Nanosolar Cell Technology

Overview

Nanosolar is a company from San Jose, CA that has developed a ink that can print the semi-conductor of a high performance solar cell. This printing technology allows for a low cost development and easy deployment of solar cells to be put to commercial and consumer use in a highly cost efficient way. Since the solar cells are flexible they can be essentially painted onto roof-tops of houses and trucks or wherever solar power is needed as it does not need to be mounted like traditional solar cells.

Technology Behind Nanosolar Cells

Nanosolar ink mentioned above is made of various forms of nanoparticles, associated organic dispersion chemistry and processing techniques. Since the ink is mixed the right way no matter where you print the solar cells it will always be efficient and contain the proper amount of elements needed to make them work. Semiconductor printing usually has a vacuum process that is very costly, so an advantage of Nanosolar cell printing is it can be done in thin air cutting out the vacuum step and making it low cost in comparable to per-meter-square economics required by the solar industry. Nanosolar technology uses a metal foil that makes it 20 times more conductive than traditional stainless steel or glass material as this allows the substrate to carry the electric current from the semiconductor more efficiently.

Advantages and Comparison Excerpt from website

Thin-film solar films are more than 100x thinner than silicon-wafer cells and thus have correspondingly lower materials cost.

Combining the materials-cost advantage of thin films with the process cost advantage of Nanosolar’s 100x faster process technology leads to the best of both worlds.

The result is the world’s most cost-efficient solar electricity cells and panels:

Technology Wave	I. Wafer Cells	II. Vacuum-Based Thin-Film-on-Glass	III. Roll-Printed Thin-Film-on-Foil
Process:	Silicon wafer processing	Sputtering, evaporation in a vacuum chamber	Printing in plain air
Process Control:	Fragile wafers	Expensive metrology	Built-in bottom-up reproducibility
Process Yield:	Robust	Fragile	Robust
Materials Utilization:	30%	30-50%	Over 95%
Substrate:	Wafer	Glass	Conductive Foil
Continuous Processing:	No — wafer handling	No — glass handling	Yes
Cell Matching:	Yes	No	Yes
Panel Current:	High	Low	High
Energy Payback:	3 years	1.7 years	< 1 month
Throughput/CapEx	1	2-5	10-25

Impressions of Nanosolar Cell Technology

Nano cells are not created with silicone that has become an expensive commodity around the world, so this makes it highly affordable for consumers and companies looking to cut costs in energy. As there is little to no environmental impact for the reasons it gives off no green house gasses and has a 25 year warranty you can be safely assured it is a product that will last, cost little to maintain and is easily replaceable in a cost efficient way. We can see in countries like Africa where coal consumption is high this technology would be useful as it is much less expensive, considered a renewable resource as your harvesting the suns energy and lastly its lifespan and productivity is incomparable to many energy resources.

Resource: Nanosolar