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> Yu said the perovskite modules cost about CNY 1.4 ($0.19)/W. He said perovskites could be manufactured more affordably than this, and claimed that once the co

by tromp 2y ago

> Yu said the perovskite modules cost about CNY 1.4 ($0.19)/W. He said perovskites could be manufactured more affordably than this, and claimed that once the company's 1 GW commercial line is fully operational, costs could fall to $0.11/W. How does that compare to traditional solar cells?

blkhawk 2y ago
on their own they currently max out in the high 20ies in lab samples but more importantly they use a different part of the spectrum so you can combine them traditional cells to get even higher efficencies.
calaphos 2y ago
Apparently Chinese mainstream silicon PV modules are already a bit cheaper at ~0.14USD/W right now. Article doesn't talk about efficiencies but it seems production perovskite modules are slightly lower than their silicon counterparts, which will affect downstream costs like land or mounting hardware a bit.
Tade0 2y ago
During the glut of solar panels last year prices fell to as little as $0.17/W. The value proposition of perovskite cells is combining them with regular panels to form more efficient tandem cells.
- hackerlight 2y ago
  Which saves on labor and land use costs, which is why it's a big deal.
pjc50 2y ago
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices Last data has that at about $0.25/W, although there's currently a bit of a glut so you may be able to find lower on the open market. Don't forget to add taxes, because the West is not keen enough on the renewable transition to allow China to subsidize it.
- xbmcuser 2y ago
  This is old data even without the excess inventory a lot of new larger module manufacturing got online end of 2023 and start of 2024. These are the currnet traded prices separated with efficiency https://www.pvxchange.com/Price-Index https://www.pvxchange.com/Price-Index
  - ziggy_star 2y ago
    High efficiency: $0.19 Mainstream: $0.13 Junk tier: $0.08 Trending flat as of late with single digit percentage reductions in price to be expected year over year. At these prices the actual panels for most houses would be below $1,000 wholesale. The vast majority of the cost is elsewhere. It is great that it keeps getting cheaper but at this point the returns are diminishing. If you're thinking of buying something there is no new tech or anything on the horizon worth waiting for just go ahead.
    - dzhiurgis 2y ago
      > at this point the returns are diminishing Welll... Tandem perovskite cells have been tested up to 35% effective while your traditional ones are 20-25%. So for same labour cost you'll get 50% more returns...
    - xbmcuser 2y ago
      Now the next big thing in home solar will be home batteries. BYD seagull Chinese car costs less than $10k it has a 30-32 kWh battery where as a Tesla powerwall costs around $9k for 13 kWh. With feed in tariff restrictions being added home battery market is going to explode.
      - ziggy_star 2y ago
        [dead]
        bryanlarsen 2y ago
        The EG4 is just a battery, the Powerwall includes an inverter etc. Not that adding a $1000 inverter to the EG4 battery will change your point much.
gandalfian 2y ago
In UK a 410w panel is £50 retail plus sales tax but including delivery and retailers margin. So about 16c US a watt. So I dread to think how cheap it must be at the Chinese factory gate. (Sadly plus wiring, inverters, brackets and installation which is where they get you, but still).
- cpldcpu 2y ago
  Most likely the fab sells it at a loss, given the current situation in the industry: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-solar-industry-faces-shakeout-rock-bottom-prices-persist-2024-04-03/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-solar-industry...
  - kragen 2y ago
    even that ridiculous propaganda article says that most fabs aren't selling at a loss the usa has been pushing this overcapacity/dumping nonsense for 12 years now, when solar panels cost 80¢ a watt. now they cost 8¢ a watt, down by half since last year's prices, prices which had been held steady for several years only by a price-fixing cartel. this is precisely what you would expect in a niche technology as it becomes mainstream: the costs drop dramatically as you climb down the learning curve. one mechanism in that process is that the less efficient producers are driven out of the market because they can only sell at a loss by contrast, if this were actually a question of dumping and overcapacity, you'd see the prices drop to the dumping level, eventually driving out of the market the vendors who required a profit, after which the remaining vendors would raise their prices to a level higher than before. you'd have to believe that someone in china is spending something like 72¢ a watt to subsidize the buildout of solar farms in the entire rest of the world over more than a decade with the objective of monopolizing a market that's entirely built on the assumption of solar panels being cheap. this strategy would have cost about 500 billion dollars to pull off, since the total world solar generation capacity built out by this 'dumping' is about a terawatt now, and the payoff would be that when you tried to raise prices back to a dollar a watt, nobody would buy your product of course that's wildly implausible, so nobody actually claims that. the supposed 'subsidies' that the us department of commerce accuses china is applying get smaller and smaller over time, so they're implicitly admitting that the supposed 'dumping' a year or two previously wasn't actually dumping at all, and the supposed 'overcapacity' was actually just manufacturing capacity brought online a year or two before washington thinks it should be if you read the filings, they're really ridiculous: the supposed 'subsidies' are things like 'provision of electricity for less than adequate remuneration', 'preferential loans and directed credits', 'provision of land-use rights for less than adequate remuneration', etc. they're literally arguing over whether the price of electricity and commercial real estate is too low in china or not. if you want to read this bullshit you can start at https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/07/11/2023-14563/crystalline-silicon-photovoltaic-cells-whether-or-not-assembled-into-modules-from-the-peoples https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/07/11/2023-14... but be warned that you may turn into a rabid ayn rand fan imagine 19th-century bloomery ironmasters and their blacksmiths campaigning against blast furnace operators because they can't believe anyone could use so much steel or make it so cheaply; that's what you've seen
hackerlight 2y ago
Similar. Retail panels can go as low as $0.2/W for the end consumer, so assume that manufacturing costs are $0.1-0.16/W for standard solar panels. But these are translucent. They'll be put onto windows. So even if they're 50% more expensive, it's serving an adjacent use-case. The more interesting figure is they're getting 160W/m^2. That's very large, and it'll be a big deal considering there is more vertical surface area than rooftop area on buildings. Standard solar panels get about 220W/m^2.

