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Cheap Spray-on Plastic Solar Cells Coming
coyote1 writes "The
Sacramento Bee reports about
custom-tailored molecules and spray-on plastic could someday create the next generation of solar cells -- more flexible, more efficient and much less expensive than existing sources of solar power.
Nanotechnology is used to organize the molecules that are sprayed onto a surface."
Those inorganic nanorods were then combined with the organic part of the operation, a liquefied plastic semiconductor, to create a solar cell that could be sprayed or painted onto almost any surface. How is a liquified plastic semiconductor organic? Dogg
"It's not a big breakthrough.
...
It could take a decade or more for hybrid solar cells to make it from the laboratory to someone's rooftop system, and much could go wrong along the way, said Robert McConnell, who oversees federal funding of cutting-edge solar research for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
It's always nice to hear of advances in technology like this, but it seems we're still pretty far away from practical use. Just imagine if most of the electricity using world was running on solar power. I hope I live to see the day.
The cool thing that most people don't know is that this type of technology is going to be everywhere. For example, I'm sure most people have heard of OLEDs (orgainc light emitting diodes, Alan Heeger won the 2000 Nobel prize for this stuff among other things), the newest research is being done on small organic polymers that absorb photons at almost 100% quantum efficiency. What this means is, one day you'll paint your house and the whole thing will be a solar panel, you won't need specialized tiles. This will also be extended to cars, boats, etc. the implications are truly amazing.
Oh Puleeze. Isn't it obvious? These spacecraft are not accelerating toward the sun, the Universe (and thus the Solar System) is expanding past them. Sheese.
What was that you said about hats?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
I'm studying architecture, and sustainability and enviromental design is starting to be a big thing in buildings. Solar Power is one of the major technologies that will make it all work. The biggest obstacles to widespread use in architecture are price and appearance. Both of these will be overcome, and I imagine that photovoltaics will be integrated into most building materials. Right now they're seperate pieces applied to a building, but I think they'll some how be integrated or sprayed onto more traditional (or at least more traditional looking) building materials, so their existance could be a non-issue, at least from a visual standpoint.
On a larger level, I imagine urban areas becoming communities of buildings, all saturated with PV, generating all sorts of power. The buildings would on average generate more electricity than they need, and just release the extra into the local power grid. Instead of everyone getting their energy from a single provider, production would be distributed through all of the buildings, and energy would flow freely to where it was needed. A lot like the distributed internet systems we're starting to see now. There would most likely need to be some sort of external system for peak useages, and I'm sure heavier industrial buildings can require more energy than their buildings could provide, even with maximum PV use. But the advances in PV, along with the growing popularity of energy conserative design should make the power companies nervous
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Maybe the guy who built the spray-foam PC in the earlier Slashdot article could coat the whole mess with this stuff too. Add some 802.11b and it'd be completely self contained. A little spray paint, and voila!
Cyber-turd.
this is great for small cheap consumer electronic things, ie: calculators, spell checkers, orginizers. Today, things are being built at 1.8v, imagine never replacing the battery in your calculator, or pocket orginizer.
Forget your pocket-pc or palm - they draw too much current. I'm talking about those cheap $5 to $10 products that have a small coin or button cell. No more button cells, no more coin cells. This is great.
It can save lots of money..
Solar power is supposed to help us rely less on oil. However, these new solar cells are made from plastic, which doesn't help our dependency on oil. Also they don't mention how long these solar cells will last. Plastic is degraded by UV radiation and these solar cells might not last nearly as long as the silicon solar cells.
Imagine the uses, spraying it on electric cars. Even though spray paint and solar energy don't go well together :
Well, the primary problem with solar cells is that it takes more energy to make them than they'll ever be able to harness from the sun. In other words, it takes more fuel to run the crystal furnaces which are used to make them, than they'll ever be able to pay back.
If spray-on solar cells don't have to be fired, that must reduce the energy required to make them. Further, if they're spray-on, they probably won't be so hard once they're set. Hard = brittle. Brittle = breaks during thermal cycling, ie. day/night transitions eventually crack them.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
We can use nuclear power until cheap solar, and hydrogen from solar power, becomes a reality. We can build lotsa nuclear plants to make hydrogen to power pollutant-free hydrogen fuel cell cars.
