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Where are the 70% Efficient Solar Cells?
VernonNemitz asks: "Back in 1984 a patent was granted for silicon chip micro rectennas, which would convert visible photons into electricity in the same way that ordinary rectennas convert microwaves into electricity, at perhaps 70% or greater efficiency. Nobody could make such solar cells back in 1984, but we certainly can today, with sizes of antennas that would capture everything from infrared to the edges of UV -- and the patent has expired. So, where are they?" Currently the most popular type of solar technology is photovoltaics, however PV technology only has an efficiency of about 7-17%. With the potential gains claimed by the technology in the cited patent, has anyone even tried to build one of these units to see if it can live up to the given promise, or at least prove to be a technology than we should be exploring?
I have know about this company for years. Lumeloid Solutions claims their technology is theoretically capable of efficiencies of up to 80%.
Also there was a story about 2 weeks ago, mentioning solar energy breakthrough using full-spectrum layering. Does anyone know anymore about this. I was unable to find it in Google News.
Nanotech material, once they arrive, will of course make 90% efficient material practical.
Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technology.
www.enthea.org
Could it be that the effect in question has been patented for some other use? I'm not familiar with the patent quagmire, but multiple similar uses for the same physical phenomenon (light absorbtion into silicon) might be the issue...
I don't get a shift feelign at all. We are already direly close to Hubbert Peak, when oil demand starts to outstrip production. In fact Hubbert, himself an oil man, said that Hubbert Peak, even considering undiscoverd reserves (which is fairly predictable with satellite reconaissance) will come sometime between 2002-2009.
You can read about here on my website for more info. Some in the oil industry are thinking that peak will be hit within the next two years. This might explain our rush to invade Iraq.
Either way, as oil reserve dwindle and demand goes up, it will create a highly destabilized politic - and if you think the repression we've all been feeling lately is bad, it will only get worse... UNLESS:
We wean ourselves (QUICKLY!) off of Oil. The Hydrogen economy is just waiting in the wings. All of the technology is essentially there. The cost factors will become not only competitive, but cheaper and cleaner than oil, once we start migrating our energy infrastructure over to Hydrogen.
Lets hope this happens before we end up in some kind of nigthmarish Oil Fedual/Fascist Global New World Order.
Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technology.
www.enthea.org
For a time, I lived in a so-called Texas oil town during the late 80's and early 90's. A family member worked on oil rigs there. The town itself was a ghost-town (and is much worse within the last few years) because the government paid the oil producers to shut down the wells. Texas oil is more expensive to drill, retrieve and refine than just buying tanker-full shipments of imported oil. If anything, the "Texas oil economy" probably revolves more around importing and off-shore drilling. Just a detail there for ya, "partner".
Do you have a URL for Bush's guidelines on electric vehicles?
i don't know actual numbers for how much energy we can get from the sun, but i do work with a bunch of people who do research for alternative energy sources. one neat statistic that i was told a while ago is:
if you take all the unused building space in america and covered them with solar cells (of today's technology and efficiency) you could generate (more than) all the power we use (even if we convert all cars to electric cars). the neat thing is that the "unused building space" doesn't mean "cover the desert with solar cells" is just means to put solar cells on every roof top, on the top of the medians along the highways. granted this is a difficult task, but what if every residential house that was built had to have it's roof coated in solar cells and put on the grid. after a while you'll be generating quite a lot of power.
another cool thing that is in development is turning the huge windows of office buildings into solar panels. in high-rise office buildings, it's not uncommon to have 10 foot tall windows that span the entire room. usually these windows are tinted and the office generally has blinds or curtains to keep all the sun out (to reduce cooling costs in the summer, and having that much sun in the office would make it to bright anyway). so rather than just using some type of tinting that reflects the light partially, i've seen some cool work with dithering (very) small solar cells in the windows, these will absorb light and turn it into electricity. so you'll get two benefits: tinted window and extra electricity for the building.
just simple solutions like that could help our upcoming power crisis when we run out of oil.
Plants stored energy from the Sun, then died and were burried for a long time. That energy still came from the Sun. If we can just figure out a way to go from plants to oil more quickly, we can plant fields and basically they would be giant solar pannels.
I think it is a good idea, anyway. The only energy that is not solar is geothermal and nuclear.
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