This is just out from Nanosolar. For the record, I have never seen such a level of financial support from such significant players this early in a corporation’s development. The investor’s ability to both complete due diligence and to do back up research is a given and is surely at play here. This company is moving forward on a mountain of cash even perhaps more vigorously than Google did (the owners of Google are major investors here). I have no doubt that the IPO will be a gimme.
As a reminder, they produce a tool for $2,000,000 that produces sufficient solar cells in a year to replace one nuclear power plant at an initial selling price of $1.00 per watt. This means that they can surely produce it down to a price of $0.25 per watt. I have no doubt that the installed cost of this energy will fall below all other sources of energy.
Even more important, as you can see from the rest of the company blog, they are building small in order to intercept the transmission system itself just before it reaches the customers. This will eliminate the need for high voltage transmission which is responsible for huge unavoidable energy losses. I was not joking when I have written in the past that a dollar bill is sitting at the top of the dam while as little as $.15 actually reaches the application point. Now perhaps a dollar of collected solar energy will deliver fifty cents to the application point.
These numbers that I am throwing around are not refined but you get the idea and we are not too far off.
The advent of cheap solar energy now pushes the low cost hydrogen production that we have recently posted on and will push the development of an efficient hydrogen storage technology. It is obvious that surplus solar energy needs to be stored and doing it with hydrogen is as obvious provided the turn around is fairly cheap. I do not have precise details as yet but the enthusiasm at MIT suggests that that is now nicely solved.
We still have to store it all but there are plenty of methods if we need them for lack of a great solution. Even a large balloon full of gas works. I suspect that we will see some of the metal hydrides dusted off again.
For those who follow this blog, we have generally commented on any and all alternatives that pop up. They all have their champions and are all worthy if the cost of energy is high or inconvenient. Breezing into the middle of the boreal forest with a balloon wind power generator makes eminent sense compared to any and all alternatives.
However there occasionally comes along a technology that can put any and all others out of business forever.
Printed solar cells are about to do just that. This means that any and all alternatives need to be financed in such a way that closure upon payout is a practical option. I cannot make this any more clearly. Grid power is now obsolete.
The world that we are shortly entering will ultimately use ethanol for long haul transportation because of the convenience of onboard fuel storage and the ease of production as an engineered alga product or several viable alternatives. Everything else will use solar energy directly with hydrogen acting as a storage system.
This means also that we have the option of ending all oil production and natural gas production with what likely will be a much cheaper alternative even at ten dollars a barrel.
As part of a strategic $300 million equity financing, Nanosolar has added new capital and brought its total amount of funding to date to just below half a billion U.S. dollars.
Last December, we introduced the Nanosolar Utility Panel(TM) to enable solar utility power — i.e. giving utility-scale power producers the solar panel technology to build and operate cost efficient solar power plants.
The tremendous demand for our unique product was matched by the desire to support us in scaling its availability even more rapidly and ambitiously.
Today we are pleased to announce that we have received strategic backing by partners ideally suited to accelerate the implementation of this business — in the form of product supply agreements, strategic collaboration, and equity investments.
As part of the transaction, the boards of directors of AES Corporation (one of the world's largest power companies), the Carlyle Group, EDF (the world's largest electric utility), and Energy Capital Partners signed off on investments into Nanosolar through Riverstone Holdings, EDF Renewables, and simultaneously formed AES Solar. A fraction of the oversubscribed Nanosolar equity round also included financial investors such as Lone Pine Capital, the Skoll Foundation, and Pierre Omidyar's fund as well as returning investors including GLG Partners, Beck Energy, and Conergy founding investor Grazia Equity. The transaction closed in March 2008.
The alliance for solar utility power is the outcome of a year long effort on behalf of our strategic partners examining the solar industry, investigating virtually every solar company on the planet, and conducting one of the most thorough due diligence efforts on our manufacturing operation, our scale-up capabilities, and our readiness for the level of cost efficiency demanded by solar utility power. We are honored to have been selected as the company of choice to partner with by such a distinguished and sophisticated group.
The new capital will allow us to accelerate production expansion for our 430MW San Jose factory and our 620MW Berlin factory. (Earlier, Nanosolar secured a 50% capex subsidy on its Germany based factory.)
Going All-Electric August 7, 2008 By Martin enRoscheis, CEO
The following is one of my favorite charts: How far a car can drive based on either of the following forms of energy, each produced from 100m x 100m (2.5 acres) of land: (cut for this post)
How come that biofuel does not really cut it? Electric cars are about four times more energy efficient than fuel based cars. This is because fuel engines mostly creates heat and thus wastes the majority of the energy units available. Combine this with biofuel plants not being very efficient solar energy harvesters relative to semiconductor based solar electricity, and the result is this huge difference.
In other words, it is clear that if the goal is to maximize energy efficiency, the end point to go after is all-electric cars everywhere. Moving all of transportation to all-electric would essentially cut in half our overall energy consumption without compromising on distance to go.
I for one have vowed that the Prius I bought six years ago will have been the last fuel powered car I'd buy in my life. (Given that I may very well own the highest-mileage Prius on the planet, this presumably reflects my confidence in the quality of this vehicle and the near-term readiness of electric car technology…) Presently, it is baking in the sun all day while I'm at work. My future all-electric car would charge up while idling under a solar carport.
U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer and her staff today visited Nanosolar to tour our factory and present us with the U.S. Senate Conservation Champion award. We are honored to be awarded this recognition — thank you very much!
During our meeting with the U.S. Senator, we discussed the importance of getting a Federal RPS right in 2009.
Getting a Federal RPS Right
The state level Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) we have today are limited in a key way: They are primarily geared towards large-scale, centralized generation, i.e. power plants of larger than 50MW in size. That's the old mindset — preferring one 300MW plant over thirty 10MW plants.
But a lot of today's action and opportunity in renewables is in decentralized 1-10MW generation, including municipal solar power plants and other forms of power generation at the local level. No well-designed RPS should have a built-in bias against small & medium sized power generation.
For instance, in California, we have one policy framework (the California Solar Incentives, CSI) for sub-1MW solar installations, connected locally; and we have an RPS that works for >20MW power generation, connected to transmission lines. In between we have a policy gap for renewable generation of one to twenty MW in size, which is often directly connected into the municipal grid, i.e. without having to use transmission lines:
No federal energy policy should favor big power plants over medium sized ones; and the state level policies should be reworked in this regard too.
Specifically, by avoiding the substantial expense and energy loss associated with transmission infrastructure, small and medium sized power plants have an economic benefit to the public, and this ought to be reflected as a corresponding commercial benefit.
Another key element to get right in the next generation of RPS is better transparency and project pipeline predictability. Only a predictable environment will be an investible one. One way of achieving good predictability are standard contracts which the utilities have to accept.
