Nanosolar announces $4.1 billion in contracts, boosts, efficiency, starts

By MB-BigB | September 9, 2009

Nanosolar came out with flurry of announcements today, after months and months of quiet time for the company.    And the announcements were pretty big – Nanosolar’s thin film CIGS solar cells have hit 16.4% efficiency (verified by the DoE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory), which is currently the highest efficiency seen from a printed photovoltaic solar cell.   Furthermore, the powersheet panels made from these cells have an efficiency greater than 11 percent.

Nanosolar thin film cells

For those who haven’t heard of Nanosolar, they make thin film CIGS (copper indium gallium (di)selenide cells by printing their proprietary ink on rolls of aluminum foil.  You can read more by downloading their new white paper.    (The white paper actually represents a bit of a departure for Nanosolar, up to now they’ve been very secretive about their technology.)

That’s not all.   Nanosolar also has announced that they’ve received $4.1 billion in orders for their powersheets, which include orders from solar power plant developers like NextLight, AES Solar and Germany’s Beck Energy.  Along with that announcement came news that they have completed production of their German factory where the the Nanosolar panels will be assembled.   Total annual capacity of the new plant is 640 megawatts.    Their San Jose plant (where the cells are made) is currently operating at a capacity of one million solar cells a month, and is continuing to ramp up production.

If you want even more info, you can read a short Q&A that Reuters did with Martin Roscheisen, the CEO of Nanosolar.

Related posts:

1. First Nanosolar panels go on sale
2. Nanosolar’s new solar panel printing press
3. CIGS thin film solar cell hits 19.9% efficiency – a record
4. Nanosolar update – winning awards and ramping up production
5. CIGS firms duke it out for efficiency crown

Are Carbon Nanotubes the Next Asbestos from Brad Herring on Vimeo.

Carbon nanotube

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This animation of a rotating carbon nanotube shows its 3D structure.

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are allotropes of carbon with a cylindrical nanostructure. Nanotubes have been constructed with length-to-diameter ratio of up to 28,000,000:1,^[1] which is significantly larger than any other material. These cylindrical carbon molecules have novel properties that make them potentially useful in many applications in nanotechnology, electronics, optics and other fields of materials science, as well as potential uses in architectural fields. They exhibit extraordinary strength and unique electrical properties, and are efficient thermal conductors. Their final usage, however, may be limited by their potential toxicity and controlling their property changes in response to chemical treatment.

Nanotubes are members of the fullerene structural family, which also includes the spherical buckyballs. The ends of a nanotube might be capped with a hemisphere of the buckyball structure. Their name is derived from their size, since the diameter of a nanotube is on the order of a few nanometers (approximately 1/50,000th of the width of a human hair), while they can be up to several millimeters in length (as of 2008). Nanotubes are categorized as single-walled nanotubesmulti-walled nanotubes (MWNTs). (SWNTs) and

The nature of the bonding of a nanotube is described by applied quantum chemistry, specifically, orbital hybridization. The chemical bonding of nanotubes is composed entirely of sp² bonds, similar to those of graphite. This bonding structure, which is stronger than the sp³ bonds found in diamonds, provides the molecules with their unique strength. Nanotubes naturally align themselves into "ropes" held together by Van der Waals forces.

DNA 

DNA, the excellent molecule for duplication and storage of genetic information in biology, has recently been shown to be very useful as a structural material for construction of electrical nanodevices, biological sensors and molecular computers with nanoscale feature resolution.  Properly designed synthetic DNA can be thought of as a programmable glue which, via specific hybridization of complementary sequences, will reliably self-organize to form desired structures.  The significance of patterned DNA nanostructures lies in their application as scaffolds or templates for organizing and positioning other materials.

Nanoribbon and nanogrid using four four arm junction

We present the design, construction, and characterization of a novel DNA tile (so called as 4x4) and its self-assembled lattice forms. The novelty of this structure includes a square aspect ratio with helix stacking and sticky-end connections in four directions (north, south, east, and west) within the lattice plane. Self-assembly of 4x4 tiles results in two distinct lattice morphologies: long (>10 mm) uniform nanoribbons (~60 nm wide) and flat two-dimensional nanogrids which display periodic square cavities. Control of the relative proportions of the two lattice morphologies has been achieved with only slight reprogramming of the tile spacing and sticky-end associations.

The 4x4 nanoribbon provides an excellent scaffold for production of uniform width nanowires via DNA metallization with silver. We have, for the first time, produced highly conductive nanowires on self-assembled DNA tiling structures. Metallization and conductivity measurements of metallized 4x4 ribbon lattices. a, SEM image of non-metallized 4x4 DNA nanoribbons (scale bar: 500 nm). b, SEM image of silver-seeded silver nanoribbon, (scale bar: 500 nm). Note the change in the signal contrast between a) and b). The samples were deposited on SiO₂ surface. c, SEM image of the actual device (scale bar: 2 um). Inset : current-voltage curve of the silver-seeded silver 4x4 nanoribbon.