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.  Have one of these in each of several hundred cities and a Gigawatt of power is delivered — locally to where the power is needed and in a digestible size each.

In a municipal solar power plant, solar panels are mounted onto rails above the ground so that grass and flowers can continue to flourish in between and below the rows of panels.  Care is taken that sufficient amounts of rainwater can drop through between adjoining panels so that the flowers and organisms below are not starved.  In fact, in dry regions, the solar panels even benefit the ecosystem by increasing the moisture level in the soil.

Municipal solar power plants integrate very naturally into the existing landscape as well as the existing electricity grid.  By feeding power directly into the (local, medium-voltage) distribution grid, they avoid the (long-haul, high-voltage) transmission grid which is expensive to build and expand, and they also avoid the expense of a substation for down-transforming transmission voltage to municipal voltage.  It’s a form of distributed generation but at the wholesale level —  ”Wholesale Distributed Generation” (WDG) – and it has been determined (using CPUC methodolgy and data) that there is a locational benefit of about 35% over wholesale power cost. These are real dollars that WDG power providers and rate payers can split in a win-win cost advantage.

In any region with a decent amount of sunshine, there is no more economic way of reliably providing municipal power during the day than through a municipal solar power plant.  That’s because municipal solar power plants combine the locational benefit of avoided transmission with the time-of-day benefit of solar and the economics of scale.

Ground-mounted solar power plants are installed in industrially streamlined ways, with specialized tractors deploying standardized substructure components according to standard system block designs to achieve optimal cost efficiency. 

While rooftops are surely a good application too for solar panels, it is a business that’s difficult to scale rapidly in a truly meaningful way. Crawling onto rooftops and mounting solar panels in compliance with building codes is fundamentally always a somewhat less efficient proposition.

In fact, municipal solar power plants are one of the most rapidly deployable forms of power: whereas it takes 10-15 years to get a new coal plant done (if ever given their carbon risk) or 5 years for a concentrating solar-thermal plant (also requiring a connection to the transmission grid), a municipal solar plant can be completed in as little as 12 months.

Furthermore, a unique feature of photovoltaic power plants is that they utilize power inverter electronics with increasingly intelligent features.  Enlightened utilities around the world are now recognizing these as a very good way to manage and improve grid power quality.  This is especially a point of pain at the outer branches of the electric grid where power quality is hard to manage otherwise.  (Any U.S. utility executive who is concerned about the new world of local power but desires to learn more should join this trip.) 

Municipal solar power plants offer an attractive level of efficiency, scale, and benefit in solar.  This is just not yet known very well to the public in the United States and in California where this segment has been stifled not least by the policy gap that exists in California between the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (geared towards >20MW systems) and the California Solar Incentives (designed for <1MW systems).

But towns and cities throughout Europe and Asia have already proven the concept, and more and more — in fact increasingly entire counties — are now implementing plans to go 100% renewable based on a mix of solar and biofuels.  It works, it is economic, and it is possible now.  It is a silent revolution going on that the press rarely reports about.

[A nice exception is an article today in our local newspaper – “Local communities reach for power over energy” (SF Chronicle) – describing how Marin County in California is wrestling with going for local renewable power.  We salute their effort.  It is well timed, smart, and shows a lot of foresight. They are on the right track based on what we see happening in our own industry and in energy overall. In a few years, they will have less expensive power than it is available in the rest of PG&E territory.]

The amount of activity going on behind the scenes in readying technologies, sites, and financings for such is tremendous, and this will become very visible to the public in many locations in the United States in 2010. There is a reason why one of the world’s largest power producers invested in Nanosolar.

But now is the time for cities and counties to lay the adminstrative foundation for having their own power, 100% renewable, if they care to make a difference by then.

Update 4/30: Thank you for the hundreds of comments we have received to this posting via email. Our team has read and digested every single of them. To all 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. 

And yes: California is a big target of this partnership of ours.  Multi-MW sized farms in particular.

More info: Press articles

We are grateful to everyone who supported us through all these years and the many occasions where there appeared to be mile-high concrete walls in our path; the unusual intensity and creativity of our team deserves all the credit for achieving this major milestone today. 

Our product is defining in more ways I can enumerate here but includes:

- the world’s first commercial solar panel based on a printed solar cell;

- the world’s first thin-film solar cell with a back-contact;

- the world’s lowest-cost solar panel – which we believe will make us the first company capable of profitably selling solar panels for as little as $.99/Watt;

- the world’s highest-current thin-film solar panel – delivering five times the current of any other thin-film panel on the market today and thus simplifying system deployment;

- an intensely systems-optimized product with the lowest balance-of-system cost of any thin-film panel – due to innovations in design we have included.

Today we are announcing that we have begun shipping panels for freefield deployment in Eastern Germany and that the first Megawatt of our panels will go into a power plant installation there.