by tromp 2y ago

blkhawk 2y ago

on their own they currently max out in the high 20ies in lab samples but more importantly they use a different part of the spectrum so you can combine them traditional cells to get even higher efficencies.

calaphos 2y ago

Apparently Chinese mainstream silicon PV modules are already a bit cheaper at ~0.14USD/W right now. Article doesn't talk about efficiencies but it seems production perovskite modules are slightly lower than their silicon counterparts, which will affect downstream costs like land or mounting hardware a bit.

Tade0 2y ago

During the glut of solar panels last year prices fell to as little as $0.17/W. The value proposition of perovskite cells is combining them with regular panels to form more efficient tandem cells.

hackerlight 2y ago
Which saves on labor and land use costs, which is why it's a big deal.

pjc50 2y ago

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices Last data has that at about $0.25/W, although there's currently a bit of a glut so you may be able to find lower on the open market. Don't forget to add taxes, because the West is not keen enough on the renewable transition to allow China to subsidize it.

xbmcuser 2y ago
This is old data even without the excess inventory a lot of new larger module manufacturing got online end of 2023 and start of 2024. These are the currnet traded prices separated with efficiency https://www.pvxchange.com/Price-Index https://www.pvxchange.com/Price-Index
- ziggy_star 2y ago
  High efficiency: $0.19 Mainstream: $0.13 Junk tier: $0.08 Trending flat as of late with single digit percentage reductions in price to be expected year over year. At these prices the actual panels for most houses would be below $1,000 wholesale. The vast majority of the cost is elsewhere. It is great that it keeps getting cheaper but at this point the returns are diminishing. If you're thinking of buying something there is no new tech or anything on the horizon worth waiting for just go ahead.
  - dzhiurgis 2y ago
    > at this point the returns are diminishing Welll... Tandem perovskite cells have been tested up to 35% effective while your traditional ones are 20-25%. So for same labour cost you'll get 50% more returns...
  - xbmcuser 2y ago
    Now the next big thing in home solar will be home batteries. BYD seagull Chinese car costs less than $10k it has a 30-32 kWh battery where as a Tesla powerwall costs around $9k for 13 kWh. With feed in tariff restrictions being added home battery market is going to explode.
    - ziggy_star 2y ago
      [dead]
      - bryanlarsen 2y ago
        The EG4 is just a battery, the Powerwall includes an inverter etc. Not that adding a $1000 inverter to the EG4 battery will change your point much.

