Sanyo To Put $350 Million Into Solar Over Next 5 Years - Reuters

OSAKA - Japanese electronics maker Sanyo Electric Co. said on Wednesday it would invest more than US$350 million in its solar cell business over five years, aiming to cash in on growing demand for renewable energy.

Sanyo, the world's fourth-largest maker of solar cells behind Sharp Corp., Germany's Q-Cells and Kyocera Corp., aims to more than triple sales from the business to 180 billion yen (US$1.6 billion) by the year to March 2011.
"Somehow we want to join the world's top three," Satoshi Kitaoka, head of Sanyo's solar unit, told a press conference in the western city of Osaka, where Sanyo is based.

Solar energy is one of the few promising units for Sanyo, which lost over US$3 billion over the past two years as it was unable to keep up with rivals in the cutthroat consumer electronics market and suffered from earthquake damage to a chip plant in 2004. Japan's third-largest consumer electronics maker said it would invest 40 billion yen or more in its solar business by the financial year through March 2011, starting with an investment of 10 billion in 2007/08.

Sanyo plans to increase production capacity of solar cells by about 60 percent to 260 megawatts in 2007/08 by bolstering output at its Osaka plant. It hopes to reach 600 megawatts by 2010/11, accounting for roughly 15 percent of the global market.

EDIT

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/36953/story.htm

It's a Japanese based company that has several manufacturing plants in Arkansas.

the one thing thats getting lost in all the debates is renewable energy. Affordable solar energy is what the world needs, as well as electric car transportation.

I personally don't hear enough discussion about renewable energy in this country, with all the problems we face in this country this should be something we can all agree on.

"Who Killed The Electric Car" and why? I was watching the program NOW on PBS, and the director of the new documentary WKTEC was on talking about the car companies that built a fleet of these cars in the late 80's and how popular they were.

The technology is better then it was in the 80's, and the need is greater then it's ever been. Whats keeping these car's from being built on a mass scale and sold to the general public?

No one should object to this bit of corporate news, but on the other hand, there is that annoying matter of scale.

Depending on the price du jour, this investment, over 5 years, is comparable to the cost of US oil imports (not all US oil) for about two or three days, considering the April 2006 figures for US oil imports: http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_wkly_dc_NUS-Z00_mbblpd_w.htm

I hope no one is interpreting this report as good news, especially in light of the business planning. We are told that by 2010 - five years off = 600 "megawatts" of production will represent 15 percent of the solar market. If so, world production by 2010 will be roughly 4000 "megawatts" of solar capacity per year. A solar cell in a desert like Los Angeles or Phoenix operates, under ideal conditions, at 30% of its rating, since, along with similar limitations, the sun still goes down and is not likely to stop doing so by 2010. Thus the real worldwide capacity should be thought of as more like 1200 megawatts, total capacity. This means that four or five years off, the entire world will be able to produce enough solar cells to equal a single coal plant. (Actually, being peak load, the solar cells will displace zero coal, but they will displace some natural gas.)

production of solar related products. Keep up the good work. Spread the word.

I am merely noting that this will do very little against global climate change. It's a finger in a hole in the levee during the equivalent of Hurricane Katrina.

Since you're very knowledgable about the purpose and results of research maybe you can research what percentage of the world's energy demand will be met by the Sanyo capacity, and then make a fawning presentation on how this is enough under the current circumstances. To me, it's the equivalent of one coal plant a year. Maybe you can demonstrate something else.

There have been 50 years of "solar PV research." When this investment is producing 3000 "MW" per year of peak power, there will have been 55 years of research and investment. If 55 years of research can produce a technology in which 15% of the capacity is represented by 600 physicist watts of energy, that's not enough.

Personally I don't give a fuck how Sanyo invests. I suppose this investment contrasts well with an investment in a new plant to make 1 meter wide TV sets. But again, if it, this investment, makes you feel comfortable and secure somehow, you're totally oblivious to what is happening.

I am not trying to stop solar research. I am however, very interested in exploding unrealistic expectations.

Think of it as a power plant factory. Just pumping out little point source energy collectors. Energy collectors which may only collect a small percentage of their source energy, but are also small enough that they can put it right to use, rather than wasting it in transmission lines.

Oh, and the energy source, although it disappears each night, will be back again each morning for the next couple of billion years.

How long will our radioactive resources last us again?

