Technology Review has a look at First Solar's efforts to improve thin film solar power panels - How First Solar Is Avoiding the Industry’s Turmoil.

They are touting both better solar conversion efficiency (up to 24% in the lab vs 20% for silicon) and lower prices (60 to 70 cents per watt to manufacture vs 69 to 80 cents for silicon) than silicon panels as the reason for their success.

The SMH reports on 2 large scale thin film solar power plants to be built in outback NSW using First Solar panels - AGL unveils Australia's biggest solar energy plants.

Australia’s biggest solar energy plants have been given the funding go-ahead, clearing the way for the installation of 2 million photovoltaic panels at two sites in the NSW outback.Power company AGL on Wednesday committed to proceed with the $450 million investment in the plants which will supply 50,000 homes with electricity and potentially pave the way for more such ventures.

Nyngan, north-west of Dubbo, will host the larger of the two plants, with a 102-megawatt capacity, while a 53-megawatt plant will be built near Broken Hill. Both should be supplying power to the eastern Australian grid by the end of 2015.

Greentech Media has an article on the demise of thin film solar company Nanosolar (another victim of the shakeout following the solar investment boom of 5 years ago) - Nanosolar, Thin-Film Solar Hype Firm, Officially Dead.

It's official. Nanosolar, the CIGS thin-film solar panel aspirant which produced little but hype and broken promises, is done. Its assets are being auctioned off.

This should come as no surprise to GTM readers. We reported on the layoffs, the skeleton crew, and the "restructuring for sale" back in April. If you speak CIGS, then you know that "restructuring for sale" translates to "Hanergy, please buy us."

But a white knight never emerged as it did for MiaSolé, HelioVolt, and Ascent -- and so, Nanosolar joins Solyndra, AQT, SoloPower, etc. on the list of failed CIGS solar firms.

The thin film solar sector is still moving forward though, with dramatic cost improvements in the offing for CdTe based films - Thin film PV breakthrough may cut solar costs by one third.

A new Silicon Valley developer of thin film solar PV modules, backed by an Australian venture capitalist, has claimed an engineering breakthrough that could cut the manufacturing costs of PV modules by one third. RSI has broken cover after five years of development to announce it has created a 1.5 square metre cadmium telluride PV (CdTe) module, twice the size of conventional modules.

It says this will enable solar PV modules to be manufactured at a cost of less than 40c/Watt, around one third cheaper than current mass-produced thin film and silicon based modules – and hastening the charge towards grid parity for solar PV.

First Solar, currently the world’s largest thin film solar PV module manufacturer, had predicted reaching 40c/W by 2017 through increases in efficiency. RSI says it can deliver that cost in 2014 by doubling the size of the module through a process known as Rapid Efficient Electroplating on Large- areas (REEL).

thin film market leader First Solar still seems to be going strong as well - First Solar Advances 162 MW of Unsubsidized Solar in Chile.

First Solar's strategy of expanding into new, sustainable solar markets looks like it's paying off. The thin-film solar panel manufacturer and project developer has applied for permits for the $370 million, 162-megawatt Luz del Norte project, according to a filing with Chile’s environmental licensing department. The project will use more than 1.7 million panels, with construction slated to start in June 2014.

Reuters has an article on what will be the world's largest thin film solar power plant - Solar Frontier to supply world's largest CIGS solar plant.

Japan's Solar Frontier has reached a deal to supply up to 150 megawatts of its solar panels to a California power plant that will one day be the world's largest solar installation made from an up-and-coming technology know as CIGS.

The company, a unit of Showa Shell Sekiyu KK, called it "a landmark moment" for CIGS technology, or solar panels that use copper indium gallium selenide as their raw material. Once completed, the project with a unit of France's EDF Energies Nouvelles will supply enough electricity to power 35,000 homes.

CIGS panels have been slow to penetrate a market dominated by silicon-based equipment, although they have long been seen as a potential challenger to traditional panels because they cost less to manufacture and have the potential to generate nearly as much electricity from the sun's light.

Solar Frontier is the world's largest CIGS manufacturer.

Earth2Tech reports that First Solar has a set a new efficiency record for a CdTe thin film solar cell - First Solar boasts world-record solar cell.

