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Home > Archive > Alternative Power sources > October 2005 > PV panels
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| Whenever I look at PV panels as an option I get put off by the price- are
they intrinsically expensive or difficult to produce? Or is this just a
volume of production issue? I was thinking of comparing with say processor
chips which contain a LOT of technology in them, but are comparatively cheap
especially when you look at the non-cutting edge versions where the premium
for the state of the art aspect has faded.
Francis
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| Derek Broughton 2005-10-28, 12:21 pm |
| Ledz wrote:
> Whenever I look at PV panels as an option I get put off by the price- are
> they intrinsically expensive or difficult to produce? Or is this just a
> volume of production issue? I was thinking of comparing with say processor
> chips which contain a LOT of technology in them, but are comparatively
> cheap especially when you look at the non-cutting edge versions where the
> premium for the state of the art aspect has faded.
They're _not_ comparatively cheap compared to the amount of silicon in a PV
panel compared to a CPU. It's (partly) a matter of the silicon wafers
being built to chip-maker spec, rather than the much lower standards
required for PV.
--
derek
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| R.H. Allen 2005-10-28, 4:21 pm |
| Ledz wrote:
> Whenever I look at PV panels as an option I get put off by the price- are
> they intrinsically expensive or difficult to produce? Or is this just a
> volume of production issue?
There are a number of issues. About 70% of the manufacturing cost of a
crystalline silicon PV module goes to purchasing raw materials, most
notably silicon. The per-peak-watt cost of a PV module is a function of
both this and solar cell efficiency. Volume production will help bring
down some of the material costs, but it alone will not make PV
economical. Obviously, increasing efficiency is one way to bring the
cost down, but crystalline silicon efficiencies are already close enough
to theoretical efficiency limits the amount of material used in making a
PV module from it has to be reduced. Conversely, folks working on thin
films -- amorphous silicon, CIS, CdTe, organics, microcrystalline
silicon, etc. -- have minimal material costs, but terribly low
efficiencies. *They* are looking to increase efficiency without worrying
too much about material costs.
Thus far, crystalline silicon is still more than 90% of the PV market,
but I suspect that will drop by about half over the next 20-30 years.
Another aspect to your question is the supply/demand issue. Right now,
demand for PV modules far outstrips supply, and PV manufacturers have
not been able to grow the supply fast enough to catch up. As a result,
retail prices are bit inflated and not very indicative of actual
manufacturing costs.
> I was thinking of comparing with say processor
> chips which contain a LOT of technology in them, but are comparatively cheap
> especially when you look at the non-cutting edge versions where the premium
> for the state of the art aspect has faded.
Well, considering that a single silicon wafer full of processor chips
can have a street value well over $200,000, and that a $600 PV module
contains 36 silicon wafers, I'm inclined to say that the technology in
the processor chips is pretty pricey compared to PV. Even for
non-premium processors, you're still looking at thousands of dollars per
wafer. That is because a large number of processors can be made on a
single wafer; when the wafer is finished, the processors are sawed out
of it and individually packaged. Solar cells, on the other hand, are
typically made one cell per wafer because power output is proportional
to the size of the solar cell. The amount of silicon used to make, say,
a Pentium microprocessor would only produce about 100 mW of power if
used as a solar cell.
I'm writing fast, so I hope that's not all too jumbled to understand....
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| Market Theory 2005-10-29, 8:21 pm |
| R.H. Allen wrote:
> Ledz wrote:
>
> There are a number of issues. About 70% of the manufacturing cost of a
> crystalline silicon PV module goes to purchasing raw materials, most
> notably silicon. The per-peak-watt cost of a PV module is a function of
> both this and solar cell efficiency. Volume production will help bring
> down some of the material costs, but it alone will not make PV
> economical. Obviously, increasing efficiency is one way to bring the
> cost down, but crystalline silicon efficiencies are already close enough
> to theoretical efficiency limits the amount of material used in making a
> PV module from it has to be reduced.
Researchers at the Australian National university claim to have
developed a silicon PV cell that uses an order of magnitude less Si.
http://solar.anu.edu.au/pages/publi...nthinmonosi.pdf
Is this a breakthrough?
(They have some interesting work on PV concentrators and solar thermal
on their site too)
When I did the calculations on the value of a home PV array I found I
could generate considerably more electricity by putting the money in
the bank and using the interest to buy electricity from the local power
station. That was including the government rebate.
cheers,
--mt.
