The company’s website is here.
When I first heard about this the other day, I Googled their website to find out if I could buy stock… nope. :smack:
Very cool if it actually works, though, even if I can’t ride their coat tails to extreme wealth.
I saw it on Slashdot, and I have to sheepishly admit that it didn’t mean much to me, because I’m not sure what an average kilowatt-hour of electricty costs.
Call me a pessimist, but I call bullshit. There have been several companies that claim “Breakthrough”, the previous being an outfit from Norway IIRC (Or sweden, or Finland, one of those up yonder countries). Other amazing breakthroughs include the amazing canadian spider-goats, nano-tube breakthroughs, room temp fission, a plan to harness the power of the ocean by creating pumps to feed water into a gravity fed system, and probably the one that might just be viable, the Turkey poop and guts to oil.
Just because a company isn’t publicly traded, doesn’t mean that BS PR announcements aren’t a tool in their arsenal. In the case of the spider-goats, it looks like they’ve sold off they’re Intel. prop and are selling off. Which is the ultimate fate of most of these outfits. A bogus or overstated announcement may be a good tool for getting the attention of the venture capital world. Heck. Maybe it’s just some dude trying to get the attention of his high school crush. The reasons are legion. The results, sadly, are usually the same. I forsee nothing coming out of it.
Well, I’m a bit dubious because of the use of the “self-assembling nanotechnology” referenced in their press release. I wasn’t aware that we had gotten that far along in nanotech. To me, it sounds like jargon for jargon’s sake.
I bet you could call cooling liquid silicon into an ordered crystal structure “self-assembling nanotechnology”. Sounds cool. 
The last time I bothered to calculate mine, they were double that or more. Mind you, I live in an area where electricity is artificially cheap. I’d WAG that folks in CA regularly pay three or four times that.
Hope it is true. Seems such a waste to live here in sunny Las Vegas, and have to pay close to $200 month for airconditioning in the summer.
I signed up for their mailing list. Will see what they have to offer in the near future.
I’m not going to dismiss it as just bullshit, but let’s just say the odor of bovine manure hovers rather strong around their claims.
Warning Sign #1: the site’s links seem to be mostly business related, concerning the founding of the company, their claims, the publications of their press releases, etc. ad nauseum – as opposed to genuine news coverage of actual tech breakthroughs as evidenced in sound products.
Warning Sign #2: the site’s reluctance to get into tech specifics. The parameters of existing cutting-edge solar tech are fairly well-known; such literature often makes reference to such measurable criteria as efficiency (% of solar radiation converted into electricity), thermal drop-off (traditional cell efficiency declines – sometimes sharply – with increases in temperature, which is one of many reasons why a photovoltaic panel can test better in a lab than on top of your roof in July), and so forth.
Warning Sign #3: the site’s touting manufacture methods and product thinness to the exclusion of virtually every other consideration, such as durability; you want your investment to hold up over time. Nanosolar’s panels are touted as being extremely thin, as if that in itself is a key and distinguishing virtue. While it would be a good thing to have relatively cheap, easily-manufactured and easily-installed PV panels, they still have to hold up to the elements and extreme temperature changes, and generate enough power to make their installation worthwhile.
Nanosolar’s reluctance to divulge the details doesn’t bode well for the veracity of their claims, IMHO.
The relevant question isn’t how much you pay for it, but how much it costs the power company to produce it. There are all kinds of other costs rolled into your bill, from distribution to power corp payroll.
Another solar technology uses nanotubes to generate power.