Solar panel made with ion cannon is cheap enough to challenge fossil fuels

That is some amazing technology right there, almost fun to read because it sounds like science fiction but it's real.<p>And privately designed/built/owned particle accelerators? It's definitely a new era.<p>What if one day the other side of the globe getting sunlight powered the grid for the other half? Of course this would require very peaceful nations on each continent, so even if we had the cost-effective technology now, it would take hundreds if not thousands of years to happen politically.

I highly recommend reading "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air"[1] to anyone interested in topic of energy sources and use. It covers lots of things mentioned in comments, like storing energy in pump storages or car batteries in order to make solar/wind plants able to provide a big contribution to power grid without breaking it.<p>What is important, this books talks about those ideas <i>using real data</i> and carefully estimates what's really feasible to do (like, how many pumped storages you'd need if you'd like to switch 50% of your energy sources to solar).<p>[1] - <a href="http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/" rel="nofollow">http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/</a>

This is why I <i>welcomed</i> the backlash and even some of the sensationalism regarding the nuclear explosion in Japan. Even if I realize that nuclear energy could be safe and it's good to have an alternative that is cheap enough to compete with coal, I'd still wish we'd spend all those billions switching from nuclear and putting most of them into renewable energy technologies, which should be the future.<p>The arguments against solar were that the tech is "not there yet", so then it's better to just focus on nuclear. I disagree with that. I believe that if the energy industry changed focus to solar panels and other renewable energy technologies, we would get there a lot faster. We would have a lot more companies exploring different ideas that make them more efficient and cheaper.<p>Nuclear technology will probably never be gone, or at least not within the next century. But I just don't want it to be the holy grail of the energy industry and see the vast majority of investments go into that. I want renewable energy technologies to be that.

The article says we still need better battery technology, and there's truth to that. But even without batteries, just providing power on days when air conditioners run continuously, solar could make a huge difference in the energy picture.

And this is a beautiful example of manufacturing innovation and advancement, evolution and revolution, coming from those that actually make things. When you make things you find a way to make them better. This is why I believe we in the USA need to maintain a strong industrial/manufacturing culture. Not simply to employ people but rather to be at the epicenter of where innovation happens.

Any claim of something being cheaper, with a picture of some shiny stainless-steel small-scale lab equipment, is suspect. It's not demonstrated to be cheaper until you're producing at scale.

Could this method also be used to create ultra-thin wafers for microprocessors?

From the literature I've seen, the realistic maximum amount of solar energy that can be produced through photovoltaic cells is about 40-50 watts per square meter. Although solar is exciting, there's just no way it can be used to replace fossil fuels, no matter how cheap it gets to manufacture. It'll have to be a combination of renewables (why not more hydroelectric power) and greater efficiency (like LED's).

For traditional wafer processes, you consume a great deal more feedstock than goes into the active portion of a wafer, and even then you may end up grinding away much of the material such as in the case of backlit imaging sensors.<p>This 'exfoliation' approach in some ways plays into the concept Elon Musk floated about SpaceX - the actual atoms in a booster are relatively simple, they just need to be arranged in the right way.

A case in which building your hammer to build your desk does actually add value.

I think I may have misunderstood the manufacturing process. To my reading, it looks like they have 3mm-thick wafers, accumulate a 20mm-thick layer of hydrogen, which then shears off in a furnace, leaving...a 3mm-thick wafer. Which they started with. Thanks in advance to whoever explains how I've misunderstood this.<p>EDIT: Oh, I neglected to pay attention to units. The above should be 3mm, 20-<i>micrometer</i>, and 2.98mm, respectively, which means the sheet shearing off is 0.002mm thick. This is seriously cool. Thanks for everyone's patience.

<i>[..] cost of around 40 cents per watt, about half the cost of panels currently coming out of China (where the vast majority of solar panels are made)</i><p>To me, this is the second cool part of the story. It shows that we can still do industrial enterprises in the west by applying technology. Sooner or later the production and assembly industry will have no more cheap labor forces to "exploit" on the globe and production, assembly and automaton technology may (again) be an industrial game changer for the west as it was with "spinning jenny".

