After Gutenberg

While the technology originated in the United States, it has been Germany and Japan that have taken the lead in the manufacture of solar panels. In 2006 U.S. share of global panel construction had fallen to about 8 percent, down from 20-25 percent four years previous.

Observers have attributed such a lack of foresight to fossil fuel power politics. A lamentable situation at the time of the early warnings of oil shortages, when President Carter installed solar hot water panels on the roof of the White House. 40 years later, when 1) the United States is even more dependent upon foreign oil, 2) global instability threatens supply and 3) there is increasing evidence that we have passed the peak in oil production, the lack of production is potentially disastrous.

Developers in the U.S. still strive for a leadership role in state-of-the-art solar energy, yet even such advantage is diminishing as research institutes around the globe get closer to mimicking photosynthesis. Futhermore, the cost per watt of photoelectric power may not have been so much of an issue with past NASA budgets. Today there is great emphasis upon lowering the cost per watt of photoelectric power.

Red shows the regions that receive the most sun, such as the middle of the Pacific Ocean and the Sahara Desert in Niger, followed by orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and pink. Australia gleams a bright red on the NASA map based upon data collected by US and European satellites.

Felix Kramer has observed:

NYTimes columnist Tom Friedman and others have said that renewable energy won’t succeed until it meets the “China price” — that is, until it’s cost-competitive with coal in China (and also in India and globally). Once this happens, it’s no longer a question of moral appeals to “do the right thing,” but instead to do what pays.

Getting to the point where renewable energy can win in the marketplace involves both business and political strategies. We know there’s no level playing field in the marketplace. Over a century, the priorities, resources, incentives, loan guarantees, infrastructure support and straight-out subsidies have gone overwhelmingly to “big carbon” — oil, natural gas and coal (along with massive support and insurance programs to fund nuclear power). The process of changing those priorities (and the research, development and demonstration programs of the Department of Energy (DOE) that follow them), continues in fits and starts.

Meanwhile, in countries less dominated by fossil fuels there has been more interest in developing cheap, clean electric power. Now that technological development has meant the advent of lower cost methods of solar panel production, there is a growing market for photo voltaic that can compete on an economic basis with other sources of clean energy, particulary in those countries that have optimal areas of insolation.

India is one of those countries, where photo voltaic systems are part of a sustainable energy campaign. And, as this blog previously has noted Moser Baer is an Indian company that wants to compete in this new market. It is the opinion of Ratul Puri, the 35-year-old executive director of Moser Baer India- a $400 million high-tech company that straddles business as diverse as the optical media, home entertainment, consumer electronics and solar energy sectors – that “India has a massive opportunity in solar. Five, ten, fifteen years down the road it can be amongst the world’s largest markets.”

Photo credit: Parth Sanyal/Reuters
“A laborer checks the solar panel of a street light at a newly constructed solar housing complex in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata, July 8, 2008. Blank DVD-maker Moser Baer India is venturing into thin-film solar energy panels in hopes that India will grow into one of the world’s largest markets for solar power.”

Writing for the GlobalPost, Jason Overdorf muses whether Moser Bauer is a contender? “Can an upstart Indian DVD maker beat Google to the punch in solar energy?”

Puri told GlobalPost in a recent interview …that his enormous CD and DVD volumes actually give him more experience in coating thin-film silicon — the essential technology that Moser Baer’s solar cells will employ — than virtually any other company in the world. “We plan to have 600-odd megawatts of capacity by 2010,” he said, “which will get us to the magic $1 a watt [that it will take to compete with conventional power].”

Moser Baer plans investments of nearly $3.2 billion in research, development and manufacturing of solar power products — the “thin film modules” and other silicon bits and pieces that make solar power work.

The key to success, Puri says, will be the company’s expertise in lowering manufacturing costs. One of the first Indian manufacturers to successfully compete internationally, Moser Baer entered high-tech manufacturing at a time when the general consensus was that Indian manufacturing was a basket case.

In one of the dustiest places on the planet, the company built a massive “clean room” for disk manufacture that required an air conditioning unit that takes up the entire second floor of the factory, and installed their own diesel-fueled power generation facility, since even a brief electricity outage would spoil the melted silicon. And that was at a time when nobody believed blank CDs could be made cheaply enough to replace floppies. “There isn’t one big factor [to cutting costs], it’s a lot of little factors,” Puri said. “Ten years ago, it would have been impossible to believe that you could have a DVD that you could sell for 10 cents a disk and make money, but today it’s real. So similar to that in the solar space.”

Already, touching $1 a watt would put the Indian firm in some pretty elite company. Only a handful of firms claim to have reached that price point so far, including U.S.-based First Solar and Nanosolar, which has received financial backing from Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Nanosolar uses — attention science fans — copper indium gallium diselenide to build its solar cells, while First Solar uses cadmium telluride-based cells. For its part, Moser Baer uses amorphous silicon. All three technologies have their proponents.

But making DVDs has convinced Puri that he can lower the costs of producing amorphous silicon cells again and again. “We’re designing new anti-reflective coatings which then impact the light, we’ve driven the thickness of the glass down, we’ve tried to design a better system of components around the basic panel to take costs out, we’ve innovated a lot on the process recipes, which allows much higher throughput for the facilities,” he said. “It’s a lot of little things that contribute to that road map to a sub $1 a watt price point.”

If the company gets there by 2010, that could help India leapfrog to clean energy the way it bypassed terrestrial telephone networks and went straight to cellular, which would be good news for the rest of the world. Despite the much-heralded nuclear deal with the United States, even 20 years down the road, nuclear energy will supply only a tiny fraction of India’s power needs. “What does that mean for India, or more importantly, what does it mean for the rest of the world? Where will India get its energy from? It will get it from coal,” Puri said. And that means as many as 300 coal-fired power plants spewing a giant brown cloud over Asia.

But if solar gets here first, that could be different. “Maybe instead of 300 coal plants, it will only have to build 150. That might be an acceptable path.”

Thanks to Cassie for the pointer to the optimistic Global Post article. Unfortunately, even building 150 coal plants is really an unacceptable solution. There needs to be a cessation of coal fired electric power, and since U.S. energy policy makers failed to demonstrate adequate foresight, there are fewer immediate solutions to avoid pollution from cheaper, dirty power. A decline in usage / increase in efficiency, and wind power are the quickest to implement. Relocating steam turbines from coal plants to solar thermal and geothermal are more expensive, yet still may fit within the window of opportunity.

Much is being made of co-firing with biomass. In the opinion of this blog, it is another example of doing the same thing only a little bit better, like slightly increasing the gas mileage of internal combustion engines; a nice thing to have accomplished 40, 30, maybe even 20 years ago; and, an inadequate answer now. On paper, yes, such short term measures may extrapolate to less GHG emissions. Such global energy policy fails to change the momentum, which is a catastrophic increase in part per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.