gandalfian 2y ago

In UK a 410w panel is £50 retail plus sales tax but including delivery and retailers margin. So about 16c US a watt. So I dread to think how cheap it must be at the Chinese factory gate. (Sadly plus wiring, inverters, brackets and installation which is where they get you, but still).

cpldcpu 2y ago
Most likely the fab sells it at a loss, given the current situation in the industry: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-solar-industry-faces-shakeout-rock-bottom-prices-persist-2024-04-03/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-solar-industry...
- kragen 2y ago
  even that ridiculous propaganda article says that most fabs aren't selling at a loss the usa has been pushing this overcapacity/dumping nonsense for 12 years now, when solar panels cost 80¢ a watt. now they cost 8¢ a watt, down by half since last year's prices, prices which had been held steady for several years only by a price-fixing cartel. this is precisely what you would expect in a niche technology as it becomes mainstream: the costs drop dramatically as you climb down the learning curve. one mechanism in that process is that the less efficient producers are driven out of the market because they can only sell at a loss by contrast, if this were actually a question of dumping and overcapacity, you'd see the prices drop to the dumping level, eventually driving out of the market the vendors who required a profit, after which the remaining vendors would raise their prices to a level higher than before. you'd have to believe that someone in china is spending something like 72¢ a watt to subsidize the buildout of solar farms in the entire rest of the world over more than a decade with the objective of monopolizing a market that's entirely built on the assumption of solar panels being cheap. this strategy would have cost about 500 billion dollars to pull off, since the total world solar generation capacity built out by this 'dumping' is about a terawatt now, and the payoff would be that when you tried to raise prices back to a dollar a watt, nobody would buy your product of course that's wildly implausible, so nobody actually claims that. the supposed 'subsidies' that the us department of commerce accuses china is applying get smaller and smaller over time, so they're implicitly admitting that the supposed 'dumping' a year or two previously wasn't actually dumping at all, and the supposed 'overcapacity' was actually just manufacturing capacity brought online a year or two before washington thinks it should be if you read the filings, they're really ridiculous: the supposed 'subsidies' are things like 'provision of electricity for less than adequate remuneration', 'preferential loans and directed credits', 'provision of land-use rights for less than adequate remuneration', etc. they're literally arguing over whether the price of electricity and commercial real estate is too low in china or not. if you want to read this bullshit you can start at https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/07/11/2023-14563/crystalline-silicon-photovoltaic-cells-whether-or-not-assembled-into-modules-from-the-peoples https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/07/11/2023-14... but be warned that you may turn into a rabid ayn rand fan imagine 19th-century bloomery ironmasters and their blacksmiths campaigning against blast furnace operators because they can't believe anyone could use so much steel or make it so cheaply; that's what you've seen

hackerlight 2y ago

Similar. Retail panels can go as low as $0.2/W for the end consumer, so assume that manufacturing costs are $0.1-0.16/W for standard solar panels. But these are translucent. They'll be put onto windows. So even if they're 50% more expensive, it's serving an adjacent use-case. The more interesting figure is they're getting 160W/m^2. That's very large, and it'll be a big deal considering there is more vertical surface area than rooftop area on buildings. Standard solar panels get about 220W/m^2.