As far as the first three of our commercial panels are concerned:

Panel #1 will remain at Nanosolar for exhibit.
Panel #2 can be purchased by you in an auction on eBay starting today.
Panel #3 has been donated to the Tech Museum in San Jose.

Related Info: Nanosolar Shipping for Megawatt Municipal Power Plant 

Update 12/21: eBay cancelled our auction — due to its charitable angle!  Our eBay auction started at 99 cents and quickly reached more than $13,000.00, with the highest bid at $70,000. We declared that the proceeds would be used for charitable purpose.  We regret that without warning eBay today decided to delete our auction due to the promised charitable use of the proceeds.  Our Director of Legal spent much of the afternoon on the phone with eBay trying to reinstate the auction — but they are not flexible.  Upon review we decided this isn’t a battle we care to fight more than an afternoon, so it’s back to building cells and panels for us.  In other words, Panel #2 will stay at Nanosolar for now (no auction); thank you to everyone for participating in our auction; and most importantly: HAPPY HOLIDAYS.

Our solar electricity technology was named the top Innovation of the Year 2007.  Ranked #1 overall, we even came out ahead of the Apple iPhone and many other great technologies (and companies with much larger marketing budgets too in particular). 

It’s great to see our hard work — and greentech in general — recognized so enthusiastically!  Now we have no choice but to actually make sure that there’s going to be a solar panel on every building in the future.

See also: Popular Science press release, website

We are presently a private company and therefore have no stock symbol and no shares available for purchase by the public.  In fact, in the past, we have very carefully controlled our selection of investors, and it has been very good for us as a company to work with such a distinguished group of long-term committed stakeholders. 

As to the question of when we might offer shares to the public, our board of directors has not yet had a chance to discuss this; we’re simply too focused on product development and company building right now.

In general, note that silicon cell manufacturers (whether based on crystalline silicon or equally capital-intense vacuum-deposited silicon thin films) require so much capital per MW of production capacity that they pretty much have to go public as quickly as they can.  Nanosolar is different: Our technology is extremely capital efficient and has such a low cost structure.

Basically, in addition to raw speed, a key advantage of roll-to-roll manufacturing is that after processing the first few feet of a roll, the process settles into a steady state which then applies to the entire rest of the roll, resulting in very uniform deposition process parameters applied to essentially the entire substrate.  This is much better than possible with processing wafers or glass plates, where the fact that they have to be moved into and out of each process station introduces start-up and move-out process variabilities (and cycle time cost) to the substrate.  Edge effects are also greatly minimized in roll processing (whereas processing glass plates or wafers requires much work and capital dealing with uniformity issues at the edges of the substrate).

If you live in the United States, please express your support e.g. through this website:
http://capwiz.com/re-action/issues/alert/?alertid=10344066

In energy as in every industry, the playing field has to be level and fair in order for the best approaches to win.  Proposed legislation such as the above is one step towards leveling the playing field for solar energy with respect to dirty coal and other power sources.

The competition was stiff and included every single significant solar company in this country, including SunPower, First Solar, General Electric, etc.  So we are proud that the U.S. Department of Energy has decided to award us the largest net amount any company receives as part of the Solar America Initiative.

This award from the Department of Energy comes at a timely junction of commercial acceleration for our company.   It brings the DoE in alignment with the private investment community which has long recognized the distinctly superior potential of our technology.

We will do our best to deliver truly outstanding results for every dollar received, commensurate with our leading position of selection. 

Related Articles: Nanosolar press release; A New Day Dawns for Solar by Chris Nelder

As we are about to inaugurate our first commercial manufacturing facility, I wanted to make sure to say a few words early on to set general expectations about how you are and are not going to see our product appear in the market:

Our product will be introduced into the market through a very small group of the most distinguished wholesalers there exist.  

For instance, our first 100,000 panels are set to go into a very small number of private commercial installations where we deploy them in fenced or otherwise secured environments. 

Focusing on a small number of non-public deployments simply makes everything so much easier for us to manage initially.  Plus this also has the benefit of allowing us to secure an additional period of proprietary protection for all the new and product features we have.

All of the remainder of our 2008 product allocations are spoken for already too (for quite some time already in fact).  This means that if your local system integrator has not secured any quantities from us, which typically will be the case, the next opportunity is in 2009.

We are happy to notify you when our products become available through distribution partners in your region.  If you haven’t done so already, please make sure to sign up here to be sure to be notified about this. 

We are working hard to expand production as fast as possible and to make our breakthrough panels available to the broadest group possible.  2008 will be a big year of investment in additional equipment for us, and we will continue to ramp capacity at a rate that is unprecedented for this industry so that soon we will be able to address the pent-up demand more broadly.

You can read the complete interview here: http://earth2tech.com/2007/07/30/10-questions-for-nanosolar-ceo-martin-roscheisen/