Fab2Farm Could Be the Next 'Beatles' of Solar

September 26th, 2009 by Jeff Kart

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The idea looks like a cool new version of the old SimCity computer game. You link a city to a solar manufacturing plant to a solar farm. The plant employs the people, the farm collects the energy and the city is up and running.

But this isn’t a game, it’s a pitch from Applied Materials, a Fortune 500 company known for making computer microchips.

They call it the best idea in the last 4 billion years.

The company says the key to its fab2farm ecosystem is SunFab, a thin film production line that produces 61-square-foot solar panels, or modules that are eight times the size of conventional panels. That means fewer panels and less material are needed to power a connected city.

This all drives down costs for the solar generation to less than $3.50 a watt. That’s on par with peak natural gas generation, the company says.

The side benefit: A cleaner environment emitting less greenhouse gases and one less city relying on traditional, polluting power from sources like coal.

In one fab2farm example, a SunFab panel manufacturing factory could produce 80 megawatts of panels in a year, or enough to power 35,000 homes. A connected solar farm would use the panels to bring electricity to the city, and avoid 170,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. The community would enjoy jobs at the factory and solar farm, and ripple effects including training and research programs at local community colleges and universities.

Anyone following the solar industry has seen other companies boast that their technology and processes are the most revolutionary, most cost-effective, most powerful. SunFab is one of the latest. This is a race we can all benefit from, regardless of the winner. If this worked in SimCity, wouldn’t it work in RealCities?

(Image Credit: fab2farm.com)

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Tags: factory, Manufacturing

About the Author

Jeff Kart is typing about issues in the Great Lakes, from advanced biofuels to zero-emission vehicles. Jeff is an environmental journalist and social media evangelist based in Michigan, where the summers are short, the winters are cold, and the stories are plentiful.

Uncle B

Home to the new slim bodied vegan (Indian / Chinese – like) super-race evolving in Asia today! The great Euro-African stock based hulking American Neanderthal bred in just 2 hundred years of Capitalism, corporatism, consuming 80% of the worlds resources just to survive from day to day, and ever growing bigger, fatter and less healthy, is hardly a candidate for this kind of sustainable, realistic, intelligent, habitation. He requires six acres each, for his beef habit alone! Oil from OPEC to haul for him, and fertilize his food crop, GMO’ed corn, and gallons of fresh clean water to make his sodas! He will resort to great poisonous nuclear fission power plants before his final submission to his genetic pre-disposition, fast rising 200 year evolution period, and gone, extinct, like the great U.S.S.R. in less than a decade, from economics that simply cannot work in reality! Even India conserves its sustainability, through seemingly backwards means, to the Great Hulking American Neanderthal, but his logic has failed him sorrowfully, not so those who bathe in the filthy Ganges, and survive thousands of years! Lessons to be learned? Too late, Great Hulking American Neanderthal! your dollar won’t buy our rice soon, and you are doomed! The little folk among you, who can survive on much less, they possibly will make it gardening through your next greater depression and the paradigm shifts your continent faces, but the bigger ones? I doubt it! Smaller demands, vegan demands only, and much less affluenza! That and Solar and Wind, Tidal and Hydro, Wave and Geo-Thermal, perpetual powers to live by, and never grow in body size beyond! That is my prescription for the Americas, for the world! This plan is but a harbinger of massive changes to come, after the great turmoil in America in the new “Post-Materialist” Meritocracy, built on the ruins of modern day America and as she crumbles, by the least of us the disenfranchised, the poor the survivors of the age, the small light vegan scavengers and folks to be domiciled in plans like this. Good on you!
Uncle B

Home to the new slim bodied vegan (Indian / Chinese – like) super-race evolving in Asia today! The great Euro-African stock based hulking American Neanderthal bred in just 2 hundred years of Capitalism, corporatism, consuming 80% of the worlds resources just to survive from day to day, and ever growing bigger, fatter and less healthy, is hardly a candidate for this kind of sustainable, realistic, intelligent, habitation. He requires six acres each, for his beef habit alone! Oil from OPEC to haul for him, and fertilize his food crop, GMO’ed corn, and gallons of fresh clean water to make his sodas! He will resort to great poisonous nuclear fission power plants before his final submission to his genetic pre-disposition, fast rising 200 year evolution period, and gone, extinct, like the great U.S.S.R. in less than a decade, from economics that simply cannot work in reality! Even India conserves its sustainability, through seemingly backwards means, to the Great Hulking American Neanderthal, but his logic has failed him sorrowfully, not so those who bathe in the filthy Ganges, and survive thousands of years! Lessons to be learned? Too late, Great Hulking American Neanderthal! your dollar won’t buy our rice soon, and you are doomed! The little folk among you, who can survive on much less, they possibly will make it gardening through your next greater depression and the paradigm shifts your continent faces, but the bigger ones? I doubt it! Smaller demands, vegan demands only, and much less affluenza! That and Solar and Wind, Tidal and Hydro, Wave and Geo-Thermal, perpetual powers to live by, and never grow in body size beyond! That is my prescription for the Americas, for the world! This plan is but a harbinger of massive changes to come, after the great turmoil in America in the new “Post-Materialist” Meritocracy, built on the ruins of modern day America and as she crumbles, by the least of us the disenfranchised, the poor the survivors of the age, the small light vegan scavengers and folks to be domiciled in plans like this. Good on you!
Bman

Krissy:

Rather than put the facility adjacent to the town, strategically place it where the community is separated from it, but with feasibility still in mind.

And lets not be one-dimensional: always pursue in situ power generation for each sites needs, but apply this model to places that benefit best from this type of energy.
Bman

Krissy:

Rather than put the facility adjacent to the town, strategically place it where the community is separated from it, but with feasibility still in mind.

And lets not be one-dimensional: always pursue in situ power generation for each sites needs, but apply this model to places that benefit best from this type of energy.
krissy

Unfortunately in Sim City residents couldnt express their desire for “NIMBY- Not in my backyard” No one wants a large power plant whether its renewable or not, yet they want the power. Thats why I think the future of energy is in situ power generation for each sites needs and aesthetic preferences.
krissy

Unfortunately in Sim City residents couldnt express their desire for “NIMBY- Not in my backyard” No one wants a large power plant whether its renewable or not, yet they want the power. Thats why I think the future of energy is in situ power generation for each sites needs and aesthetic preferences.