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Speaker 1: Get smarter in sixty seconds with brain stuff from how

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Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hi, marcial Brain. If you've been

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Speaker 1: watching solar energy recently, you know that there's a new player.

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Speaker 1: The company is called Nanosolar, and they're shaking things up

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Speaker 1: with low prices for solar cells. Let's look at how

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Speaker 1: they work. Normal solar cells have been coming down in

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Speaker 1: price for decades, but they're still expensive because they depend

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Speaker 1: on silicon wafers. A silicon wafer comes from a big

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Speaker 1: silicon crystal that's sliced in the thin disks. The cost

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Speaker 1: of growing, slicing, and then layering a solar cell onto

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Speaker 1: the crystal jacks up the price. Nanosolar is using a

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Speaker 1: completely different technique. They start with a roll of aluminum

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Speaker 1: foil and print a solar cell onto it layer by layer.

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Speaker 1: One of the key layers takes advantage of nanoparticles to

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Speaker 1: collect the sun's rays. This makes the panels more efficient.

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Speaker 1: A nanosolar panel can generate a lot more current than normal,

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Speaker 1: and that lower the cost of the whole system by

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Speaker 1: reducing the amount of framing needed to hold the panels altogether.

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Speaker 1: Nanosolar has created panels that cost less than the dollar

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Speaker 1: per what That means that solar energy now costs less

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Speaker 1: than electricity produced from coal, and as time goes on,

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Speaker 1: it will get even cheaper. With luck, nano solar technology

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Speaker 1: will allow us to start building cheap solar farms and

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Speaker 1: eliminate many of our coal power plants. Do you have

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Speaker 1: any ideas or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please

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Speaker 1: send me an email at podcast at how stuff works

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Speaker 1: dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,

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Speaker 1: go to how stuff works dot com