Well they've had a drop in manufacturing costs of 13% in less than 12 months. This is perhaps partially explicable in terms of the declining cost of silicon which has apparently gone from $450/kg in 2008 to $100/kg today. The main problems with using silicon were difficult manufacturing processes and shortage of refined silicon. As seen above, thin film solar technologies are now beginning to use new manufacturing techniques which feature super thin silicon wafers as well as panels which don't use silicon at all. There is a battle on between the emerging technologies and refinements based on silicon. Silicon is the second most abundant element of the earths crust, so it has some advantages over some of the new technolgies if it can get the cost per watt down.

As it happens, I have contacted solar cell manufacturers in several different countries over the last year while investigating the economics of this potential business. The cheapest retail price of a silicon cell I was offered was $1.10 per watt. Why FirstSolar would retail their cells at $2.50-$3.00 I am not sure, other than that this is simple market forces - they are trying to get the highest price they think the retail market can bear and perhaps riding on the fact that their product is new and unique.

So where we are is the equivalent of a 1980s mobile phone in comparison to the price and efficiency of a phone today, except that making that transition in the case of solar may take half the time or less than mobile phones did to evolve.

The tendency toward lower manufacturing cost is unstoppable and rapid. The retail cost will follow. The wholesale cost is already 50% or lower of the retails cost, I know because one can buy systems for around $2.50 a watt but I was offered $1.10 per watt on the basis of an initial order of 1000 cells. If i can barter the price down for a measly 1000 cells I think the government could negotiate much better economies of scale on a 220km long installation. And this was with silicon based cells not printed thin-film cells.

The installation costs including labour and ancillary equipment would certainly double or treble the price, but it will be a low price very soon and installing these things along something like a railway line should drop in price too once a system is set up for doing it. As for your obsession with distribution costs, there is a distribution grid all ready all over the country and which the cork-dublin railway line passes no doubt at numerous points. Whatever the costing is for the aims eventually decided upon, I doubt very much that it will operate as the insuperable obstacle you seem to want to make it out to be. If thin film solar panels drop in price to $0.20 over the next 10 years and increase in efficiency to 20% then you can produce 600MW for around 90 million dollars. If the retail price is double that at 180 million dollars then it's still 120 million dollars cheaper than it was to build a 600MW gas fired station 6 years ago. Double again and the prices are almost comparable.

The commercial, environmental and scientific momentum is inexorably with solar.

However I am not an electrician and I find the electrical units confusing. It wouldn't surprise me if some conversion from kWh to Watts to MW yielded a number 10 times less than the power outputs I've quoted. If that were the case then the cost per watt remains the same and the area required multiplies. Then it's a question of how serious the market forces are in competing towards lower pricing and how serious governments are about the issue of global warming.

Bit late in the day for an in depth discussion but I'll chew over it, thanks for the comprehensive reply.

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I got the opportunity 2 weeks ago to see the recorded figures from Cronlaght Wind Farm in Gweedore, Co. Donegal. It's efficiency averages 44%. This was a surprise as it's way above anything being mentioned here.

Dunno what I was thinking in my last calculation above - 600MW @ $0.2 per watt comes out at $120 million not $90 million. Treble the price is $360 million, $60 million more than a contemporary gas-fired plant but with possibly less maintenance though that may be arguable. Plenty of room to compete with fossil fuel generation but, depending on installation costs, $0.10 per watt would really seal the deal.

I'm not an expert on wind but as I understand it the issue with wind is not its conversion efficiency but its load factor, basically the amount of time it's on relative to the available resource. I'm in 2 minds about wind because sometimes I see some crappy figures but at other times the Germans come out with some mammoth version of the things and make it seem somewhat useful.

Civic_critic
You are correct that the problem with wind and solar and wave, is that they are not available for dispatch 24/7. Our grid has been designed to accomodate large power stations, operating as and when the grid operator wants them. Renewable energy is not able to perform reliably in this scenario.
The fix for renewable energy is to store its power output and then release it to the grid as a large conventional power station would at present.
The problem is that we cannot store electrical energy in large amounts, the only way to store electrical energy is in capacitors and to to store large amounts of electrical energy in capacitors would take a an absolutely huge amount of capacitors covering an enormous land area, so electricity must be changed into another form of energy in order to be stored, i.e as chemical energy in a battery, or potential energy in a hydro reservoir. This method uses the electricity to pump water from a reservoir at ground level to another reservoir elevated high above ground level, so that when the energy is required you simply open a valve and allow gravity to pull the water out of the reservoir and flow through a turbine to change it back into electricity. There are a few other ways of storing energy however pumped hydro is the most cost effective and efficient method. That is one part of the Spirit of Ireland project, to build pumped hydro reservoirs in naturally formed glacial valleys along the west coast and using the sea as the lower reservoir, this is the most cost effective method of energy storage.

