Here’s a clue.

Try googling: nanosolar CIGS.

There’s only about 18000 hits.

Note that I asked you what the panels are made of, not the blueprint for their factory and their recipes and operating procedures.

Since you think NF3 is “nasty”, I’m just wondering what you think of the “S” in CIGS.

A stupid question deserves a stupid answer, sorry. Nanosolar is understandably very protective of their intellectual property. So nobody on earth apart from a small group of researchers could answer your question.

Of course have no clue, why should I? I can predict that the next generation of Intel CPU’s will be at least twice as fast as the current one, without having a clue how they pull it off. Does that make me a believer too?

If investors are prepared to put $ 500 million in this company, then as a believer, I am in good company.

Any arguments?

What a cute way of saying:

“I have no clue, I just wanna believe…”

Cheap for whom; certainly not the taxpayers who pay for the government subsidies for these “Cheap” solar panels.

Yep, there’s subsidy going in there too. My superficial research indicated it is $ 25 m on a total private funding of $ 500 m. So there are some capitalists putting large amounts of money in that company. I wonder why. They’re probably stupid.

Why is it Anne, that none of the solar panel manufacturers ever talk about their efficiency; a number that will vary throughout the day, as the solar spectrum at the surface changes form sun up to sun down.

I am stunned by this remark. All manufacturers publish the efficiency of their panels. And it can be verified very easily. Solar panels are expensive things, bought by people measuring every watt hour coming out. Any panel not meeting the specs will be promptly returned with a complaint.

The total amount of energy produced from a solar panel in Germany (~50 degrees latitude) is 800 Wh per year per watt peak. So a 200W solar panel will produce around 160 kWh per year when pointing south at an inclination of 30 degrees. The best commercially available solar panels have an efficiency of a little over 20%. Efficiency by the way is not a very important measure, price per watt peak is the most important one. Nanosolar claims its panels are 14% efficient.

How about efficiency in terms of how long does a modern production solar panel have to run, generating electricity

Somewhere between 1 and 4 years, depending on type and location. href=”http://jupiter.clarion.edu/~jpearce/Papers/netenergy.pdf”>Here is a paper. Google for ‘energy payback solar panels’ to find more information.

Let’s all get ready for the next bubble to burst;

You bet there will be a bubble and you bet it will burst. Did the the dot com bubble prove the internet was not such a good idea?

Care to tell us what materials are used to make Nanosolar’s panels?

I’ll trade that information for the recipe of Coca Cola.

But good luck on that “cheap” thing there. Cheap for whom; certainly not the taxpayers who pay for the government subsidies for these “Cheap” solar panels.
Why is it Anne, that none of the solar panel manufactureres ever talk about their efficiency; a number that will vary throughout the day, as the solar spectrum at the surface changes form sun up to sun down.

How about efficiency in terms of how long does a modern production solar panel have to run, generating electricity, to recover all the energy that went into all the materials from their raw state till the panel was installed and making free electricity to the grid. And how does that energy capital time compare to the mean time to failure of a modern solar panel ?

Well just asking; it would be nice to know if we gain energy or lose energy in this transaction.

NASA may be able to afford the cost of “cheap” triple junction solar cells that may get 30% efficiency, because weight to them is gold in the bank; but down to earth real actual energy users can’t afford such things.

I’ve heard of solar cells that you can paint onto a sheet of mild steel, with a paint roller; dirt cheap so they say; but they don’t often say, how much solar electricity they can make during an average day in an average location.

Let’s all get ready for the next bubble to burst; the solar and renewable green energy bubble. My IRA, and 401K investment managers, have specific instructions to not invest one brass razoo of my hard earned retirement funds on anything that even smells or sounds like renewable green energy or hydrogen or any other scotch mist program.

Care to tell us what materials are used to make Nanosolar’s panels?

nanosolar

For a start, there’s that 100 year period; what on earth does that have to do with anything. Does a CO2 molecule gradually lose its “potency”? Man, there’s an image for you ! One poor little old CO2 molecule just sitting there waiting for photons in the 40 to 240 millielectron Volt energy range to come along; well CO2 really only cares about the 75-90 meV range (no not MeV). Why would the molecule care about having to wait 100 years? Just what does time have to do with GHG molecular spectroscopy ?

Then there’s that Kilogram thing; that old slab of platinum.

Everybody quickly; what are the molecular weights of H2O, CO2, NF3, and SF6; and how many of each do you get for your kilogram; don’t GHG modellers understand about the periodic table and the concept of molecules.

So who out there has a preferred value for the NF3 capture crossection for 40-240 meV photons.

We moved all of our silicon fab foundry stuff out of the building, so I am still trying to find a fab engineer to find out what they used to use NF3 for; my guess is it is used in plasma etching processes. Certainly if it is so stable, it wouldn’t seem to me to be a good wet chemical reagent for anything.

But back to the atmosphere where the July 1 2008 abundance of NF3 was reliably put at 0.454ppt That’s a dry-air mole fraction for those interested. See they have to ignore the water vapor, even though it is typically one percent of the atmosphere. Well I’ll stick with the dry air, but not forget the water.

Now I’ve been involved in some high purity chemicals (by the multikilograms) I used to work in a building containing enough Arsenic to poison every living thing (that doesn’t love the stuff) in the known universe; and that stuff was good stuff; seven nines purity; that’s 99.99999 % pure Arsenic, and we had around the same amount of seven nines pure Gallium; the French quicksilver. It had to be that clean to let us grow good infra red Gallium Arsenide single crystals to make IR photodiodes, or use as substrates to make red GaAsP LED epitaxial material (ancient technology now).

