NanoSolar Hits a Milestone

I blogged before about NanoSolar's exciting prospects, and today they announced that they've shipped their first product and received their first check of product revenue.

In their announcement they make the claim that they'll be able to produce at $0.99/watt, which is on the way to the $0.30 they predicted before. If you'll recall, my calculations used a more conservative $0.60 and showed that they were on track for utility-scale power generation competitive with coal. So their claim today of $0.99 is a big milestone.

Funny enough, you can buy one of their first commercial panels on eBay. It's up to $7,350 right now. If they could just get that much for each panel, that'd be a pretty profitable model...

Nanosolar Goes Macro

Nanosolar has been getting a lot of press recently, and the reports are certainly encouraging. This article mentions "30 cents a watt" production costs and a production facility that can crank out 430 MW worth of cells per year. Impressive numbers.

A quick check of the math shows that these are some saliva-inducing figures, even if you assume that it costs double the quoted price to get the panels configured in power-plant-size arrays. Another key assumption is the longevity of the panels... do they last a year, 25 years, 100 years?



As you can see, if they last just 15 years they're beating out coal, which would mean Nanosolar has a [come on Mark, fight it, FIGHT IT... ah to heck with it] very bright future. I'd have to think that becoming a power-plant producer that uses this technology would be extremely lucrative, which is probably why a lot of people are drooling on the sidelines waiting to see if Nanosolar can deliver on these big promises. I know I am.