[NewCandle] end of an era and some photos enroute

[Nick Reiter]

Hi Keith, and all,

Just sent three interesting pics off to your admin e-mail.  These are from the "Pixie 17" foil roll salt hydrolysis reactor, where I added about .1 mole of potassium tungstate to the KCl salt brine.  Descriptions are with the pics.

You wrote:

> This doesn't bode well for solar
> development in the States...

Despite the fact I have been in it for 18 years, the solar PV industry in the US just does not make sense to me.  Or at least the thin film sector - I suppose the poly-x and single-x silicon worlds are more predictable in terms of market, applications, cost, and direction.

My own technology, CdTe, to me has a limited window of remaining viability.  Maybe 5 years or so for some profitable and responsible deployment.  If CdTe is combined with nano-rod technology, there could be a real shot there.  The promise now from my view lies with copper indium gallium diselenide - CIGS.  CIGS has always beat out the efficiency and contact stability of CdTe, but until recently, it was a fussy ternary that was just more expensive to deposit on a commercial TCO coated glass substrate.  But that is changing, mostly just by sheer mastery or sputtering and CVD recipes and control.

But overall, PV in the US is a damned fickle and skittish market.  Customers bolt and run easily.

I lay part of the blame for this on what I call the PV pundits.  These are the people who write lay-level articles and recommendations meant to appeal to deep pocket corporate investors, to the general tune of, "come, join the revolution and make LOTS of money from it fast!"  However the journal writers mostly have never worked on the factory floor, or as a grunt in the lab, in a thin film PV environment, and often fail to faithfully represent the trajectory from concept to cash flow... mainly assuming that all the bugs are already worked out!  Over-selling something that is not as mastered as they who gleam in the eyes would think.  Thus, potential investors in a new PV factory are aghast when they learn how long profitability will take, compared to how the financial journal writers portrayed it.  Or they invest, lose patience, pull out with a loss, and then nurse a grudge forever after with solar PV.

Bottom line - Solar PV is a lot of damned work to do right, and the world is still not in sorry enough shape to make people with $$$ commit to it in a non-dabbling way.  Had we gone to $10/gallon gas here in the US, it may have been a different story.

N