First of all let me congratulate you on having the courage of your convictions and selling, but I reckon you may have just about picked the bottom?
There are several points that need to be pointed out about flat panel solar
The first point I have covered about efficiency, flat panels have just about reached their peak performance with some panels but the ones that are the best efficiency for Silicon aren't really that cheap,the ones that are way less efficient are but you get what you pay for, like I say Silicon panels won't get much better or cheaper for that matter they can't because they will hit their limits , they are no Ferrari's , they do get you there, but it's more like riding a push bike or taking the bus than a buying a quality car.
Flat panel solar will be at it's peak performance for only a few hours a day, because they are stationary in most cases, that is they don't track the sun unlike CPV Dish technology.
As newer and more efficient solar cells are developed that comes along with this virtual Germanium multi junction technology an Upgrade to the whole system only takes a few hours, whereas with Flat panel solar you would have to replace every panel, but that won't happen anyway because the ones used in solar farms are already near their limits.
Flat panel solar get to have one sun on them or in some cases a few more using lenses, but with CPV dish technology you get to put up to 1000 sun's across them, that's what is available today, in the future that figure will be perhaps up to 6000 suns or even more when they get to use their Power Tower technology, it is also worth remembering that the cell efficiencies are now approaching 50% and in the future 60% or more, that is more than double what Silicon solar is capable of , it tracks the sun for many hours as against the flat panels but the efficiencies and output will go through the roof as well, because every increase in efficiency is multiplied by the number of suns across them, there is also another plus, Solar Systems are already working on using the heat captured in the process to supply super heated water to industry, something else that flat panel technology can't do.
If you are going to store electricity from Solar? then it will be much cheaper to have that storage alongside the CPV dishes or Power Tower, it will be cheaper to do this than having the storage on every household Solar system, because when you supply storage you would always supply more than what you needed in most cases to make sure you had a continuity of supply, if you have a large storage system in one location that excess required is spread across the number of people you are suppling to and the costs are shared (economies of scale) and the total excess required is less than the added excess required across all rooftop solar, it is also much easier and less of a problem changing out a faulty cell etc in a large installation without disruption to service than it is in a home installation, you also only have one system required to convert the power from the solar to supply the network, so you don't need an inverter on every home solar system.
OK, you will need a supply network, but it will be much closer to where the power is required and for industry that would always be the case in any situation anyway, they will be virtually distributed networks and every network would have the ability to help the one next to it, that's how distributed power works, it provides insurance to the networks around it.
I believe the network suppliers in the future will also be the generators of the power production, unlike today where you have generators and another company as the network supplier, both of whom want their cut and in some cases a big one.
It will be interesting to see how long some of these flat panel solar system work for and they do lose performance during their lifespan which makes them even less efficient?
I would hate to have the job of cleaning all the panels in a large flat panel solar farm and they will need cleaning because every bit of bird poo or dust etc on any panel affects the whole system not just the one panel, I suspect that these flat panels would be prone to hail damage as well?
The long and the short of it is, that Silicon Solar is around the same or similar costs today compared to what the best CPV is capable of today on a cents per KWHr basis, but CPV supplies that KWHr rate for a longer duration during the day and will only get better and cheaper whereas Silicon Solar today is just about as good as it gets right now.
I am looking forward the future and what that will bring, I too would have loved more info from management, but when you are working on cutting edge technology, it doesn't pay to give your competitors the head up.
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