Is there a mistake in the 40 cents per watt cost reported in the article? I work for an energy company and our wind-farm energy is around 4.5 cents per <i>kilowatt</i>.

Seems like something they could scale up and mass produce.

It is not clear if glass as a protective cover is still used or required for final production of solar cells made with this process.<p>Does anyone know?

And the ion cannon is powered by...? And the raw materials were extracted by machines powered by...?

"fossil fuel" is likely a misnomer. Read to your heart's content here: <a href="http://trilogymedia.com.au/Thomas_Gold/usgs.html" rel="nofollow">http://trilogymedia.com.au/Thomas_Gold/usgs.html</a>

Similar idea (solar cell would be much cheaper if they were much thinner), different process: <a href="http://www.naanovo.com/home" rel="nofollow">http://www.naanovo.com/home</a>

Waiting for shills to block this technology using peer review to save petro-dollar empire.

And as an aside, companies are already pretty good at storing energy with things like molten salt.

The thing I'm puzzled about here is why saving silicon makes your solar cells cheaper. I mean, silicon is really cheap, right? Metallurgical-grade silicon is 77 cents a pound: <a href="http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/silicon/silicmcs06.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/silicon/sil...</a> — and that works out to around a penny a watt.<p>I tried to dig into this a few years ago. Evergreen Solar's 10-K for 2007 <a href="http://edgar.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/947397/000095013508001256/b68105ese10vk.htm" rel="nofollow">http://edgar.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/947397/000095013508...</a> has some information. Evergreen's competitive advantage is supposedly that they use less silicon than other manufacturers because they don't saw their wafers — they grow them. They say they use about 5g of silicon per watt (in 2007, planning to reduce it to 2½g per watt by 2012), and it sounds like they get paid about US$3.87 per watt on average (US$58M revenue in 2007, maxed-out manufacturing capacity of 15MW/year, 276 full-time employees in manufacturing). Their "cost of revenue" (i.e. manufacturing cost) was US$53M, or US$3.53/W. But 5g of metallurgical-grade silicon at the price above is US$0.008. If each employee costs US$120k per year (including health benefits, and remembering that a bunch of them are Ph.D.s) then that would be US$2.20/W in labor costs, which already accounts for the majority of that cost of revenue.<p>But they're not buying metallurgical-grade silicon; they're buying "polysilicon", short for "polycrystalline silicon", which is perhaps a bit of a misnomer, since how many crystals are in each piece of silicon supplied by their suppliers is somewhat immaterial, since Evergreen melts the silicon down and crystallizes it in polycrystalline silicon ribbons in their "String Ribbon" furnaces. Maybe that costs a lot more than metallurgical-grade silicon?<p>It used to be hard to find that information! But it's much better now; <a href="http://pvinsights.com/" rel="nofollow">http://pvinsights.com/</a> lists current PV-grade polysilicon prices at US$29 to US$35 per kilogram, and <a href="http://www.pv-tech.org/news/polysilicon_prices_declines_will_continue_sector_shakeout_says_gtm_research" rel="nofollow">http://www.pv-tech.org/news/polysilicon_prices_declines_will...</a> explains that this is a major drop from previous prices of US$80/kg. 5 g at US$35 per kilogram is US$0.175. But "Silicon PV Module Price Per Watt" ranges from US$0.75 to US$1.40. Dropping 17½¢ off that price still isn't going to get you to 40¢. And if Evergreen has really made it to 2½g/W, silicon cost is even less of the total cost.<p><a href="http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/008483.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/008483.html</a> mentions that in 2008 polysilicon prices peaked at US$400/kg.<p>Anyway. I'm obviously no expert, but I'm skeptical that peeling silicon with a particle accelerator is going to <i>decrease</i> the cost of photovoltaic cells.

WARNING: it's another one of those OnSwipe mobile sites that crash your browser.<p>I wish there was some way to opt out of OnSwipe and just load the desktop version of a website on my iPad.

And if the solar panels don't work out, they can take four of those ion cannons and use them as blinged-out wheels on their Escalade.