So if NF3 were the ONLY atmospheric GHG, the air would be 99.9999999999546 pure. That air is 200,000 times more pure, than the very best semiconductor raw materials we were ever able to get out hands on. Well maybe you can get eight nines pure stuff these days.

I’m still inshock wondering why the GWPs are not based on per molecule comparisons; so it will take me some time to recover my senses, and figure out what that really is.

So just what does this potency mean; and does anybody know what modes of resonance oscillations are active in the 40-240 meV range in Nitrogen Trifluoride. The molecule looks supsiciously like ammonia which is tetrahedral, and it is well known that ammonia has a resonance where the nitrogen atom, pops up and down through the middle of the plane of hydrogen atoms, to invert the tetrahedron; and it does that at a microwave frequency that was used as the basis of the first practical Atomic clock.

Given that NF3 is 17.000 times more potent per century per kilogram at levels 200,000 times more pure than the best semiconductor high purity chemicals; you would think that the President of The United States would have decreed a National emergency, and instructed every Government or Government funded R&D agency or lab to divert their entire budgets to determining that molecular absorption spectrum of NF3, and determining the capture crossections over the infrared range from 40-240 meV; maybe over the solar spectrum as well.

Sounds like panic time to me.

I have the paper from the chap at Scripps, mentioned in the article, but drew a blank form the chief hoincho there on the spectrum; ho hum, maybe someone will get around to looking at this new devil gas.

Midday you might get a bit over 3kw. For the whole day, perhaps 20 kwh. Assuming a wimp motor of just 20 hp (15 kw) and a battery efficiency of 75% energy in to energy out, you might get an hour of driving. Except on overcast days, then you walk or ride a bicycle.

Solar has it’s uses, particularly in remote locations or where small amounts of power are needed. Like weather stations, for example. When you consider the whole picture, producing the silicon, and some of the rather nasty chemicals used in poduction, NF3 being rather minor, the cost is a whole lot higher. Thermal solar, reflectors and making something hot, has less environmental downside. It still isn’t cost effective.

Why the GWP is so high:
Neither water molecules nor CO2 absorb near the maximum of the infrared radiation emitted from ground or from water at ambient temperatures. They leave open the so-called atmospheric window. Methane and other molecules absorb in the ‘atmospheric window’ thus reducing strongly the radiative heat transport into space, at clear skies. (Water droplets do absorb strongly at all relevant infrared wavelengths).
If such molecules have a long life in the atmosphere, they accumulate very much. CO2 has a lifespan of 50 years, methane of 10 years, N2O probably much shorter, some weeks, I guess, but all fluorines are very stable molecules and stay in the atmosphere for a very long time. ”

Well based on a global mean surface temperature of +15C,t eh surface infra-red radiation would be bounded by a black body radiation spectrum peaked at 10.1 microns. Ozone absorbs in the 9-10 micron range, and CO2 absorbs at somewhere between 14.7 and 15 microns depending on who’se data you can find. But practically due to pressure broadening and Doppler (temperature) broadening, CO2 absorbs from about 13 to about 16.5 microns. or about 13.75 to 16 if you take width at half height. Data from The Infr-Red Handbook shows CO2 and water as affecting the surface emitted radiation from 13 to 18 microns. The ozone peak is right slap on the peak of the emission for much of the globe and seasons.
But if you ignore the fictitious global mean temperature, and instead treat the real global surface tem[perature range from tropical desert highs of +60C (surface) to Vostock Antarctic winter night lows of -90C, then you find the suspectral emittance peak ranges from about 8.8 microns out to 15 microns at the coldest temperatures. So in the polar regions the CO2 peak is about right on the surface emission spectrum while at the desert highs, the CO2 effect is quite attenuated due to the Wien displacement of the emission peak.

Also in the case of CO2, it is the very ground level CO2 that is important, because that is where the pressure is highest, and the temperature is highest, so as you go up in altitude the CO2 absorption peak narrows around the intrinsic line width. The ozone peak, since it is a high altitude pollutant is a very much sharper absorption dip than CO2. Re-emission from CO2 spreads isotropically, so about half goes up, and half goes down, and the part that goes down is either reabsorbed by CO2 (or water) or hits the surface. the half that goes up, increasingly escapes further CO2 entrapment, sicne the temperature and pressure broadening are dropping, so the absorption line narrows with altitude.

Acocrding to NOAA official earth energy budget, the so called atmospheric window only allows about 10% of the surface emitted IR to escape to space, so that is the extent of the total extra greenhouse effect one could expect from more GHGs.

And the role of water is way underplayed. Water doesn’t mind evaporating from the ocean surfaces, but once removed from the surface by upward convection or winds; it simply hates to condense, unless there is a surface to condense on. That surface can be a dust particle, or a bacterium, or even a charge ion shower track caused by incoming ionising radiations, so the water vapor gets transported (along with 540 or so calories per gram of latent heat of evaporation) high into the troposphere. Eventually it gets cold enough and finds some method of nucleation to form water droplets (clouds) and thereby dump out its 540 calories per gram of energy, and eventually some oif it will get high enough to form ice crystals, and dump another 80 calories per gram of latent heat.

So the water cycle is the most potent energy transport mechanism for getting heat energy back out into space, other than direct electromagnetic radiation.

And when ANY sort of cloud moves in front of the sun; it ALWAYS cools down; it never heats up, so clouds of any form are a negative feedback factor.
It doesn’t matter that high clouds at night slow the cooling of the surface; that is last night’s weather; but the persistence of such clouds over climate time scales always results in cooling from solar radiation blockage or reflection (albedo).