I know we need nuke plants. They supply a needed type of robust power alternatives just can't match right now. But radioactives are a finite resoure, just like coal, just like oil. We cannot ignore alternatives just because they haven't made sense to a bunch of bankers for the last 50-100 years.

In another 50-100 years, they won't just make sense. They'll be vital.

There are three to five billion tons in the seas, which are saturated with respect to uranium, meaning that uranium removed from the seas is replenished by the dissolution of new uranium. Every volcano, every geothermal field, every geyser on the planet is fueled by the decay of uranium, thorium and their daughters, and a little potassium-40. The specific activity of these elements is not that high.

This uranium is recoverable at between $200-500/kg. The process has been succesfully piloted, but is still to expensive to use when uranium is available from concentrated ores. Some people, the Japanese in particular, have argued to use the expensive seawater recovery method anyway since very little of the cost of nuclear power depends on fuel. Many scientific papers on this subject have been published and I have referenced them frequently.

Their reasons have to do with security. I think that the seawater recovery method is environmentally preferable, since it requires little mining. Some types of modern uranium mining however, leaching of carbonates, has worked with lower environmental impact.

A metric ton of uranium is equivalent to 600,000,000 gallons of gasoline.

I hardly regard uranium as a depletable resource. I note that the advances in nuclear technology have been slow, mostly because people have been going around with all sorts of myths in their heads.

In the worst case, uranium and thorium resources could carry humanity for millenia, if not longer. I'm not sure we'll move on the question, but I imagine that the technical failure of the active solar electricity industry for the last 50 years could indeed be worked out by then.

It would seem to me it would be incredibly dilute. I find it hard to imagine it would be worthwhile from an energy gain/loss point of view.

Like recovering oil from tar sands. At a certain point it takes more energy to gain the material than you can recover by using the material to generate energy.

Any (what is that acronym?) EROI numbers on seawater uranium?

I'll make some estimates for you, but understand that they will be crude.

The type of resin used is known as a graft polymer - it is ordinary polyethylene - functionalized so that little strands of molecules stick out from it: These are what we call amidoxime functionalized acrylates. This co-grafting is achieved energetically by irradiating polyethylene in the presence of polyethylene.

I will refer to a recent paper on the subject to give some idea about the energy investment: Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2000, 39, 2910-2915. This paper is by the Japanese teams that have been working on this project for several decades.

Here is a description of the synthesis of one of their graft polymer resins:



Here is a website from the University of Cambridge that gives the energy content of polyethylene:

http://www.doitpoms.ac.uk/tlplib/recycling-polymers/end.php

We see that the energy content of polyethylene is about 71 MJ/kg. We also note that it is necessary to irradiate the polymer. In this case they are using beams of electrons to deliver 200 gray to the polymer. A gray is a joule of energy absorbed by a kg, and allowing for any inefficiencies and energy losses, lets multiply the 200 joules by 50 to add another megajoule to the cost of making cografted amidoxime functionalized PE. We're up to 72 MJ. Now lets triple this cost (arbitrarily) to account for the fact that we are using solvents (which will be recovered in multiple runs) and nitrogen gas, and that we will have to repurify and pump these solvents. We're up to 216 MJ/kg of resin. They told us they put it in a cage device 6 km of the shore of Japan, where the flow rates of seawater are maintained by currents and wave action (this is your solar energy, which provides the flow around the uranium.) Let's say that their boat gets only 6 km/gallon (yeah a weird unit) and estimate that they have burned in this practice, about 2 gallons of gasoline, accounting for another 260 MJ. We are now up to 500 MJ roughly, allowing for an even less generous assessment of what we have done thus far - I'm looking at the worst possible case. They leave the system there in floats and come back after 20 days, burning another 260 MJ of gasoline to pick the stuff up. We're up to around 800 MJ/kg now.

Note that the performance of resins still is undergoing optimization, and many variables are being explored.

They find that the have recovered 0.9 grams of uranium per kg of resin. Note that this resin is reusable, one can use it as many as ten times, but we'll leave that out now.

I'm going to arbitrarily charge them, for their acid washes and other purification, to remove the uranium from the resin another 700 MJ meaning that they have paid at total of 1500 MJ for 0.9 grams of uranium.

