“But the question remains: are these alternatives just a short-term solution approach? The silicon crisis will end in a few years – if not through thinner wafers and other means of saving material, then with additional production capacities. Actually, the problem isn‘t one of a lack of raw materials – nearly 15 percent of the entire earth is made of silicon. However, while there are only vague estimates about the amount of indium, tellurium, and gallium, one thing is certain: their availability is more or less limited. “

They have developed a roll to roll sputtering production process, which may not be as efficient a process as those proposed by Maisole and Nanosolar, but they still project costs that are in the $1/Wp range on the system level which is competitive with coal fired power plants.

Maisole and Nanosolar have also announced that they will have large scale production facilities in the same time frame, but I have not seen any public information as to what basis they are using for these plants. Their advantage is that they can “print” their cells on a non-metallic substrate, while Daystar requires a matellic substrate for their sputtering process.

Thin-film silicon technology, which uses much less silicon than conventional silicon cells, is also progressing rapidly and greatly minimizes the silicon supply problem. Sharp is projecting costs similar to that of Daystar by 2010. Silicon supply issues should be under control within 2 years.

What technology has the least cost and becomes the dominate supplier to me is rather mute-the prospects for low cost gigawatt supplies of PV solar (from one manufacturer) by 2012-2015 seems to be a fair bet. The real question is when will we have enough production to meet the demand for solar cells.

Anyway, I find it funny how in the last 12 months the US commentators are suddenly waking up to how “hot” PV solar is and focusing on for example Nanosolar and Miasole are the leaders. Uhh, this maybe has something to do with PR and the strings pulled by their new venture capital backers, because none of these companies are anywhere on the global scale. Germany alone deploys EIGHT times more PV per annum than the US.

Lastly, for all the talk of a 430 MWp plant, I have yet to see a peer-reviewed or internationally certified test of a normal production (not lab) module from Nanosolar. I think they’re printing 4% efficiency VC paper…