I saw an article recently in Popular Science magazine, one of those magazines that just seams to be lying around at the doctors/dentists. Anyway, the article was about a company called Nanosolar and there revolutionary new solar panels.

Some of the problems with traditional solar panels are that they a made with Silicon (it's expensive and in short supply), they have to be made of glass (breakable and very heavy) and they have to be mounted (time and more money) which adds up to them being EXPENSIVE.

This cost relates to the amount of time that your free electricity is going to take to pay back your investment.

What Nanosolar have done is design and manufacture solar panels that are paper thin. They "print" using semi-conducting ink on to Aluminum sheets though a room size press. The end product is giant rolls of solar panels. This means it can be almost wrapped around buildings, used to almost replace paint or cladding's.

The apparent cost of traditional solar panels is approximate $3 per watt, to compete with coal this would need to be in the $1 per watt range. Nanosolar will produce their PowerSheet for approximately 30 cents per watt.

To read the Popular Science article in full, click here.