the Prius I bought six years ago will have been the last fuel powered car I’d buy in my life. (Given that I may very well own the highest-mileage Prius on the planet, this presumably reflects my confidence in the quality of this vehicle and the near-term readiness of electric car technology…) Presently, it is baking in the sun all day while I’m at work. My future all-electric car would charge up while idling under a solar carport.
U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer and her staff today visited Nanosolar to tour our factory and present us with the U.S. Senate Conservation Champion award. We are honored to be awarded this recognition — thank you very much!
During our meeting with the U.S. Senator, we discussed the importance of getting a Federal RPS right in 2009 and fixing the state level RPS’es.
Getting Renewable Portfolio Standards Right
Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) are the politically most digestible administrative framework in the United States for leveling the playing field for green technologies in the energy industry.
But the RPS systems we have in place today at the level of various states are ineffective because they are limited in the following three key ways:
1. They are primarily geared towards large-scale, centralized generation, i.e. power plants of larger than 50MW in size. That’s the old mindset — preferring one 300MW plant over thirty 10MW plants.
But a lot of today’s action and opportunity in renewables is in decentralized 1-10MW generation, including municipal solar power plants and other forms of power generation at the local level. No well-designed RPS should have a built-in bias against small & medium sized power generation.
For instance, in California, we have one policy framework (the California Solar Incentives, CSI) for sub-1MW solar installations, connected locally; and we have an RPS that works for >20MW power generation, connected to transmission lines. In between we have a policy gap for renewable generation of one to twenty MW in size, which is often directly connected into the municipal grid, i.e. without having to use transmission lines:
No federal energy policy should favor big power plants over medium sized ones; and the state level policies should be reworked in this regard too.
Specifically, by avoiding the substantial expense and energy loss associated with transmission infrastructure, small and medium sized power plants have an economic benefit to the public, and this ought to be reflected as a corresponding commercial benefit.
2. They have no teeth. State utilities can simply default on the agreed-upon renewable targets and pay a marginal fee. Without the prospect of a penalty that hurts at least a little bit (e.g. 10-15 cents/kWh of a surcharge) and one that will actually be enforced, the utilities won’t seriously plan on delivering on the agreed-upon objectives, and the more honest approach would be to better cut the whole RPS system. In fact, what is happening today is that utilities commit to a lot of dubious projects, many of which can never make it (e.g. due to lack of transmission) and/or will never make it. If there were real penalties, they’d take a much harder look at how to really deliver on the agreed-upon objectives.
3. A final key element to get right in the next generation of RPS is better transparency and project pipeline predictability. Only a predictable environment will be an investible one. One way of achieving good predictability are standard contracts which the utilities have to accept. The smoke-filled backroom dealing part of the RPS system has to be cleaned up.
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