1$ per Solar Watt

After five years of product development, Nanosolar has shipped its first solar panels priced at $1 a watt, the price at which solar energy gets cheaper than coal.

Panels features include:

• World’s first printed thin-film solar cell in a commercial panel product
• World’s first thin-film solar cell with a low-cost back-contact capability
• World’s lowest-cost solar panel (as little as $.99/Watt)
• World’s highest-current thin-film solar panel, delivering five times the current of any other thin-film panel on the market today and thus simplifying system deployment
• Intensely systems-optimized product with the lowest balance-of-system cost of any thin-film panel

Thin-film solar films are more than 100x thinner than silicon-wafer cells and thus have correspondingly lower materials cost.Combining the materials-cost advantage of thin films with the process cost advantage of Nanosolar's 100x faster process technology leads to the best of both worlds.

Technology Wave	I. Wafer Cells	II. Vacuum-Based Thin-Film-on-Glass	III. Roll-Printed Thin-Film-on-Foil
Process:	Silicon wafer processing	Sputtering, evaporation in a vacuum chamber	Printing in plain air
Process Control:	Fragile wafers	Expensive metrology	Built-in bottom-up reproducibility
Process Yield:	Robust	Fragile	Robust
Materials Utilization:	30%	30-50%	Over 95%
Substrate:	Wafer	Glass	Conductive Foil
Continuous Processing:	No -- wafer handling	No -- glass handling	Yes
Cell Matching:	Yes	No	Yes
Panel Current:	High	Low	High
Energy Payback:	3 years	1.7 years	<>
Throughput/CapEx	1	2-5	10-25

First shipping panels have been shipped for deployment in Eastern Germany.

Popular Science Magazine has awarded Nanosolar's solar electricity technology the top Innovation of the Year 2007.

Nanosolar has already raised $100 million to build a factory, and has secured more than 600,000 feet of manufacturing space.
Worth noting that the company already has orders for the first 18 months of manufacturing capacity.

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