Now we need to ask what is the energy value of this uranium? First of all, we need to recognize that if this scheme ever becomes commercial, it will do so in a recycling atmosphere, since uranium will be a valuable commodity. Thus we can assume the whole energy content, and not just the U-235. How much energy is that? Using the atomic weight of uranium, and 190 MeV per fission we see that the total energy recoverable from this uranium is 70 billion joules, while the cost of acquiring the uranium using 1 kg of resin was 1.5 billion joules. Thus we have received 70 billion joules for the investment of 1.5 billion joules. This is because of the enormous energy density of uranium. Of course each recycle will require some energy investment as well, but given that I have been exceedingly ungenerous in the energy cost of this scheme, it cannot be likely that there won't be a return much greater than 10 or 20 fold for seawater recovered uranium.

Since we will be using reusable resin, since we will actually have much better efficiency of hauling the resins in and out from the sea, since we will be hauling in ton lots, etc, etc, we can see that the scheme becomes quite attractive from an energy investment standpoint. I'm sure there will be many further process improvements, such as using supercritical carbon dioxide to extract the uranium from the resin, reducing the need for solvents, etc, the use of fission products to induce grafting in the polyethylene, and other changes I cannot anticipate. Thus we can easily envision a return in the hundreds for the energy invested. But to be sure, the matter will be large scale. If the resin is used 10 times, about 100 kg of resin will be required for each kg of uranium obtained. We are talking of many hundreds of thousands of tons of resin, and large submerged structures in ocean currents. However we should also recognize that it will take many decades to burn completely each kg of uranium in reactors in a continuous actinide refueling scheme. Each cycle burns less than 5% of the fuel.

The likely environmental impact will not be zero, but that is true of any energy scheme, nuclear or otherwise. Therefore no one should ever interpret the availability of this technology as an excuse to waste energy. We must always conserve. I hope that if humanity survives, it will have learned some lessons by the events surrounding oil and not ignore the limits of energy production.

We'd just be drifting H gas if it weren't for stars popping up now and then to cook up some more complex elements. But even I think that's taking the importance of solar just a BIT too far. ;)

I'll admit the chemistry of the process you posted is beyond me. It would be a sweet thing if it would works so well, just as I think the numbers on biodiesel from algae farms look very promising. Hope something along these lines pans out, or we're in deep.

...Everything is ZPE! :D

Is there a known link between ZPE and the strong nuclear force or the electroweak force?

I don't go that deep into theoretical physics.

In the first 1/10,000th of a second they are inseperable: after that you'd be winning the jackpot to grab a a virtual particle (or photon) with 90GeV, although it's no more bizzare that the whole ZPE idea. The Z⁰'s 10^-25s half life may be problematic, though. :) Alternativley, just go for broke and grab Higgs bosons: A double bonus, since you're bound to get a Nobel just for proving they exist...

...but because of the shortage of buglers to play taps, resulting in higher pay for buglers as opposed to whistlers, Mr. Higgs left the Navy and joined the Army. He's been busy ever since, funerals mostly.

In general, I am ignorant of events that take place in microseconds, never mind events that take place in the tenths of a yoctosecond. In this case, I'll have to take your word for it, assuming you guys, the astrophysics, were there while we chemists waited around for things to cool. You guys are hot. We're cool.

:)

I take it ZPE is Zero Point Energy?

Sorry, having a Bill & Ted moment :)

Yes, ZPE is zero point energy which is both the power source for the bing bang (well, sort of) and - if you believe some websites - a golden opportunity to invest in the power of the future as we've nearly got it working, click here to see video.

Not exactly the Chernobyl model, mind you ...

--p!

-Think ITER...

...But like me, he appreciates both the scale of the problem and the urgency to fix it. The solar industry is growing at an incredible rate, as is the wind-power industry: If these growth rates are maintained, we could (ignoring stored energy problems) generate all our electricity by renewables by about 2060.

Problem is, we don't have until 2060. We'll be damn lucky if we have until 2020.

The biosphere is on the point of collapse: we've got maybe 10 years to kill off all CO₂ production or were all fucked. There is no way in hell that renewables can be scaled up in time: Hydro is an option, but it's limited by the terrain we like to live in. The only other option is nuclear, for all it faults.

Pissing money away on PV (and at ~$30/watt, it is pissing it away, whatever the cost for unstored peak power may be) is a total waste.

You clearly don't understand what I am saying. My personal feeling is that the renewables case is simply over sold. I have written extensively on renewables in a positive light, but I often feel the need to offer correctives to wide eyed optimism that tends to minimize the seriousness of the crisis and to pretend that what is available is both sustainable, preferable and immediately available. This view comes mostly from the over promising and under delivering that has characterized a half of century of renewable posturing.