The prices of solar panels are falling fast, and that’s putting enormous pressure on manufacturers to cut costs and improve the amount of power solar cells can convert from sunlight. Thin film solar leader First Solar says it’s even gotten a world record out of its latest efficiency developments, and on Tuesday the company boasted a 17.3 percent efficient solar cell.

The test cell exceeds the previous record of 16.7 percent for a solar cell made of cadmium-telluride set by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in 2001. The new record is critical not for bragging but for showing solar panels made with cadmium-telluride cells can have a longer presence in the market than previously expected.

Efficiency is correlated with how much power a panel of a given size can produce – more power means higher efficiencies. There is a fixed cost and amount of time for making each panel, and First Solar’s technology makes a panel in less than 2.5 hours. If the company produces each panel with a higher power rating (in watts), then that panel’s cost-per-watt is lower.

The Arizona company has been hailed as the lowest-cost solar panel manufacturer in the industry for some years now. Producing panels more cheaply than others is the key advantage for First Solar, especially when its solar panels aren’t as efficient as most others in the market. During the first quarter of this year, the company produced panels with 11.7 percent efficiency at $0.75 per watt.

Renewable Energy World has an article on a Japanese entrant into the thin film solar market - Solar Frontier Opens Largest Thin-film Plant in the World.

One of the world's largest solar module factories, perched atop the bucolic foothills of West Japan's bamboo and pine-covered mountains, began operating in February.

This fully automated facility – capable of producing about 1 GW of thin-film solar modules – is the result of more than three decades of research and development by an oil company, which hopes to eventually generate 50% of its revenue from sales of renewable energy products and services.

“We won’t take anything less than 10% of global market share” in the next seven years, said Shigeya Kato, chairman of Showa Shell Sekiyu K.K., which has a 100% subsidy in module factory operator Solar Frontier. “The market has grown so much that even a 1 GW plant capacity won’t reach 10%.”

Solar Frontier said it could eventually build an overseas plant, but it must first prove to Showa Shell’s board of oilmen that its uniquely black solar panels can translate into black gold in the competitive, global thin-film industry.

The company invested 100 billion yen, more than $1 billion, at its Kunitomi plant in Miyazaki Prefecture on the southwest island of Kyushu. Recouping that investment will be challenging, Kato said, because the Yen is trading low compared to the dollar and euro. Further complicating Solar Frontier’s efforts is the weak Japanese economy, which economists say will likely sink deeper into recession in the wake of the March 11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis that caused an estimated $300 billion in damage. Still, Solar Frontier leaders say demand for solar energy could be a bright story for this struggling country.

Solar Frontier’s Kunitomi factory produces modules that use a version of the copper, indium, gallium and selenium (CIGS) technology. More than one-dozen cleantech writers last week toured the factory, which the company claims is capable of producing 112,000 modules (130 W to 150 W each) per week.

In recent press releases, Solar Frontier has said its copper, indium and selenium (CIS) modules are more environmentally friendly than conventional thin-film because they do not use toxics like lead or cadmium. That marketing strategy takes aim at conventional, thin-film panels based on cadmium telluride (CdTe). Squarely in Solar Frontier’s sights is First Solar, the world’s leading thin-film panel manufacturer, which has also invested in bringing to market a competitive CIGS module, though its current modules are based on the CdTe platform.

Greentech Media has an update on progress at thin film solar company Nanosolar - Nanosolar 2.0: New Attitude and New Deals for Up to 1 GW of Solar Panels.

Nanosolar, the CIGS (CuInGaSe) solar module aspirant, has been cutting a lower profile compared to its brash early years.

The 300-employee, San Jose, California-based firm has reset its management team with a focus on operations and seems to be making some progress on the technical and commercial fronts.

As one of the first wave of capital-intensive, VC-funded, next-generation thin-film solar companies, the company raised a lot of cash (more than $400 million in private equity) but was prone to over-promising and under-delivering. Faced with an economic slowdown, a precipitous decline in global module pricing, a bit of boardroom carnage that brought in a new CEO (Geoff Tate, formerly of Rambus and AMD) -- the firm stayed relatively quiet in 2010 and regrouped. (Tom Cheyney of PV-Tech did get an audience with the firm in their most notable press account of 2010.)