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| R.H. Allen 2005-10-30, 8:21 pm |
| Market Theory wrote:
> R.H. Allen wrote:
>
>
>
> Researchers at the Australian National university claim to have
> developed a silicon PV cell that uses an order of magnitude less Si.
>
> http://solar.anu.edu.au/pages/publi...nthinmonosi.pdf
>
> Is this a breakthrough?
Origin Energy (also in Australia) is attempting to commercialize this
technology right now. From what I understand, assembling the "slivers"
is difficult to automate, but not many details are available. In
principle, it has a lot of potential; in practice, manufacturing issues
might very well offset the savings from reduced silicon consumption.
Until they actually hit the market with a product (or admit failure), it
will be difficult to tell.
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| Offgridman 2005-10-31, 12:21 am |
| If you go back and look in recent past when BP and Shell bought out
solar panel mfgs the prices stopped declining and started to rise right
after. Look up my old posts on the subject. My predictions of what they
would do to the solar panel market was correct. Heck they did not even
bother to change the story they give the public. "Shortage of raw
materials"
Offgidman
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| Solar Flare 2005-10-31, 12:21 am |
| Who has gone without a solar panel yet?
Shortages don't raise the price they make them harder to get.
They can produce a silicon chip with different doping layer, engineer and burn
in over 10,000,000 transistors for under $30 but it takes $500 to make a solar
panel with one substrate layer?
"Offgridman" <offgridman@cs.com> wrote in message
news:1130730073.725281.73720@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> If you go back and look in recent past when BP and Shell bought out
> solar panel mfgs the prices stopped declining and started to rise right
> after. Look up my old posts on the subject. My predictions of what they
> would do to the solar panel market was correct. Heck they did not even
> bother to change the story they give the public. "Shortage of raw
> materials"
> Offgidman
>
| |
| R.H. Allen 2005-10-31, 11:21 am |
| Offgridman wrote:
> If you go back and look in recent past when BP and Shell bought out
> solar panel mfgs the prices stopped declining and started to rise right
> after.
According to every market survey I've seen, prices started rising at the
end of last year. Neither of them bought out manufacturers anywhere near
then. Besides which, neither Shell nor BP have the kind of market share
(6.0% and 7.1%, respectively) to influence the market that way. At a
minimum you'd have to have Sharp and its 27.1% share of the market
involved. And Sharp, if anything, has been acting to *reduce* prices in
the US by expanding here (prior to last year they had no US PV presence)
and increasing the total supply of modules available.
> Look up my old posts on the subject. My predictions of what they
> would do to the solar panel market was correct. Heck they did not even
> bother to change the story they give the public. "Shortage of raw
> materials"
Try buying silicon for double the price it was 18 months ago. If you can
even *find* someone who has silicon to sell you, they'll charge you a
lot more than that for it.
However, I don't recall anybody claiming a raw material shortage prior
to that. I *do* recall that they couldn't increase production capacity
fast enough to keep up with demand -- it's pretty tough for a business
in *any* industry to raise enough capital to double, triple, or
quadruple production in the span of a single year.
| |
| R.H. Allen 2005-10-31, 12:21 pm |
| Solar Flare wrote:
> Who has gone without a solar panel yet?
> Shortages don't raise the price they make them harder to get.
Which raises the price. Anytime a product is scarce, it goes to whoever
is willing to pay the most for it. Hence, prices rise. The manufacturing
cost of PV has declined in recent years, but retail prices -- which the
manufacturers have little control over -- have not.
> They can produce a silicon chip with different doping layer, engineer and burn
> in over 10,000,000 transistors for under $30 but it takes $500 to make a solar
> panel with one substrate layer?
Big difference. There's an economy of scale with microchips that is not
possible with solar cells. Your $30 chip was cut from a silicon wafer
that held hundreds, and possibly thousands (depending on the size of the
chip), of additional chips. Processing a single microchip wafer costs
tens of thousands of dollars, but when it yields a thousand chips, each
only costs tens of dollars. A silicon wafer that gets turned into a
solar cell, on the other hand, typically costs $7 or less to produce. So
a wafer full of microchips might cost $30,000 to produce, while a solar
cell made on the same size wafer will cost only $7.
