Jim Baen's Universe

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Fifteen Ways Cheap Solar Cells are going to Change the World

Written by Stephen Euin Cobb

Cheap solar cells are going to alter your life in more ways than can be listed or even anticipated, but some changes are predictable. Exactly when the changes will begin and when they will be completed can be estimated at roughly seven to fourteen years. But this is only an estimate. These events might begin in as little as four years, ending in ten; or might begin in twelve years and end in twenty.

(1) Solar cells made of silicon will continue to achieve increased efficiencies, but these achievements will be meaningless since solar cells made of other materials will drop below one tenth the price of the silicon versions; and then shortly after that, below a hundredth. Prices will continue to drop, but at a pace that is unstable and unforeseeable. Eventually prices will drop below a thousandth, but how long that might take is impossible to estimate.

(2) Solar cells will no longer be an object. Instead they will be a paper-thin coating added to an object after that object has been made. This is one of several reasons they will become so cheap.

(3) Solar cells will no longer be made inside a vacuum chamber (another massive cost savings).

(4) Solar cells will be made using a variety of processes, methods and materials. No company will be able to gain a monopoly on solar cells because each of the dozen or more manufacturers will have their own patents which do not infringe the patents of others. Thus every manufacturers’ line of solar cells will compete against those of the others based on efficiency, attractiveness, ease of installation and most especially: price.

(5) All the major home improvement stores like Lowe’s, Home Depot, and even Wal-Mart will carry vinyl siding and roofing tiles in the usual colors and styles but with a thin outer coating which transforms the vinyl siding or roofing tile into one big solar cell array.

(6) Siding and roofing tiles with solar cell coatings will cost about ten to twenty percent more than the non-electricity generating variety; but because of the incredible popularity of the solar versions the non solar versions will become difficult to find for several years since many stores will not bother to stock them.

(7) At first, most of the homeowners who install solar siding and solar roofing tiles will have no way to store the electricity for later use. Consequently, this will only reduce the amount of electricity they must buy from the power grid during those hours of the day when the sun is shining on their house. For some people this will cut their electric bill by a third; for others it will cut it in half.

(8) People will drive cars which cost them nothing to fuel. Anyone who has a solar powered home will be able to recharge their electric car for free. By allowing people to drive every day for the rest of their life without paying so much as one penny for fuel, solar homes will finally cause electric cars to become overwhelmingly popular.

(9) Some solar homeowners in America will use a converter to change the DC (direct current) made by their solar home into AC (alternating current) which they can then push out of their house and into the power grid used by the general public. Some of these people will push their electric bill down near zero, and some will push it all the way into negative numbers. Those in negative numbers will receive monthly checks from their local electric company as payment for the power they contributed to the grid during that month. (There are laws in forty U.S. states that require electric companies to do this.)

(10) When rechargeable battery technology also becomes cheap, people will abandon the power grid altogether. Isolated from the power grid, their electric bill will drop to exactly zero, and will remain zero for the rest of their life.

(11) Oil will remain an important commodity since it will continue to be used to make plastics, lubricants, paints and other chemicals. However, since it will no longer be the dominant source of energy for any developed nation, its price will decline steadily over many years and eventually settle to a level that would seem ridiculous today.

(12) Gasoline too will decline in price over many years. Eventually gasoline prices will fall low enough that gasoline powered cars will enjoy a new but much more limited popularity with a new but much smaller segment of the population. This new popularity will not threaten the dominance of electric cars, since gasoline cars will account for only a few percent of all cars.

(13) Solar homes not attached to the power grid will slowly abandon the use of AC (alternating current) and be refitted with lights and appliances that run on DC (direct current). Reasons for this include: (a) Solar cells produce DC. (b) Power is lost in converting DC to AC. (c) AC only became popular because it reduced the loss of electrical power when sending it over long distances. Since long distances are no longer involved, conversion to AC is not needed. (d) Waste heat is generated by the converter; nice in winter, but bad in summer. (e) Converters fail occasionally and replacing them with new converters which will also fail eventually is a waste of money.

(14) Power outages will no longer affect an entire town or city or neighborhood. If a tornado hits a house hard enough for it to lose power, that house will probably also lose its roof and maybe its walls.

(15) As more and more sections of the electric power grid are without customers large sections will be torn down and sold for scrap. Eventually it will be gone.

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It's not enough to make a string of predictions, and especially to claim them to be "nearly inevitable," without providing supporting details and some outside references (links) to explain why these predictions are likely to become part of the reality in which we will all live.

These events are foreseeable because so many different technologies, forces and trends are converging from a variety of directions to make them likely.

But the one thing all these many factors have in common is the motivation which drives them: money. All the participants are intensely aware that there is a vast amount of money for whoever gets there first. Just how much money one can make by selling enough solar cells to power all the homes and businesses in every developed country on earth might be difficult to calculate. But if a sizable chunk of it were going into my bank account working out that calculation would be a burden I would be willing to shoulder. New billionaires will be made, and perhaps a few of the old oil-based billionaires will be lost.

Perhaps the most easily seen trend is the frenzied growth in demand for the currently available—which of course means expensive—silicon-based solar cells. New factories have been completed or are under construction to make silicon solar cells in Arnstadt Germany, Frankfurt Germany, Hillsboro Oregon, and dozens of other locations around the world. Already 131 factories exist in China alone. Here’s a list of all the major solar cell producers’ world wide, which includes contact info and the types of cells they manufacture.

Money for solar cell research is flowing everywhere. The US government and other governments are targeting money for research into advanced solar cell technologies. Major companies which traditionally had no interest in “alternative energy” are researching it such as Honda of Japan. Even the giant oil companies are afraid of being left out (BP and Royal Dutch Shell) although Exxon claims no such fear.

But the most important trend is the amount of money and effort that is being put into research and development of the most advanced forms of solar cells. Some of these are referred to as thin film solar cells or Dye Sensitized Solar Cells (DSSC).

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin provided seed money to Nanosolar which claims to have “developed proprietary technology that makes it possible to simply roll-print solar cells that require only 1/100th as thick an absorber as a silicon-wafer cell, yet deliver similar performance and durability.” Nanosolar is building “the largest solar cell factory in the world” in the San Fransico Bay Area.

A company called XsunX describes themselves in their press release as “a developer of advanced manufacturing systems and cell structures for thin film photovoltaic solar energy,” and describes as their goal: “to build a multi-megawatt production facility in the United States in order to supply the growing domestic demand for solar cell products that can be easily integrated into buildings and houses.”

Additional information on this topic is easily searched. For those who like Wikipedia there are some nice articles such as Solar Cells, Solar Shingles, Solar Power, and especially Dye sensitized solar cells. Listeners to my podcast The Future And You have suggested the following links: Printable solar cells from Discovery News, from Science in Africa, and from Technology Review Cheap Nano Solar Cells.

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You can learn more about Stephen Euin Cobb here or here.

Or about his podcast The Future And You here, or here or even here.

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