The new CEO told me, "We've made huge progress; we've grafted an operations process onto the company."

Nanosolar has re-emerged in its 2011 incarnation, presumably a bit humbled, but set on having 115 megawatts of capacity online by the end of the year. What bluster remains in the company comes in the form of an ambitious cost and efficiency roadmap with these goals:

* Below $1.00 per watt factory cost by the end of this year
* Low $0.80s or high $0.70s per watt by late next year
* In the $0.60s in 2013
* Below $0.60 per watt in 2014

Our analyst team estimates their current cost in the $1.35 per watt range. Tate suggested that cost reduction will come from improved sourcing, ramping yields, growing volume to spread the overhead across more units, and optimizing the recipe.

Nanosolar produced 2.5 megawatts of panels last year. This year they'll ship "double digit" megawatts and "triple digits" in 2012, according to the CEO. Cell production capacity will be 115 megawatts by the end of 2011 and the next step jumps the firm to 250 megawatts of cell capacity in San Jose. Panel assembly is performed at their factory in Luckenwalde, Germany.

The firm is shipping 10 percent efficiency panels today with a target of 12 percent efficiency next year. Expectations are for 13 percent in 2013 and 14 percent in 2014. Tate joked that he'd like to keep the trend going to 99 percent efficiency in 2099. In any case, a 4 percentage point increase in efficiency in four years would be unprecedented by any solar firm.

Climate Progress notes that wind power is now cost competitive with gas fired power in the US - Wind now on even playing field with gas; GE to build nation’s largest solar panel factory. Romm's post also notes that General Electric plan to build the largest solar panel factory in the US - producing 400 MW per year of Cadmium Telluride thin film solar PV panels (producing some snark from SP at TOD ANZ).

Though the U.S. wind industry installed half as much capacity last year as it did in 2009, production streamlining and efficiency improvements mean wind can compete evenly with cheap natural gas, wind industry executives said today.

There was 5,116 megawatts of new capacity installed across the nation in 2010, down sharply from nearly 10,000 MW the year before. But the industry grew by about 15 percent as new equipment manufacturing facilities sprouted in almost every state.

And heated competition has driven prices down much more quickly than anticipated, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) told investors at a wind finance workshop now under way.

As a result, wind power generators say they can now offer utilities long-term purchase power agreements (PPAs) at the same price as natural gas-fired power plants….

Projections of future growth in the industry and claims that grid parity with natural gas has largely been achieved have upended earlier fears that record low gas prices would punish the wind sector for years to come.

AWEA figures show that the average wind PPAs are now being priced at about 6 cents per kilowatt-hour, the same price for energy procurements from a combined cycle natural gas plant. The group says wind is actually about 2 cents cheaper than coal-fired electricity, and more projects were financed through debt arrangements than tax equity structures last year, a possible sign that wind deals are winning more mainstream acceptance from Wall Street’s banks….

[AWEA chief economist Elizabeth] Salerno credits the breakthrough in cost to improved turbine design and performance, higher towers and longer blades, which have boosted the reliability and performance of wind power generation. Equipment makers can also deliver products in the same year that they are ordered instead of waiting up to three years as was the case in previous cycles, she said, calling it a sign of a mature supply chain.

Figures suggest the industry could be set to explode in size this year in terms of new installations.

The group estimates that 5,600 MW of new installed capacity is under construction in the United States, more than double the number at this point in 2010. Thirty-five percent of all new power generation built in the United States since 2005 has come from wind, more than new gas and coal plants combined, as power providers are increasingly enticed to wind as a convenient hedge against unpredictable commodity price moves, AWEA said.

Greentech Solar reports that manufacturing costs at thin film solar power company First Solar continue to drop - First Solar Drops Cost to 76 Cents a Watt.

First Solar offered a cautious outlook on sales this year, but said Thursday it cut manufacturing costs and promised a rapid expansion in utility-scale projects.

The thin-film giant reported second-quarter financial results with a 12 percent increase in sales. However, earnings were down primarily due to lower module selling prices.

The world's largest solar maker acknowledged replacing some modules made from June 2008 to June 2009 because of declines in power output. It said replacement costs would add up to slightly more than $23 million for an anticipated 30 megawatts of modules.

