Innovative solar alternative to power buildings
Posted by T&LPro on October 24th, 2006If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Solar energy is a serious consideration for any transports and logistics company looking to lower their monthly power utility bills to operate their (usually numerous and disparate) buildings.
Now, imagine that a company, somewhere, could sell you solar panels that can produce between 2 and 4 times more electricity (for the same physical coverage) than “regular” (off the shelf) solar panels.
You’d think such an awesome technology would be either out of price and / or unavailable before at least a few years but you’d be wrong, on both assumptions.
Meet the innovaors at Nanosolar, in Palo Alto, CA who have taken the “nanotechnology” path to greatly improve the solar cell “productivity-level”. The foundation for their solar panels is so well-thought that it seems their ongoing research is constantly yielding more impressive “results” that T&L companies (and other types of companies, too) will surely want to learn more about.
The way things are going, Nanosolar is on track to make electricity:
- cost-efficient for -ubiquitous- deployment (read: everywhere, anytime);
- mass-produced on a global scale (free energy for everyone);
- available in many versatile forms (creative applications, even for the T&L operators).
Nanosolar has developed proprietary technology that makes it possible to simply roll-print solar cells that require only 1/100th as thick an absorber as a silicon-wafer cell (yet deliver similar performance and durability).
There’s a CNN video explaining all of this so you may want to watch it (.wmv format).
The unique approach Nanosolar has perfected dramatically lowers the process cost and complexity involved in the production of thin-film solar cells and makes it possible to scale production very rapidly.
The performance these “nanotech-enabled” solar “films” is so impressive that it might just be possible, right now, to put solar panels on mostly any kind of building, be it residential, commercial or industrial.
We’re pretty sure, here at NavSite, that you’re hoping Nanosolar can (somehow) adapt their impressively “thin” solar panels to fit on trucks, trains, boats and even planes. Well, given the nature of the technology, in our humble opinion, there’s nothing stopping them of doing it.
Tags: nanosolar, nanotechnology, solar energy, environment, thin solar panels
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The May / June 2006 Edition of the excellent
EFM advances several concepts, but the single key concept is to promote electronic data exchanges along a supply chain in an end-to-end manner more robustly than is currently being done.
In the transports and logistics world, there are few prospects as exciting as limitless free power. Thanks to
Based in New Mexico, the research team has achieved something which may help shape the way we power stuff in the not-so-distant future and not just pocket calculators. Technically speaking, for one photon of sunlight, you get two electron’s worth of electricity. That’s a huge leap over today’s solar panel capabilities!
The good news is that this hot technological prowess could, sooner than later, be available for all sorts of applications since the
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