The answer, Nanosolar a Silicon Valley with money from lots of computer people not the least of whom are Google’s co-founders, announced Tuesday that it will be rolling out its super sweet new solar cell technology.

The company has raised an impressive $150 million and built themselves a big ole 200,000-square-foot factory, have a process that allows them to print solar cells in the same way you would print a newspaper (well not exactly the same way). The long and short of this is that it allows them to reduce costs by 80%.

They have plenty of people who want their product (myself included), and area already booked up for the first 18 months of prodcution, most of which will go to Germany to create a 1.4 MW solar power plant.

People have long dreamed of having their own money printing machine, well Nanosolar basically has created themselves a money printing machine. The ability to print cheap solar cells means they can be incorporated into EVERYTHING. Imagine if every roof of every building was solar panel, if your home, your car, your cell phone, all were covered with cheap power producing solar cells. It would mean that we could incorporate solar cheaply into every product that needs power.

Nanosolar decided to focus on making the cells as cheap as possible, they now claim they can build the panels for less than $1 a watt which equals about $2 a watt systems (you have to install all the other stuff) to put this in perspective a new coal plant produces energy at about $2.1 dollars a watt, but you also get earth destroying global warming emissions.

On top of all that good news, they also put their plant in San Jose, keeping jobs in America, and I guess leaving the possibility that they could build enough solar cells to power their own plant (as it is sunny there, a boy can dream). I for one welcome our new solar overlords.

This just goes to show you, if you spend some real money on renewable energy you get cheap usable renewable energy. For too long we have been trying to make our old broken system work better, when really what we need to do is scrap fossil fuel altogether and move completely over to renewable and sustainable sources of energy.