Perhaps most significantly, the company cut its 2010 sales expectation to $2.5 billion to $2.6 billion from the $2.6 billion to $2.7 billion it forecast in April.

On a conference call, it said:

*Module manufacturing costs fell to 76 cents a watt, down 5 cents from the first quarter. Annual throughput per line was up 6 percent to 59 megawatts and material costs were lower. The company's target is to reach 52 cents to 63 cents a watt in 2014.

*Utility-scale projects are expected to increase. First Solar said it anticipates building 500 to 700 megawatts of projects in North America during 2011, up from 175 megawatts this year.

*Demand is expected to exceed supply in 2010. First Solar expects production capacity to be 2.2 gigawatts by 2012, up from 1.4 gigawatts this year. Module conversion efficiency was 11.2 percent in the second quarter compared with 11.1 percent in the first quarter.

Technology Review has an article on thin film solar company Abound Solar's improved process for making Cadmium Telluride cells - Solar Cell Maker Gets a $400-Million Boost.

A thin-film solar firm spun out of Colorado State University says it has developed a way to make cadmium-telluride photovoltaic modules that could be cheaper than processes used by other makers of such solar cells. Abound Solar of Loveland, CO, has received a conditional $400-million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy.

The loan will be tapped over the next three years to fund a 12-fold expansion of Abound's capacity, bringing its total annual output to 840 megawatts and giving the company the scale it says it needs to compete with industry leader First Solar. "Abound's device is almost identical to what First Solar makes," says W.S. Sampath, a professor of mechanical engineering at CSU and inventor of Abound's manufacturing process. "Our real distinction is in how we make it. It's a more continuous in-line process. What might take five or six different machines (for another manufacturer), we do in one chamber."

Sampath says that even though Abound produces fewer cells, its per-watt cost of production is already "quite close" to First Solar's. "With a little more volume, we can get lower," he says.

It's a bold claim. Tempe, AZ-based First Solar, which currently has about 1,300 megawatts of annual production capacity and plans to add another 800 megawatts over the next two years, disclosed in its last quarter that it can produce its modules for an industry-leading 81 cents per watt.

Technology Review has an article on research into combining ultracapacitors with thin film solar - Big Energy Storage in Thin Films.

Energy storage devices called ultracapacitors can be recharged many more times than batteries, but the total amount of energy they can store is limited. This means that the devices are useful for providing intense bursts of power to supplement batteries but less so for applications that require steady power over a long period, such as running a laptop or an engine.

Now researchers at Drexel University in Philadelphia have demonstrated that it's possible to use techniques borrowed from the chip-making industry to make thin-film carbon ultracapacitors that store three times as much energy by volume as conventional ultracapacitor materials. While that is not as much as batteries, the thin-film ultracapacitors could operate without ever being replaced.

These charge-storage films could be fabricated directly onto RFID chips and the chips used in digital watches, where they would take up less space than a conventional battery. They could also be fabricated on the backside of solar cells in both portable devices and rooftop installations, to store power generated during the day for use after sundown. The materials have been licensed by Pennsylvania startup Y-Carbon.

An ultracapacitor is "an electrical energy source that has virtually unlimited lifetime," says Yury Gogotsi, professor of materials science and engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia, who led the development of the thin-film ultracapacitors. "It will live longer than any electronic device and never needs to be replaced." While batteries store and release energy in the form of chemical reactions, which cause them to degrade over time, ultracapacitors work by transferring surface charges. This means they can charge and discharge rapidly, and because the electrode materials aren't involved in any chemical reactions, they can be cycled hundreds of thousands of times. Researchers have begun developing thin-film ultracapacitor materials but have had difficulty getting high enough total energy storage using practical fabrication methods, says Gogotsi.

Gogotsi's group uses a high-vacuum method called chemical vapor deposition to create thin films of metal carbides such as titanium carbide on the surface of a silicon wafer. The films are then chlorinated to remove the titanium, leaving behind a porous film of carbon. In each place where a titanium atom was, a small pore is left behind. "The film is like a molecular sponge, where the size of each pore is equal to the size of a single ion," says Gogotsi. This matching means that when used as the charge-storage material in an ultracapacitor, the carbon films can accumulate a large amount of total surface charge.

