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New Material for More Efficient Solar Cells
PunkerTFC writes "Space.com has an article on a new material that could create relatively cheap solar cells which are up to 50% efficient. This is much better than the 25% efficient silicon solar cells (most common) or the 36% efficient multi-junction solar cells (very expensive). The material was created by "forcing oxygen into a zinc-manganese-tellurium crystal" creating more band gaps, which allow the cell to create electrical energy with three seperate frequencies of light. This could lead to cheap, high-output solar cells in the future, but it will take at least 3 years to assess the feasibility of the new technology, according to the researchers."
Solar cell technology seems to be getting more and more advanced. When will the time come when we are able to use it to effectively power a complete house?
Solar panels could really be the next generation power-source, if it can be developed a cheap and efective way of using solar energy. Have you seen that short-film on Discovery Channel about the guy who built a car that runs on solar power alone? You can walk faster than it, but hey, you could walk faster than the first steam-locomotives as well. But i'd still say that hydro-plants are the way to go, if the terrain allows it.
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...but until it progresses to the point where we don't need a surface of cells an order of magnitude larger than the structure they will power to use them, they're still impracticle for primary energy needs.
I don't think we'll ever see solar cells as primary terestrial energy sources though. Cloud cover and night ruins their feasibility, but I'd wager money on them being used to augment other alternative energy sources in the future. Maybe power will go the way of Intel's new chips, multiple sources at lower power instead of one giant one at greater.
Oil reserves appear to be running out (looking at the recent problems Shell had with its overstated reserves, and seeing how some of the other large oil companies make even larger estimates than Shell's old ones). The future of energy production is going to be nuclear, wind, and solar. So it's very timely news.
Personally I think the collapse of the oil supply within the next 15-20 years will be the most traumatic event in recent human history.
Solar cells will help a lot in some ways but they won't be enough to stitch together a modern society built on the motor car and cheap fuel.
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You have false notions about the feasability of solar. You would be speaking of cheap solar whereas (as it is now) there ISsolar technology that:
A) Doesn't have to cover the entire structure - but really is mute point - if you want solar - why not maximize its production - installation and deployment is 1/4 the cost - once it's being installed, install as much as possible - your goal is to "overproduce" if possible - did you know that your local energy untility has to BUY BACK power that you could place onto the grid if you overproduced?
B) The GM solar race car is a marvel of engineering, is as fast as most street legal cars and it looks cool too!
C) Cloud cover and night are of no consequence. Cloud cover only reduces production - besides power IS STORED in batteries anyway - it doesn't go straight from the sun to your light bulb or TV.
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The solar constant (see for example here is about 1.somethin kW per Square meter.
That simply means you need quite some substantial area irradiated by bright sunlight to obtain a given amount of energy.
I think this is a limiting factor for many interesting ideas out there..
perl -e 'printf("%x!\n",49153)'
There have been "it's just around the corner!" reports exactly like this one about solar cell tech for more than two decades. Probably even longer, but that's when I started to be interested in solar cells.
Yet, solar cells are still a minor technology, not commonly used. Wake me up when the reports are finally true and buy solar cell powered houses and cars are sold at prices an average consumer can afford and at specifications that an average consumer is interested in.
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A solar panel doesn't have to power a house to be useful. 99% of the solar panels I see are on calculators. Replacing batteries on portable devices--what a great use! Presumably, a better solar device, (however you measure better, be it cheap/efficient/durable) will allow a battery-less device to have more smarts.
Cheap solar devices could be educational and communications tools for poor, illiterate areas of the world.
Are we all such good consumer robots that all we can think about is how many gadgets we can power with the roofs of our big suburban houses? This is why someone makes a hot tun with a plasma screen built-in!
... that's just not true. It is quite easy to make 99.999 whatever percent of cars run on something like ethanol or methanol. A lot of race cars run on methanol, doesn't seem to slow them down any or present any huge problems. Henry ford DESIGNED the model T to run on ethanol, he thought petroleum stuff was way too dirty, and would gunk up the engines (which it does, bad, that's one of the reasons your crankcase lubrication oil gets so dirty) They would burn cleaner, too,much less air pollution, and not even need as much of that expensive computer controlledc crap they put on cars now to make petroleum products burn clean, and your engine would last much longer as well. You could run them on methane, another huge untapped energy source just going begging, using similar pressurised carbs as the quite common propane powered generators use that are installed on farms by the hundreds of thousands now all over the place. A lot of RVs now are dual fuel, propane and gasoline, it's quite common.
If you want to just speak in general terms,
"alternate energy" became practical years ago, the big energy monopolies, and their paid off shills in government, do everything they can to keep people faked out so they can keep getting a check out of you every month forever and ever. Just mandating a doubling of insulation in new homes and buildings via the "building codes" laws they already think up would make energy demand drop severely, but they don't want that, they want your money by the bucketful. I've helped build two super insulated houses, and several heavily modified houses, the energy savings are nothing short of incredible, and the comfort level goes up immediately, and the "payback" is a few years starting with the first months utility bills. You see, "alternate energy" along with it's corrolay "sane useage" and "saner appliances" is greatly suited (in a lot of ways) to smaller independent set ups run by the owners, not some giant public 'service" corporation with their for-profits giant "suppliers", and THOSE guys being filtered through hordes of "commodity traders" who skim off even more mega billions nation wide for doing basically nothing. The REAL problem with alternate energy is joe bigco hasn't figured out how to charge you for "alternate energy" forever like they do with the current "energy" market, because you can actually pay-off your personal production, and they certainly don't want that, they want "vendor lock in" and for you to pay their "subscription",to basically stay as a renter, with no long term price negotiations allowed, rather than an owner with some sort of fixed price, totally in their favor, for perpetuity.
Correct, but misleading. This is a semiconductor technology. It has the potential to obey Moore's Law. Power has been relatively cheap because we're fuelishly burning hydrocarbon reserves, so there has not been the same market incentive for solar cells that we've had for memory and processors. But an exponential growth rate still applies.
Well, it won't be /. news then, will it?
The market ensures that this technology will happen in large scale at the consumer level, barring some new centralized power source such as nuclear fusion. If we were smart, we'd be investing a lot of money in alternative power technologies, (solar, fusion and others), instead of the government being the lackeys of the oil industry and spending a lot of tax dollars to protect a continued supply of oil. Research into alternative energy sources benefits all taxpayers. Protecting foreign oil assets uses tax dollars to benefit only a few energy company executives and sheiks, and even that benefit only exists for the very near future. It's an unfair and unwise use of tax dollars. As a technogeek, the inefficiency and short sightedness of the US energy policy offends me. The previous success of the US economy was based on free market driven technological innovation, not special interest enforcement of the status quo. The US will either look to the future and lead, or cling to the past and follow as others step up to the technological challenges.
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