Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Printing solar cells in Silicon Valley
Last month I wrote a piece on the future of personal fabrication technologies, and their potential impact on factories and manufacturing. There are several articles this week on NanoSolar and their plans to build a factory in the Bay Area to manufacture a new form of photovoltaic cell. Business Week has an article that highlights their use of printing technology to make solar cells:
The company expects to assemble the cells into more than 1 million solar panels annually in another factory near Berlin that it plans to open next year. It figures that making its panels will cost as little as 10% of what it costs to turn out current panels, eventually putting them within financial reach for lots more consumers.
Since the 1970s, most solar cells have been made of silicon and manufactured like computer chips-- a costly process. By contrast, NanoSolar plans to produce so-called "thin-film" solar cells, making them by printing special-purpose ink on sheets of lightweight foil. "The major breakthrough here is we move the solar business from the economics of the semiconductor business to the economics of the printing business," Straser says.
That move, Straser figures, will allow NanoSolar to operate 5 to 10 times more efficiently than traditional solar-cell manufacturers, measured by the ratio of capital expenditures to revenues. If all goes as planned, Wall Street analysts should eventually be able to predict how much additional revenue NanoSolar will generate for every dollar it spends to increase manufacturing capacity-- a heretofore difficult feat in the solar industry.
Yet another example of printing technology making its way into manufacturing (something we've previously written about in early 2004, late 2004, and late 2005). But why do this here in the Valley? According to the Mercury News,
[CEO Martin] Roscheisen [whose "great great grandfather founded the Germany's first regional electricity utility," according to SiliconBeat] said Nanosolar decided to open a factory in the Bay Area, rather than in China or another developing nation, because being close to its R&D center in Palo Alto was important, and because labor costs are a relatively small part of the overall operation since so much is automated.
It's also a good bet that there will be a lot of tweaking that'll have to be done to the manufacturing process as they ramp up, and having the R&D and manufacturing people close together will make it easier to deal with problems. You can only successfully outsource what you understand well.