RV Articles & Opinion
Are "buck-a-watt" solar panels on the horizon?
Russ and Tina DeMaris

Photo: R & T DeMaris

Boondocking RVers--those who stay away from RV parks and utility hookups, figure the high price of solar panels is just part of the lifestyle. For those of you still umbilicaled to the meter box, a good price for a 160 watt solar panel is $600. When you figure that even a frugal RVer will be looking at a minimum of two of these panels, RV solar electricity is not something you take lightly.

Now a Tempe, Arizona firm claims it has cracked the code, found the holy grail, stuck oil--however you want to put it. While their designs are aimed at making solar panels for permanently affixed structures like homes and businesses, if their claims pan out, we might actually see a day when solar panels will be inexpensive enough for nearly any RVer's budget.

The company is First Solar, and they're about as forthcoming to the media as a moonshiner welcomes strangers. Nevertheless, British writer Richard Stevenson combines a journalist's knack for investigation with the expertise of a solid-state physicist to piece together how First Solar has cracked the problem of low cost solar. In an article appearing in this month's journal, IEEE Spectrum, Stevenson says First Solar's approach is to shun the main ingredient used in everyone else's solar panels--silicon--and use a scarce element tellurium, combined with cadmium.

Tellurium in its natural state is a silvery white crystal, and is a semi-conductor (think transistors). Not long ago it was little more than a laboratory curiosity, largely because nobody had found a practical way to make the cells much larger than a postage stamp. First Solar has now refined the manufacturing procedure to blow up the cells to poster size. They're already selling solar panels to electric utility companies who are providing them to customers in a way to ease environmental concerns.

The snag? Tellurium is one of the nine-rarest elements on earth. But if the company's approach is successful, Stevenson says he thinks that rarity issues will be overcome. He writes that the increased demand for the panels will stimulate the search for new supplies of the scarce element. Perhaps that thinking will somehow shift itself over to the more common solar panel problem: A current shortage of silicon, which affects the price of what might soon be considered, "old style" solar panels.

As RVers with a half-dozen panels already, we're ready for relief!


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