Technology Review has a look at the use of nanoparticles to improve solar power performance - TR10: Light-Trapping Photovoltaics.

In 1995, finishing her undergraduate degree in physics, Kylie Catchpole decided to take a risk on a field that was nearly moribund: photovoltaics. "There was a sense that I might have difficulty ever being employed," she recalls. But her gamble paid off. In 2006 Catchpole, then a postdoc, discovered something that opened the door to making thin-film solar cells significantly more efficient at converting light into electricity. It's an advance that could help make solar power more competitive with fossil fuels.

Thin-film solar cells, which are made from semiconductor materials like amorphous silicon or cadmium telluride, are cheaper to produce than conventional solar cells, which are made from relatively thick and expensive crystalline wafers of silicon. But they are also less efficient, because if a cell is thinner than the wavelength of incoming light is long, that light is less likely to be absorbed and converted. At just a few micro­meters thick, thin-film cells only weakly absorb wavelengths in the near-infrared part of the spectrum; that energy is lost. The result is that thin-film photovoltaics convert 8 to 12 percent of incoming light to electricity, versus 14 to 19 percent for crystalline silicon. Thus, larger installations are required in order to produce the same amount of electricity, limiting the number of places the technology can be used.

Catchpole, who is now a research fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra, began work on this problem in 2002 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. "It was a case of 'start at the beginning: can you think of a completely different way to make a solar cell?' " she says. "One of the things I came across was plasmonics--looking at the strange optical properties of metals."

Plasmons are a type of wave that moves through the electrons at the surface of a metal when they are excited by incident light. Others had tried harnessing plasmonic effects to make conventional silicon photovoltaics more efficient, but no one had tried it with thin-film solar cells. Catchpole found that nanoparticles of silver she deposited on the surface of a thin-film silicon solar cell did not reflect back light that fell directly onto them, as would happen with a mirror. Instead, plasmons that formed at the particles' surface deflected the photons so that they bounced back and forth within the cell, allowing longer wavelengths to be absorbed.

Catchpole's experimental devices produce 30 percent more electrical current than conventional thin-film silicon cells. If Catchpole can integrate her nanoparticle technology with the processes used to mass-produce thin films commercially, it could shift the balance of technology used in solar cells. Thin-film photovoltaics could not only gain market share (they currently have just 30 percent of the market in the United States) but sustain growth in the solar industry overall.

Thus far, silicon has been losing out to cadmium telluride as the material of choice for thin-film solar cells. (First Solar, the market leader, is planning gigawatt-scale solar farms that will use cadmium telluride thin-film technology to deliver as much electricity as conventional power stations.) But tellurium is a rare material, and experts question whether the supply will support such grand ambitions. "There just isn't enough tellurium to make a substantial difference to the way the world's energy is produced," says Catchpole. "Silicon is the way to go."

Technology Review has an article on research into improving the efficiency of plastic solar cells - Giving Plastic Solar Cells an Energy Boost.

If the efficiency of polymer solar cells--which are cheaper and lighter than silicon cells--can be boosted significantly, they could be ideal for plastering on rooftops or laminating on windows.

Solarmer Energy, based in El Monte, CA, is on target to reach 10 percent efficiency by the end of this year, says Yue Wu, the company's managing director and director of research and development. Organic cells will likely need at least that efficiency to compete on the photovoltaic market.

In collaboration with Luping Yu, a professor at the University of Chicago, the startup has previously engineered polymers that absorb a broad range of wavelengths and has made cells that convert sunlight to electricity with a record efficiency of nearly 8 percent.

Polymer solar cells with even higher efficiencies are in the works. Solarmer is collaborating with Yang Yang, a materials science and engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Yang is working on a stack of multiple cells that absorb different bands of light. He expects to achieve 12 to 15 percent efficiencies using this approach along with new polymers and better device design. So far, he has made laboratory prototypes that are better than 6 percent efficient.

Polymer solar cells should be cheaper to make than thin-film cadmium-telluride or copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) ones because they use low-cost materials that are easy to print, says Michael McGehee, a materials science and engineering professor at Stanford University. But McGehee believes polymer cells will need to be more than 15 percent efficient to have a major impact on the solar power market. "We still don't understand the physics well enough to know what the theoretical limit is," McGehee says. "I think cells with 15 to 20 percent could be possible."