Most of my objections are about scale, but I have daydreamed here about certain places where I think renewables could do great things. One thread about which I waxed romantic about renewables is found in my journal:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x37366

I am proud of this post.

But mostly renewables remain very small niche forms of energy, and some of the largest, mostly those of the biological type are of dubious sustainability given that agriculture is in a precarious position owing to climate change.

The "solar will save us" crowd is in my view, religious in nature. It insists on dogmatic assertions and is indifferent to facts.

I like solar where it's installed, at least in reasonable climates. But to suggest that it can replace nuclear power - a safer form of energy - and fossil fuels is basically a mad hallucination based on ignorance about how things work. It's not to renewable technology itself I object to; it is the uneducated approach to it by some adherents whose expectations are unrealistic, ill informed especially on the nature of cost and scale, and, in some cases, their frankly stupid insistence that renewable technology can substitute for base load sources, the safest of such source being nuclear power. If there wasn't so much nuclear bashing in favor of the more critical fossil bashing, I would feel no need to point out to the experimental data that is readily available, showing that in these times the potential for renewables is incredibly small, at least for now.

If the renewable energy business was fighting the people who should be fought, the fossil fuels people, it would have a fiery ally in me. But for some reason many renewable opponents operate with the idea that nuclear energy is the enemy. This is completely and totally nuts under the circumstances. I have oodles and oodles of data on the subject. I'm not making shit up. If this idea is not exposed for what it is, dogma, it is likely our planet will be a ruined cinder with in one century.

opposed to ANY nuclear in the hands of for-profit corporations that only care about quarterly profits and nothing about the long-term big picture.

If we didn't have the waste dilemna, I could get behind it. Security and Chernobyl-sized messes are also an issue for me.

The worst nuclear practices were in fact in a socialist state, where everybody short cut standard safety measures in hopes of meeting the five year plan, resulting in bonuses for the workers. The absence of independent review was tragic. In fact, Chernobyl would not have occurred in the West not only because the reactor design (it was designed to be dual use, to make energy and to make plutonium for the Red Army of the glorious people's anti-capitalist anti-imperialist workers marxist-leninist proletarian liberationists anti-trotskite state. In the west we had government oversight that was independent of the owners of the plants, the corporations.

For the future I would like a third level of oversight, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA, winner of an organization Nobel Peace Prize.

I think in this crisis attaching all kinds of crap about profits and corporations is a red herring, and of no value in determining how energy and the environment should be approached. I applies no differently to nuclear energy than it does to coal or oil or natural gas. I basically don't give a shit about any of that.

As for the so called "waste dilemma," I don't know how many times I must say that the worst waste crisis, the crisis that is actively killing people, is the waste of fossil fuels. Worrying about spent nuclear fuel under these circumstances is rather like worrying about poor wiring in your toaster oven while a huge gasoline fire has broken out in your garage and is consuming your house.

We rarely hear anything about it, yet much of what we do hear is positive, at least in prime locations in the Southwest. The NREL maps show solar thermal beating PV in those areas by a good margin.

The thing I like about solar thermal is that the temperature of the heated material or fluid can be boosted by a little natural gas. For example, suppose the plant reaches maximum output at 1:00 pm, but the summer peak use runs from 3-4 pm. The plant can maximize its output at peak by turning on a natural gas heater to supply a little more heat. Alternatively, the plant could use a little NG to get the plant to produce electricity on a day when the sunlight and heat weren't quite enough.

I don't think that solar of any kind is going to contribute much of anything to out base load unless we have better electrical storage options. However, solar thermal, in particular, may be able to take over a very substantial amount of daytime load during warm months in some locations here and abroad.

Some of these plants, while having been financial failures, operate quite nicely now that they have been depreciated.

will increase. Much of the peaking power comes from inefficient gas turbines, not the combined cycle type, and in my opinion, NG prices are not going down.

I also believe that price of coal generated electricity will continue on its upward march because of the difficulty in getting more equipment for mine operations, the probably decrease in top mining sites and the inability of the railroads to carry any more coal, let along anything else.

Add to that the difficulty in siting nuclear in many areas of California due to earthquake activity, and in Arizona, Nevada and many parts of California, lack of water for cooling and in California, pollution problems.

To sum it up, times are changing quickly, and the project to which I believe you are referring to will look like it was several years ahead of its time.