As regards the development of wind turbines, the theoretical limit of the amount of power that a wind turbine can extract from the air blowing through its blades is just short of 60% and most modern turbines are close to that efficiency figure, but as the power in the wind is proportional to the cube of the wind speed it is vital to site the turbine in the windiest site, a turbine in a 7 metre per second wind, a gentle breeze, will generate 60% more electricity than a turbine in a 6 metres per second airflow and the turbines in Ireland at present have been sited close to the grid to enable a faster and cheaper connection as opposed being sited in the windiest sites and bringing the grid to them, that is the second part of the S of I proposal, the other way to maximise the conversion of wind to electricity is to make the blades bigger, so more wind is available to convert, the swept area of a turbine with 40m blades is about 5000m2, by increasing the blade lenght by 20m this is increased to above 11000m2, with a subsequent increase in electrical output.

So this means that as Ireland has the highest wind resource as a percentage of land area in Europe we have the potential to be a very big energy exporter, if we so decide as a nation. Billions in export earnings and tens of thousands of well paid jobs are hanging on this decision.

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Regards, Pat Gill
My posting name does not indicate my political views
labourure or greenure, do not have the same ding.

I understand your enthusiasm FF and perhaps wind has a place in future energy production but solar is far ahead, at least according to the capacity rates and costings which I have read. For one thing solar is going to liberate every country to generate its own electricity, so the market for wind-generated energy is likely going to be much less than people anticipate. Secondly improvements in all electrical devices and transmission systems deriving from extremely precise calibration at the nanolevel are going to reduce the power required to accomplish the same tasks. I don't have figures on that but it occurs to me that such reductions may well be drastic, so there goes another chunk of the potential market. Thirdly nanotechnology will improve storage systems greatly - for example it has been found that carbon nanotubes have the property of being able to store hydrogen at great densities and release it at low energy. Another consideration is that these groovy new high altitude wind turbines tethered by pylons can be used by many countries to access high altitude, reliable wind resources.

So it seems to me that we might be on a bit of a bum steer with wind and actually behind the real technological developments that are taking place rather than in advance of them.

We all have the same aim, the question is how best to position ourselves. For myself I find the use of the words 'nanotechnology' and 'Fianna Fáil' in the same sentence sends a shiver down my spine, I have no faith in these scum, on the contrary I have every expectation that Fianna Fáil will do to us now at the dawn of the 21st century what they did to us throughout the 20th century: keep us 20-30 years behind our real potential in order to benefit themselves. I look at the Naughton Institute (the nanotechnology institute) at the back of Trinity and see that it's primarily taken up by 2 cafés, a gym and a climbing wall - those are the face of nanotechnology in Ireland. This is absolutely not good enough, there's a great opportunity there to advertise nanotechnology to the public that is instead taken up by a gym pumping out Sky TV on screens throughout it, that's what you see from the street. A disgrace and a piece of idiocy.

As opposed to say nightfall versus solar? Electrical use goes up during the winter here, while solar power would produce maybe a tenth of its maximum. What do you recommend to deal with that?

And yet according to the investment and actual working models, solar produces almost nothing compared to wind at the moment.

Er why would that reduce the market for wind based power. All grid drawn power requirements would benefit or lose from enhanced efficiency; if anything it would make wind more attractive yet.

Storage systems for every type of energy production, again. As for hydrogen, its by its nature inefficient, since you need to create the hydrogen using electricity, then lose yet more energy converting it back. Hydrogen is a dead end.

These do not exist in any meaningful sense of the word, and face numerous real and practical difficulties in turning them into useful devices.

Alrighty, Denmark and its 30,000 jobs plus €5 billion in wind related exports is on a bum steer, is it?

Please do not use the word bickering in any responses, lets keep things to reality.

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[quote=Civic_critic2;1960158]Civic_critic
I do have enthusiasm, backed by over 30 years experience as a technologist and that experience tells me that nanotech has some great days ahead, but this thread is about our energy needs in the immediate future. Two things that you do not seem to have realised about solar in Ireland is 1 the availability of direct sunshine is very low, in fact the load capacity is down around 10% and unlikely to improve in the near future and voltaic solar panels need the pressure exerted by photons to "push" electrons out of their molecular positions and you cannot do this with diffused sunlight, and the second thing you are not considering is that we do not the land area necessary for large scale solar farms.

Again it will be decades before these are available and again you have to consider the ATC problems of many tethers reaching miles into the sky

You still do not recognise that pumped storage units have lifetimes measured in centuries and large scale energy needs will never reduce from their present levels, without the fall of civilisation back to the dark ages or beyond.