Technology Review also reports that General Electric is getting into the thin film solar market - GE to Make Thin-Film Solar Panels.

GE has confirmed long-standing speculation that it plans to make thin-film solar panels that use a cadmium- and tellurium-based semiconductor to capture light and convert it into electricity. The GE move could put pressure on the only major cadmium-telluride solar-panel maker, Tempe, AZ-based First Solar, which could drive down prices for solar panels.

Last year, GE seemed to be getting out of the solar industry as it sold off crystalline-silicon solar-panel factories it had acquired in 2004. The company found that the market for such solar panels--which account for most of the solar panels sold worldwide--was too competitive for a relative newcomer, says Danielle Merfeld, GE's solar technology platform leader.

She says cadmium-telluride solar is attractive to GE in part because, compared to silicon, there's still a lot to learn about the physics of cadmium telluride, which suggests it could be made more efficient, which in turn can lower the cost per watt of solar power. It's also potentially cheaper to make cadmium-telluride solar panels than it is to make silicon solar cells, making it easier to compete with established solar-panel makers. Merfeld says GE was encouraged by the example of First Solar, which has consistently undercut the prices of silicon solar panels--and because of this has quickly grown from producing almost no solar panels just a few years ago to being one of the world's largest solar manufacturers today.

Technology Review has an article on Applied Materials' efforts to expand solar manufacturing capability - Scaling Up Solar Power.

In 2006, semiconductor-equipment giant Applied Materials got into the solar-power market in a big way. At the company's headquarters in Santa Clara, CA, you can see just how big: a ceiling-mounted crane lifts a piece of glass the size of a garage door onto a table for testing. The glass sheet, covered with a thin orange film of amorphous s­ilicon, ­is destined to become one of the world's largest solar panels.

Applied Materials developed the equipment to produce these extremely large photo­voltaic panels in order to lower the price of solar power--­crucial if solar is to compete on price with fossil-fuel electricity. The value of a solar installation comes down to the cost of each watt of power it can produce over the lifetime of a panel, and Applied Materials' panels bring down costs in two ways. The equipment for manufacturing thin-film solar cells operates more efficiently when the panels are bigger. And larger modules need less hardware and labor to wire them together and support them.

Applied Materials, which was already the largest equipment supplier to the semiconductor and liquid-crystal-display industries, brought its expertise to solar power in 2006. The company's photo­voltaics and its display backplanes are both based on glass panels coated with amorphous silicon. Its production facilities were already set up to make those panels in 10 sizes, so achieving the best cost per watt was simply a matter of picking the right surface area, says Jim Cushing, senior director of the photo­voltaic-equipment line. The result was "by far the fastest ramp to production in the PV industry," he says--from lab to market in just under two years.

Applied Materials now sells a complete set of equipment for transforming large glass panels into thin-film solar cells, transporting it to manufacturers in several shipping containers. The company claims that each factory using its equipment can produce enough solar cells every year to generate 80 megawatts of power, enough to provide energy for 35,000 U.S. homes during peak hours of electricity use.

Cleantech.com has a look at the state of play in the thin-film solar market - Paint, spray or ink it on.

Clean technology companies and researchers are coming up with all sorts of ways these days to spray, paint, and ink on their technologies. But are these new innovations ready to be pumped out in large quantities?

Burtonsville, Md.-based New Energy Technologies (OTCBB:NENE) announced a new milestone yesterday in a patent-pending technology for spraying solar coatings onto see-through glass windows, allowing power generation. Though it's still early days for the new product, it could offer significant commercial production advantages for building integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) over current thin-film technologies.

The key, as the company points out, is getting scaled up and fully developed (And protecting its IP.)

It joints a host of others pursuing similar paint-on solar compounds, including researchers at Swansea Unversity in the UK and a partnership between JA Solar and Innovalight.

Last week, a group of Japanese scientists claimed they’ve come up with a lithium polymer battery that can be made using only printing technology (see Japanese scientists advance printable battery tech). The new flexible, lithium polymer battery is considered to be applicable for solar batteries, flexible displays, or being attached to curved surfaces.