One of the big culprits of smog is obviosly cars. We need to switch to hydrogen fuel cell cars. However, many people seem to think of hydrogen as an energy source. It isn't. You need electricity to make hydrogen.
Until we have cheap solar, you need to get the electricity from one of our old sources: coal, oil, nuclear, natural gas, etc.
Coal pollutes too much. We'd be overrun with smog if we built many more coal plants for hydrogen cars, much more so than if we used gasoline engines. We don't have enough oil to be energy independant. Natural gas is too expensive and we will run out of it in about 30 years. That leaves us with nuclear. Nuclear power is not as dangerous as people think. Also, Chernobyl-scale meltdowns in U.S. PWR are impossible. The Chernobyl reactor was a crappy commie RBMK reactor with no containment building. Of course we had the TMI reactor problem. However, that killed or injured no one. And, according to the World Health Org, only 31 people were killed in Chernobyl.
Fears of nuclear power are overblown. Radiation is just like any other pollutant. And you need a shyteload of radiation to really harm you. Nuclear power has killed a grand total of 35 people in it's entire exsistence. Coal power has killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 million people in this century, of emphysema, lung cancer, etc, etc.
Little known fact, but according to the Lawrence Livermore Nat'l lab, coal power realeases more radiation than nuclear power. Coal naturally contains some thorium and uranium. When you burn coal, this is realesed into the air. We burn so much fscking coal that we realease around 150 thousand tons of uranium and 350 thousand tons of thorium!!! The study is here. Nuclear power is also cheap. With some new tech, they have gotten the cost of some nuclear power plants below the cost of coal.
There is not mountains of nuclear waste made by our plants. Each plant only uses several tons of uranium a year. That would fit in an area just a few feet square. The total amount of waste ever created for a whole family for their whole lives would fit in a shoebox. If we reprocessed our fuel, it would fit in a pill bottle. Compare that to mountains of highly toxic coal waste with arsenic, cyanide, and other good stuff that just sits on the ground and leaches poisons into the groundwater.
Nuclear waste storage is very good. It's not like they are hauling it around in thin metal barrels like the environmentalists want you to think. No. The waste is transported in thick metal containers that have been tested by being thrown off cliffs, rammed into locomotives, and all sorts of crap. In Yucca mountain, the waste is stored inside these metal casks, which are in turn inside an ultra-thick concrete subterrainean room. Also, the storage place is 2,000 feet above the water table, so you're OK there.
Anyway, this plastic solar thing looks like it could be amazingly cheap and very clean. It would probably be easier for everyone to have these solar cells at their own homes. If Joe Smith put up 3,000 dollars worth of these solar cells, he could power his house for much cheaper than coal or nuclear.
However, you still have the energy storage problem. What happens to the power after dark or when it's cloudy? With this, you have an electrolyzer that takes some of your solar cell power during the daytime and splits it into hydrogen and oxygen. Then at night you recombine these components in a fuel cell to get power.
Home based solar plants are better than centralized ones for a few reasons:
1. Power loss over the lines. You lose over 10% of your electicity in the lines. Plus loss in transformers, etc.
2. Fuel cells are small devices. They are more suited for home use.
3. Independance from power companies (i.e. Enron)
Anyway, I don't think these solar cells will be ready for another 30 years or more. That is just my gut feeling. In the meantime:
1.Replace your incandescent bulbs with compact flourescent!!! The better brands put off a better, more natural light than even incandescent. They use so little electicity and last for so goddamn long that they are cheaper in the longrun.
2. Turn off the lights when you are not in the room!!!! There is no reason to have all the lights on. If you live in a house with you and your spouse, only one or two rooms should have the lights on. If you have your whole house lighted at night, you are really wasting energy.
3. During the daytime, set your hot water heater to "vacation." You don't need it to keep your water continously warm when you are at work. Turn it on when you get home. By dinnertime you will have plenty of hot water.
4. Buy "Energy Star" appliances. These will save you money in the long run.
For more info, go here.
It's pushback.com, San Francisco talk show host Dr. Bill Wattenburg's website. Lots of info on energy conservation and lots of other stuff, coming from someone with a doctorate, a masters, and a B.S., whos worked for Lockheed Missile and Space company, IBM, Lawrence Livermore, and other places. He is a rocket scientist. Listen to what he has to say.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
We who design solar cars beg to differ :).