One of the main architects of S of I is Professor Igor Shevts of Trinity, he also has a special interest and knowledge of nanotech, you really should talk to him about the practicalities of your interest in nano, he is a very approacable man and will I am sure inspire you to become a real expert yourself. I have gotten myself into trouble in the past when I comment on the tech knowledge of the average politician so I will decline comment on that area.

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Regards, Pat Gill
My posting name does not indicate my political views
labourure or greenure, do not have the same ding.

I have already talked to the people in SFI, several years ago as the Naughton Institute was being built I went in there to interview them about developments in nanotechnology in Ireland.

It is simply not true to say that solar doesn't work in diffuse light, both PV and thermal work in Irish conditions. It is also not true to say that efficiencies are "unlikely to improve in the near future". For one thing, one company is already installing panels optimised for diffuse light conditions. 3D cells capable of capturing even more diffuse light were already demonstrated in the lab 2 years ago. To increase diffuse light capture simply painting the roof or the railway tracks with white paint underneath the 3D collector gives a boost to efficiency. Solyndra's 3D system can also be optimised by encasing it in lensing glass which also has the quality of capturing solar themal radiation and turning the system into a hybrid solar PV/solar thermal array. These are things that are possible today. And while I was looking around I came across this, 2 years ago a team had already announced a 10 cent per watt plastic solar cell @ 6.5% efficiency.

It is also incorrect to say that we don't have enough land area for solar. For one thing with plasic solar sheets we can skin buildings, roofs, walls and so forth. One architectural engineering company is ready to bring a solar skinned house to full size prototype within 2 years and claims to have 3 years as its timeline for bringing their product to market.

Lets look at the economic and logistics of this again. I've looked up some numbers to better judge all this. The Cork-Dublin railway is a dual-track line. There are about 400km of dual-track line in Ireland and 1800km of single-track line. The average solar power consisting of both diffuse and direct light available to a horizontal surface in Ireland over a year is 250 W/m2 (diffuse and direct light), or one quarter of what's available at the equator on a cloudless day. Conversion efficiency only goes down to 10% on a very cloudy dark day. Lets say for arguments sake that our cells can get, averaged over the year, 20% conversion of the available power to electricity. If we were to place 4 square metres across the cork-dublin line for every metre in length that would equal 220,000 x 4 x 50 = 44MW. Say we paid today's prices and got a Fianna Fáiler to negotiate the buying price and bought each square metre for $150. Then it would cost us $132 million in materials to line that route. Say a team of 200 people were laying 500 metres a day at a wage of on average 750 euros a week; then it would take just over a year and a half to complete with a total labour cost of 13.2 million euros. All told the project would cost 132 million dollars plus 13.2 million euros which is about 105 million euros to produce a 44MW capacity. That system would produce 160GWh of electricity per year, or about 0.8% of our current annual production.

Not very impressive is it. But lets say it's 10 years from now and we're using mass produced low cost solar sheets that don't require much ancillary equipment along most of their length, which can be pinned or stuck into place along the railway sleepers cheaply and which only require a team of 30 people to install. Lets say they've painted the line white to reflect light and these sheets utilise the advances in 3D collection shown above to gather 40% of the available power and lets say further that Fianna Fáil have been sent to political oblivion and the price per cell has now been negotiated to $0.30 per square metre.
Then the materials cost of laying the line is 220,000 x 4 x 0.3 = $264,000 and the labour cost is 1.98 million euros. This would be an 88MW system producing 321 GWh per annum, or 1.65% or our current annual needs. Extend that to the other 180km of dual-track and 1800km of single-track and you have 9.5% of our annual national electricty usage for a total cost of $1.56 million materials and 3.3 million euros labour, or around 4 million euros. Mulitply that figure by 10 or even by 20 if you're not happy with the costings. Multiply it by 50 if you want. In fact let's say each square metre costs $30 instead of 30 cents, that's 100 times the cost or 400 million euros. So for 400 million euros the entire railway system of Ireland is laid with solar panels. What is the capacity of this system? 520MW - that's 520MW of actual production averaged over the year, not the theoretical rated peak production.

But the trend over the last 40 years in using silicon panels has been that the cost has lowered each decade by a factor of 10. This cost decrease trend is however now accelerating and a wide variety of materials are being brought to bear successfully. In 10 years the cost of a solar panel should be at least one tenth of what it is today; today a silicon panel is $150 per square metre. In reality in a decade it should be $5 - $10 per square metre. So the above costings, on this model, are more than realistic.

The point about nanotechnology is that it revels in precisely the problems you bring up and at this moment in time it's not too much to say that it's practically frolicing with investigation and solutions.