And last August, University of Texas at Austin researchers came out with a CIGS-based paintable solar cell technology that could help to increase efficiencies and decrease manufacturing costs (see Texas researchers look to unleash spray-on solar cell potential).

They achieved proof-of-concept producing solar cells using tiny nanoparticle inks that allow them to be printed like newspaper or painted onto the sides of buildings or rooftops to absorb sunlight.

Lowell, Mass.-based solar company Konarka Technologies announced in 2008 it successfully conducted the first-ever demonstration of manufacturing solar cells by using inkjet printing (see Konarka demonstrates inkjet printed solar cells). Just last month, the company launched a pilot project to integrate its branded Power Plastic solar panels into the non-load bearing exterior walls of buildings.

Inhabitat has a post on some pleasant looking new thin film solar panels - Uber-Thin Modular Solar Panels Energize Any Building.

The recent evolution of solar technology has been nothing short of amazing, and we are continuously impressed by all the products hitting the market that make it easier to integrate clean tech into our daily lives. One innovative company at the forefront of the solar energy bustle is Sulfurcell, the producer of a new kind of modular solar panel that add energy-generating capabilities to any building. The super-thin panels are entirely self contained, so they don’t require any substructure, and they can be applied to new buildings as well as retrofitted old buildings to provide a sleek look and plenty of power. ...

Sulfurcell utilizes copper-indium-sulfide semiconductors, which enable them to produce cells hundreds of times thinner than conventional photovoltaics, which in turn reduces the manufacturing costs. Production is said to use only half the energy used to manufacture conventional solar modules. Sulfurcell has been a pioneer in the photovoltaic industry since 2003, and the company has been named by The Guardian as one of the world’s top 100 cleantech companies for two years running.

Technology Review has an article on thin film solar company Solexant's process for "printing inorganic solar cells with nanomaterials" - Thin-Film Solar with High Efficiency.

Solar cells made from cheap nanocrystal-based inks have the potential to be as efficient as the conventional inorganic cells currently used in solar panels, but can be printed less expensively. Solexant, a company in San Jose, CA, is currently manufacturing solar cells to test the technology. In order to compete with other thin-film solar companies, Solexant is banking on simpler, cheaper printing processes and materials, as well as lower initial capital costs to build its plants. The company expects to sell modules for $1 per watt, with efficiencies above 10 percent.

The company has licensed methods for growing nanocrystals and making them into inks from Paul Alivisatos, professor of nanotechnology at the University of California, Berkeley and interim director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. (Alivisatos is on Solexant's board of directors.) Alivisatos says the advantage of these materials is their potential to combine low cost with high performance. Solar cells made from crystalline silicon are efficient at converting sunlight into electricity, but they're expensive to manufacture. To bring down the cost, companies have been developing thin-film solar cells from semiconductors that don't match crystalline silicon's performance but are much less expensive to make.

Solexant's goal is to make cheap thin-film solar cells with relatively high efficiencies. It would not disclose what the nanoparticle inks are made of, but the company says they are suspensions of rod-shaped, semiconducting nanocrystals that are four nanometers in diameter and 20 to 30 nanometers long. The Solexant cells are printed on a metal foil as the substrate. Nanocrystal films are simple to print but have poor electrical properties. Electrons tend to get trapped between the small particles. "The trick with these cells is how to deposit the materials on the fly in a way that makes a very conductive surface," which in turn ensures decent light-to-electricity conversion, says Alivisatos. Solexant begins with nanocrystals because they're easier to print, and heats them as they're printed, causing them to fuse together into larger, high-quality microcrystals that don't have as many places for electrons to lose their way.

The remaining parts of the solar cell, including the electrical contacts and a light-absorbing layer, are also printed on the flexible metal films. This process allows Solexant to print very large areas. When complete, the cells are cut and then topped with a rigid piece of glass.

