Gordon

I sincerely hope that the article is based on fact and is not just 
wishful thinking. If someone can produce adequate quantities of reliable 
PV panels at 1/10th the cost of existing ones, with a similar lifetime, 
then this will, indeed, be revolutionary. However, please excuse me if I 
temper this hope with a modicum of scepticism. Why? Well, if you look at 
  http://www.globalsolar.com/sheet/SL_25_Spec_Sheet.pdf, this advertises 
a 25 W panel of 0.57 m2 or, extrapolating, 43.6 W/m2. This compares with 
a typical 150 W/m2 for "conventional" PV cells. And what are these cells 
made from? Copper indium gallium diselenide! Where are we going to get 
all the indium, gallium and selenium to power the world? Apart from 
this, selenides are extremely toxic, so this would offer another 
inhibitory factor. Yet the article cites "thin-skin photovoltaics don’t 
depend on finite supplies of polysilicon": true, but I venture to 
suggest that silicon, in any form, is a helluva sight more abundant and 
easily obtained than the mentioned elements, albeit that the wafers used 
in PV panels are a lot thicker than the CIGS used in "thin-skin" ones.

Let's hope my scepticism is ill-founded!

Brian

Isn't it funny that you are sceptical about climate change and I'm not, 
while I'm sceptical about such "breakthroughs" and you do not appear to 
be? :-)

Davy, Gordon wrote:
> A recent news article by Ed Ring at
> http://www.ecoworld.com/blog/2006/10/31/thin-film-photovoltaics/
> discusses the possibility of cheap renewable energy from photovoltaics.
> If this works, it will also reduce concern about CO2 production. An
> excerpt follows.
> 
> "We are very close to learning whether or not what we've been waiting
> for all these years has finally come true: Cheap abundant energy via
> photovoltaics. What was required was a way to manufacture them for, say,
> one-tenth the current costs, and from what representatives of several
> photovoltaic manufacturers are telling us, that day has come.
> 
> "The entire energy consumption of the world in 2005, expressed in
> electrical terms, was about 16,000 gigawatt-years. The current installed
> base of photovoltaics in the world contributed a paltry 5 gigawatt-years
> to that total. The entire manufacturing output of photovoltaics in 2005
> was only about 1.5 gigawatts. But thin-skin photovoltaics don't depend
> on finite supplies of polysilicon, and they are far less expensive to
> manufacture.
> 
> "Photovoltaic technology is the most promising alternative energy source
> we've ever seen to quickly usher in the era of clean, cheap, abundant
> energy."
> 
>  
> 
> Gordon Davy 
> 
>  
>