When you assemble a PV module, of course, you use not one, but
(typically) 36 solar cells. That's $252. Then you have to add on the
costs of the frame, encapsulant, glass, etc. By the time you buy it from
your dealer, there are also shipping costs and profit margins added for
each stop in the supply chain.
| |
|
| There has been several stories in the past about how solar cells were going
to be built on a single roll, in a long length and the cost would be 1/10 of
the price, well it seems like they were all a bunch of crap to collect
investment money. What happened to them?
"R.H. Allen" <kkarie@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:KbOdnUryWbubqPveRVn-jg@giganews.com...
> Offgridman wrote:
>
> According to every market survey I've seen, prices started rising at the
> end of last year. Neither of them bought out manufacturers anywhere near
> then. Besides which, neither Shell nor BP have the kind of market share
> (6.0% and 7.1%, respectively) to influence the market that way. At a
> minimum you'd have to have Sharp and its 27.1% share of the market
> involved. And Sharp, if anything, has been acting to *reduce* prices in
> the US by expanding here (prior to last year they had no US PV presence)
> and increasing the total supply of modules available.
>
>
> Try buying silicon for double the price it was 18 months ago. If you can
> even *find* someone who has silicon to sell you, they'll charge you a lot
> more than that for it.
>
> However, I don't recall anybody claiming a raw material shortage prior to
> that. I *do* recall that they couldn't increase production capacity fast
> enough to keep up with demand -- it's pretty tough for a business in *any*
> industry to raise enough capital to double, triple, or quadruple
> production in the span of a single year.
| |
| R.H. Allen 2005-10-31, 4:21 pm |
| TNT wrote:
> There has been several stories in the past about how solar cells were going
> to be built on a single roll, in a long length and the cost would be 1/10 of
> the price, well it seems like they were all a bunch of crap to collect
> investment money. What happened to them?
Some are in production -- if I'm not mistaken, at least some of United
Solar's amorphous silicon panels are manufactured this way. Others were
in the early R&D phases when they were announced and are still under
development. I figure some of them will fail to even make it to
commercial production, while others will be found in commercial products
sometime in the next 5 years or so. The biggest proponents of these
technologies will tell you that commercial production is right around
the corner, and I think they honestly believe that. But I also think
they underappreciate how difficult it is to take a product from the
laboratory to the production line, particularly when the underlying
technology is new and there's no experience to draw from.
| |
| Solar Flare 2005-10-31, 8:21 pm |
| There is stil not shortage. despite your logic proving it also.
"R.H. Allen" <kkarie@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:wJGdnZDnMqdOpfveRVn-gg@giganews.com...
> Solar Flare wrote:
>
> Which raises the price. Anytime a product is scarce, it goes to whoever
> is willing to pay the most for it. Hence, prices rise. The manufacturing
> cost of PV has declined in recent years, but retail prices -- which the
> manufacturers have little control over -- have not.
>
burn[color=darkred]
solar[color=darkred]
>
> Big difference. There's an economy of scale with microchips that is not
> possible with solar cells. Your $30 chip was cut from a silicon wafer
> that held hundreds, and possibly thousands (depending on the size of the
> chip), of additional chips. Processing a single microchip wafer costs
> tens of thousands of dollars, but when it yields a thousand chips, each
> only costs tens of dollars. A silicon wafer that gets turned into a
> solar cell, on the other hand, typically costs $7 or less to produce. So
> a wafer full of microchips might cost $30,000 to produce, while a solar
> cell made on the same size wafer will cost only $7.
>
> When you assemble a PV module, of course, you use not one, but
> (typically) 36 solar cells. That's $252. Then you have to add on the
> costs of the frame, encapsulant, glass, etc. By the time you buy it from
> your dealer, there are also shipping costs and profit margins added for
> each stop in the supply chain.
| |
| Ecnerwal 2005-10-31, 9:21 pm |
| In article <Lp-dnS8teo_MwPvenZ2dnUVZ_tGdnZ2d@comcast.com>,
"TNT" <tnt@comcast.net> wrote:
> There has been several stories in the past about how solar cells were going
> to be built on a single roll, in a long length and the cost would be 1/10 of
> the price, well it seems like they were all a bunch of crap to collect
> investment money. What happened to them?
They cost about 15/10 the price of traditional crystalline cells, and if
you want to pay that sort of premium, you can buy them. Low price claims
remain so much smoke and mirrors, as per usual.
--
Cats, coffee, chocolate...vices to live by
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