Making the entire cell using a roll-to-roll process gives the company an advantage over other thin-film photovoltaic companies that print on glass, which is heavier and limited to smaller areas, says Solexant CEO Damoder Reddy. "The cost benefit is dramatic, allowing us to produce cells for 50 cents a watt," he says. First Solar, a thin-film company that uses vacuum deposition to print its cells onto glass, has manufacturing costs of 85 cents per watt. Nanosolar, another company making nanocrystal solar cells, uses a different semiconductor that requires chemical reactions to take place during printing, which increases the complexity and expense of the process. "We print a preformed semiconductor," which eliminates such steps, says Reddy.

http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2008/01/thin-film-solar-power-cheaper-than-coal.htmlGreentech media has a post on thin film solar company First Solar's booming market capitalisation - First Solar Joins S&P 500.

As sales climbed, First Solar filed for an IPO in November 2006. The stock went out at $20 and hit $200 within a year, a trajectory that compares with Google's first year. The economic calamity, among other factors, caused the stock to drop, but the company has consistently topped revenue and earnings expectations while dropping the average price of its solar panels. It broke the $1 per watt manufacturing cost barrier in 2008. During the second quarter, the cost per watt was down to 87 cents. But good luck figuring out how they do it – the company fiercely guards its secrets. First Solar is working on a way to bring copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) cells to market.

Technology Review has an update on thin film solar company Nanosolar, noting their 640 MW per year fully automated manufacturing facility for CIGS solar cells in Germany is now operational (though only producing 1MW per month of panels initially) - Advanced Solar Panels Coming to Market.

Solar cells made of the CIGS semiconductor, which is composed of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium, have long been considered a potential challenger to conventional solar cells made of silicon. At least in the lab, CIGS cells have reached efficiencies comparable to silicon-based solar cells. And in theory, they could be made using inexpensive printing processes, leading to much less expensive solar power. But developing manufacturing processes that maintain the high efficiencies has proven difficult.

Nanosolar claims to have solved these problems. Its solar cells still aren't as efficient as laboratory cells--the best of them convert 16.4 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity, as opposed to over 20 percent in the lab. And on average, the company's solar panels convert just 11 percent of that energy into electricity, says Martin Roscheisen, Nanosolar's CEO. But that's high enough to compete with conventional solar panels, he says, due to modifications that improve performance and lower installation costs. He estimates that in sunny locations, power plants made using these panels could produce electricity at five to six cents per kilowatt hour, based on Department of Energy methods for calculating the amortized cost of solar panels over their lifetimes. That's near the cost of electricity from coal and significantly less than most solar power, which costs about 18 to 22 cents per kilowatt hour.

The Huffington Post has an article on a planned Chinese solar plant that would be the world's largest (lots of those around) - this one is a 2GW thin film solar plant using technology from First Solar - Chinese solar plant expected to be the biggest.

First Solar Inc. said Tuesday it has received initial approval from the Chinese government to build what may become the largest solar field in the world.

First Solar, which makes more solar cells than any other company, said it struck a tentative 10-year deal to build in China's vast desert north of the Great Wall. The project would eventually blanket 25 square miles of Inner Mongolia – slightly larger than the size of Manhattan – with a sea of black, light-absorbing glass.

The solar field would dwarf anything in operation in the U.S. or Europe. At 2 gigawatts, or 2 billion watts, the solar plant could pump as much energy onto China's grid as two coal-fired plants, enough to light up three million homes. Like most solar plants, however, it wouldn't produce electricity at night.

"The potential is enormous" for projects like this in China, CEO Mike Ahearn told The Associated Press before the announcement. "The Chinese government is further along in its thinking about solar than we've imagined."

Ahearn said it would be nearly impossible to install a solar field of this size in the United States. There's plenty of land, but there's not enough near transmission lines, Ahearn said.

And efforts to build new power lines are regularly stymied by competing interests from government agencies, environmental groups and disgruntled residents. ...

Ahearn said First Solar spent the past few months searching for partners in China, culminating with its 2-gigawatt deal in Inner Mongolia. Like the U.S., China has taken aggressive steps to move away from fossil fuels. It located the First Solar plant in Ordos, a gritty industrial city of 1.4 million people that is the main production base for China's largest coal company.

The project hasn't been given an exact location yet, but the agreement said it will be located within a massive development zone that is expected to eventually offer nearly 12 gigawatts of renewable energy from wind, solar, biomass and hydroelectric power. First Solar will provide most of the solar, with the first 30 megawatts installed by June 1, 2010. The company will expand the plant over the next decade, installing about 27 million thin-film panels by 2019.