Get smarter in sixty seconds with brain stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hi, marcial Brain. If you've been watching solar energy recently, you know that there's a new player. The company is called Nanosolar, and they're shaking things up with low prices for solar cells. Let's look at how they work. Normal solar cells have been coming down in price for decades, but they're still expensive because they depend on silicon wafers. A silicon wafer comes from a big
silicon crystal that's sliced in the thin disks. The cost of growing, slicing, and then layering a solar cell onto the crystal jacks up the price. Nanosolar is using a completely different technique. They start with a roll of aluminum foil and print a solar cell onto it layer by layer. One of the key layers takes advantage of nanoparticles to collect the sun's rays. This makes the panels more efficient.
A nanosolar panel can generate a lot more current than normal, and that lower the cost of the whole system by reducing the amount of framing needed to hold the panels altogether. Nanosolar has created panels that cost less than the dollar per what That means that solar energy now costs less than electricity produced from coal, and as time goes on, it will get even cheaper. With luck, nano solar technology will allow us to start building cheap solar farms and
eliminate many of our coal power plants. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me an email at podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, go to how stuff works dot com