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If Researchers are Right, This Rock Will Make Solar Power Cheaper than Coal
In 2007, a student at the University of Tokyo brought a lump of a grey, sparkly mineral to his professor Tsutomu Miyasaka, with the hope that this material might have potential to make cheap and efficient solar cells. But it only converted 4 percent of the sun energy to electricity. Not that remarkable.
Now, however, things have changed. Seven years later the unremarkable lump of rock called perovskite is beating out most solar cells on the market, getting 20 percent efficiency. The progress has sped up because researchers around the world saw the potential in this mineral.
While the sun is pretty much a limitless source of energy for all of us, the cost to capture it remains the challenge. The typical residential solar roof might get about 15 percent efficiency in sunlight and provides electricity at 50 cents/watt. This is twice the cost of coal.
So it's got to get cheaper in order to pull ahead as our number one energy source. Right now the top-performing cells, made of gallium arsenide get a maximum efficiency of about 30 percent but are prohibitively expensive.
The cheaper options like copper indium gallium selenide (a flexible material) or cadmium telluride (as cheap as silicon) get only about 20 percent efficiency.
Here is why perovskite is worth watching: It removes the need for a major component of the solar cell makeup.
Standard solar cells require a semiconductor (like silicon) to absorb sunlight and produce electrons and their opposite counterpart, holes. Then the cell separates the electrons and holes to create a flow of charged particles...and this is the electric current. Few materials can both absorb light in the right way and separate the electrons, so there needs to be a pigment added to the semiconductor that absorbs sunlight at just the right wavelength. The breakthrough with perovskite is that it does not require a semiconductor. Scientists are not yet sure how it works but apparently this material can shift electrons and holes better on its own, as opposed to a paring with silicon or some other semiconductor.
Scientists have shown that perovskite can be manufactured cheaply and easily, and Henry Snaith, a TK at the University of Oxford, hopes to bring this material to market by 2016. They think they can reduce the price to 10 cents a watt.
There are two main challenges. First, perovskite contains lead and so scientists are experimenting with tin-based versions that look very promising so far. The second challenge is pretty tough to solve: Perovskite easily absorbs moisture and when it's exposed it tends to swell and loses its ability to absorb light. Since the very utility of solar cells requires that they are exposed—researchers note they can be encased in glass.
If these issues can be resolved, it is possible, theoretically, that there could be terawatts of perovskite cells, and those kinds of numbers would easily dwarf the current silicon industry.
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If the solar panel is installed in a place where there is on average 12 hour of sunlight per day, that would be 4380 hours a year, which mean that a 1kw panel would produce 4380kwh in a year.
So, if the solar panel last 10 year, total cost per kwh is 0.0114 $/kwh. if the solar panel last 20 years, the cost would be 0.0057 $/kwh. (not including lost interest on investment, and declining performance of pv panel)
In addition to this, in time there will be less to pay in rent for grid infrastructure, which in the UK is 25% of the price per kwh. Because solar farms can be small, they can be closer to the consumer, making heavy powerlines and transformers obsolete. This will also reduce the risk of large scale blackouts, and will probably make the energy grid less vulnerable to solar storms, in that transformers will be smaller, thereby easier to repair
Up here in BC we pay about 10c/KWHr from BCHydro. I think that's about half what I used to pay when I lived in Silicon Valley 10 years ago.
For instance, our municipality buys our power from the Prairie State Energy campus - a government boondoggle sold to our idiot politicians who signed us up for a 40 year contract where we have to pay enormous rates or sell the power at a loss to the open market.
It cost $4bn to produce a plant with 1600MW of capacity. Tell me if my math is wrong but that's $2.50/W. Yet its cost to operate is supposedly lower than market average because it uses coal mined in proximity. (of course it looked great on paper but doesn't in real life) I would consider that a variable cost though - there's no telling how the market will behave, what the government will do to increase the regulatory burden, and what electricity prices as a whole will do.
With solar you have a more or less simple cost structure: investment in infrastructure then immediate returns based only on how many sunny days you have - assuming the cells have a long lifespan of no maintenance. If you want to make solar look more appealing financially you just increase the sample time.
Your $500 cell would cost $500 for one year, $250 for 2 years, etc. Only no one knows how long it will last, or how its performance will decrease with time. That's why it's not an even comparison.
$.50/W is anticipated the cost of the solar cell, dollar units per power. A 1000W (1kW) generating cell would therefore cost $500. A steal compared to today's prices.
You pay $0.11/kWHr, a unit of energy, not power. Power is energy per unit time.
Some anomalies:
"...perovskite is beating out most solar cells on the market, getting 20 percent efficiency."
" Right now the top-performing cells, made of gallium arsenide get a maximum efficiency of about 30 percent but are prohibitively expensive.
The cheaper options like copper indium gallium selenide (a flexible material) or cadmium telluride (as cheap as silicon) get only about 20 percent efficiency."
It's my understanding from these statements that perovskite is an advantage because it is more efficient than existing solar technology, but your statements are in conflict with each other.
Later in the article, you state this:
"Here is why perovskite is worth watching: It removes the need for a major component of the solar cell makeup."
If this is the case, why mention efficiency at all if it's on parity (or less than the top end by 1/3)?
Next, your numbers need some clarity:
"The typical residential solar roof might get about 15 percent efficiency in sunlight and provides electricity at 50 cents/watt. This is twice the cost of coal."
Efficiency and cost are not comparable because solar requires a high initial investment and zero input to generate power besides the sun. If you include decreases in efficiency as the cell ages, the cost to produce will technically go up, depending on how long a span of time you want to average out the operating cost. You can affect the cost per watt by simply extending the sample period.
Coal requires an initial investment to build the plant, ongoing maintenance, a fuel supply (subject to market forces and the 500lb elephant in the room - the cost of government regulation), and transmission infrastructure, it's regulatory and maintenance costs, and profits to the generators.
That said, I pay a rate much higher than average at about $.11/kW. That's $.00011/W. How do you arrive at your $.50/W number? Is that a capacity number or a production number? Because as stated above, they are two very different things with varying factors.
And finally, in your article you failed to mention the relative scarcity of this mineral, the cost to process it, and its longevity. It may require less components to manufacture but what is the cost to recover, refine, and convert this material into a cell? It also has to be encased in glass..what's the cost to recover, process, and convert the proper glass plus the cost of the encapsulation process?
There's more questions than answers in this article. Perovskite may be a promising new material but the claims are very wild and unsubstantiated in their speculation.