The future, according to MiaSole, a Californian startup, is unrolling at one centimetre a second in a bland-looking building in Silicon Valley. Despite the location, and the fact that most other solar cells are made from silicon, MiaSole’s cells are not. Ribbons of steel a metre wide and half a hair’s width thick spool through vacuum chambers in which they are sputtered with copper, indium, gallium and selenium — collectively known as CIGS. Out of the end comes a new type of solar cell which promises to be both efficient and cheap.
MiaSole’s current cells turn 10.5 per cent of the light that hits them into electricity. A tweaked version that manages 13 per cent should go into production early next year. Further tweaks have produced cells with an efficiency of 15.7 per cent. This is as good as the best silicon cells and much better than those of First Solar, an American company which uses another cheap technology and is the biggest maker of solar cells in the world. MiaSole says its manufacturing costs work out to less than $1 per watt of generating capacity. This is better than all silicon-cell makers and far less than the $3 per watt of Solyndra, a rival CIGS firm that won a large loan guarantee.
All to the good: The rationale for the industry’s generous subsidies has been that as volumes increase and manufacturers get more experienced, costs will decline. For much of the 2000s, with a shortage of pure silicon and lavish support from European governments, the price of solar panels failed to fall as expected. But since January 2009, according to pvXchange, an online marketplace, the wholesale price of solar modules in Europe has dropped by 43 per cent. This is bad news for high-cost producers. And cheap, efficient thin-film cells like MiaSole’s will make life harder still. So will a slackening in the growth of demand for solar panels: This year it doubled, but demand is likely to grow by just 10 per cent or so in each of the next two years.
The solar-cell boom has been a mostly European phenomenon. Spain, then Germany, boosted demand by giving generous "feed-in tariffs" (subsidies) to anyone who produced solar power for the grid. Spain’s subsidies were slashed after 2008. Germany’s generosity has lasted longer. As a result of this, and falling prices for solar cells, demand for solar power doubled to 7,400 megawatts in the past year, calculates GTM Research, a consultancy. Solar power now produces up to a tenth of Germany’s electricity on sunny days.
However, electricity consumers’ anger at their big bills is forcing Germany to cut its subsidies. By January they will be a quarter lower than in early 2010. Politicians elsewhere have watched and learned. On Dec. 2, France’s prime minister, Francois Fillon, suspended all non-household applications for his country’s feed-in tariff scheme. In Italy, Europe’s second-biggest market, fat tariffs will be trimmed in stages next year. Even so, Italy’s combination of sunny skies and high electricity prices mean demand for solar power is likely to keep growing.
Most of the growth will be elsewhere, however. China will become a big user, as well as a maker and exporter, of solar cells. America is likely to build lots of large-scale solar plants. Shayle Kann of GTM Research calculates that the power-purchase agreements signed by America’s utilities will expand its solar capacity from 214 megawatts now to 5,400 megawatts by 2014.
Travis Bradford of the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago says that taking into account all the costs of construction including its finance, a state-of-the-art solar plant in a sunny state is broadly competitive, over its life, with a new "peaker" gas-fired station. Gas peakers, turned on only when demand is at its highest, are the most expensive fossil-fuel plants. Even so, getting to this level of competitiveness is a big step forward.
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