Although you're right, current generation solar cars can only generate about 1-1.6 kW or so, but even then they can cruise at or above 75 km/h.
Of course, right now it's not very comfortable, only seats one person (usually), and is bloody expensive, but who knows what the future will bring?
Just in case anybody is wondering, the solar panels available today are neither "clean, renewable energy" nor cost efficient in terms of long-run payback. In almost all cases, the energy used to produce today's solar panels is greater than will ever be recovered by use within their approximate 10-12 year lifespan. When you add the energy and waste cost of inverters, lead-acid storage cells, etc. you end up with a power supply with far worse environmental impact than typical utility-provided power--especially if your local utility is nuclear--yes, nuclear is clean power, folks. Many solar installations also will never pay for themselves. So basically, today's photovoltaics are in essense expensive batteries. Lots of energy is put into their production, then they're shipped off somewhere else and they give you some of that energy back.
Right now, unless you live in a climate with very abundant sunlight and are off the grid due to location, the best alternative (electrical) energy sources are wind and possibly some of the new home fuel-cell units just arriving on the market. Plastic or other more exotic solar cells will definitely be interesting if they materialize, though--especially if they last longer and are easily/cheaply recycled.
But don't forget passive solar!! You don't have to convert it into electricity to make use of the sun's plentiful energy. With the right engineering and a suitable location, it is quite possible and inexpensive to use solar for most or all your home heating/cooling, cooking, water heating, etc. needs. Look around online; there's some interesting ideas out there. Plus-good for geeks who want to beat the system and whatnot. (-:
My oldest memory of reading about amorphous semiconductor photocells of the future is from the early 70's. They were the brainchild of Stanford Ovshinski, who later invented metal hydride batteries. Good to know amorphous solar cells might finally be taking off.
1)Liberally pepper your post with oversimplified pseudoscientific pablum such as "...And, according to the World Health Org, only 31 people were killed in Chernobyl" thereby craftily distracting your audience's attention away from any actual facts about the true magnitude of the disaster. For instance that annoying little statistic of Thyroid cancer(yes I did specifically pick a site from the WHO as a jab at your laughably out of context quote) incidence increasing by oh, 10 times or so. Or maybe the statement by the Board on Effects of Ionizing Radiation and the International Commission on Radiation Protection that the collective dose of 600,000 person-Sieverts released from Chernobyl to the population of the USSR would correspond to 24,000 additional deaths(from the Federation of American Scientists) in that area?
2)Proclaim your unquestioned infinite knowledge on all things related to the topic at hand: "In Yucca mountain, the waste is stored inside these metal casks, which are in turn inside an ultra-thick concrete subterrainean room. Also, the storage place is 2,000 feet above the water table, so you're OK there." Phew good thing we have people like you to tell us such important things lest we waste millions paying doctors of geology to try to figure out such things.
3)Regurgitate amateurish propaganda supporting your cause which contains self-parodying scare tactics aimed at any opposing viewpoints: "Coal naturally contains some thorium and uranium. When you burn coal, this is realesed into the air. We burn so much fscking coal that we realease around 150 thousand tons of uranium and 350 thousand tons of thorium!!!". It's important to remember that while using this shoe-in of a tactic to attain your +5 that you should ignore all obvious holes in your strawman theory such as the fact that coal has BACKGROUND levels of radiation, and burning it has negligible effect on concentrating this radiation. By Spike hay's logic I could argue that the millions of human bodies incinerated every year in cremation ceremonies increases the radioactive pollution of the atmosphere and soil because of all that Carbon-14 and Potassium-40 released when your body burns. Why it must be thousands of tones total every year!!
4)Finally if all else fails, just make a link like he does to to the nearest nut job you can find whose home page should have the latest instructions on "How to Find Osama bin Laden with guaranteed anonymity" apparently using some whacked out pin number conspiracy theory or some such scheme.
That's all! Your're on your way to karma whore heaven! (p.s. i'm already at 50 so I don't really give a crap about what happens to this post)
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
How does the solar energy get to my laptop in the house? All the shiny dust in the world won't power a light bulb unless there's a path from the + to the -.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.