Slashdot Mirror
Breakthrough Efficient, Paintable Solar Cells
An anonymous reader writes "A new solar cell material has been discovered that converts 30% of the sun's energy to electricity." Here's another solar news story. These new cells can harness infrared light which is why they are so much more efficient.
It must be expensive.
.. as I've really been burnt up about the lost energy from my remote controls!
Can these cells be used to cool say a cpu getting power out of deal?
And frankly how is this different than thermalcouple?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
So if I spray that on my tinfoil hat and run a couple of leads to my laptop I could have unlimited power!
Trolling is a art,
If this pans out this could change the energy economy in this country. Not to mention the benefit third world countries could get from it. Imagine your grafitti powering your laptop.
This will be a blow to the dryer sheet industry as static cling will now be seen as a renewable energy source.
A new solar cell material has been discovered
Of course its expensive, its just been fucking announced!
christ...
Wearable solar panels... Resistance is Futile.
i'll be the envy of all eco-artists!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
One key thing that isn't answered in the article (or almost any other articles about "alternative energy sources). How does energy does it take to make this material compare with home much energy it can produce?
--- http://davidnehme.blogspot.com
This is a huge mile marker in solar technology. They're no where near close to being good yet but they're getting significantly better and the quicker we get solar up and running at a reasonable price/performance ratio the faster that power plants can be replaced with granola-friendly versions.
converts 30% of the sun's energy to electricity.
We are gonna need all that electricity because if the sun is 30% smaller than it was before this thing our heating bills are gonna go way up!
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
I always am skeptical when I see articles about new exciting energy sources in the popular press, but this looks exciting. I wonder what the material's physical properties are -- how it stands up to wear, radiation, etc., and especially, how much it costs to make and apply.
Behold the riant ape! Beware, his crooked thumbs!
Does this recharging unit make my ass look big?
Energy Companies will never invest in this great technological breakthrough to use for bringing power to homes/businesses. They are Fat Cats just like the *AA's and Telecoms. They love all the big profit they are making, and would never jeapordize that.
President Bush Supporter
I spend most of my daylight hours during the week under fluourescent lighting with no natural light (underwhelming cubeworld). Fluourescents don't give off much IR, right?
While I can see that it could be wonderful for some things, I think I'm better off plugging my phone into the wall to charge.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
How dare you criticize a country which brought us Triumph, Bob and Doug McKenzie, and Celine Dion. Ooops... never mind.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Well, so much for this entire thread . Can't believe we wasted all that typing.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
OK, I am being silly, what the thing should read of instead of
Converts 30% of the Sun's Energy to Electricity
Perhaps what they mean is
Converts 30% of the incident light energy to electricity
After all, the Sun is realeasing a lot of energy, most of which will never hit the Earth.
Yeah, I'm sure inexpensive mass production of this stuff is right around the corner.
...and I have to say that I'm confused.
Converting 30% of the sun's energy? That's a LOT of frikken engery!!! I think they mean to say 30% of the energy received from the sun rather than 30% of the sun's energy. The Earth itself doesn't get 30% of the sun's energy.
That said, BRAVO! We need more efficient solar energy stuff. Painted on or solid doesn't matter to me. If they can make it super dense or layer it in some way, I'll bet they can make some really efficient collector devices. Well anyway... yeah....good news....
But...but...but...I thought American science was so much more advanced than anywhere else in the world, especially in places like Canada, where they have "socialized" medicine....eewwww---> COMMIES!
I thought America was carrying the rest of the world on its back when it came to Real Science....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I've asked this time and again, and I've still not found anyone that can help me. How do you post a comment to the main article and not a comment to the comment? Help, please! And, yes, I've looked at the FAQ, which is no help at all.
If you check the original press release, you'll notice UT says the 30% efficiency might be realized "with further improvements in efficiency". The reporter for CTV missed that little nuance.
Sweeping statements should never be made.
I'll believe it when I can buy it for a reasonable cost at a store in town.
For years we have every couple of months there a new revolutionary way to convert solar rays to electricity. Unfortunately none has managed to work in the real world except the good old silicon solar cells.
Markus
So is that a 30% quantum efficiency, i.e. 30 percent of photons absorbed are converted to an electron? or does it truly represent a 30% convertion of watts? I kinda doubt since you will not get anymore electrons (Amps) than you have photon (fluence) and the decrease in energy (Volts) from the visible to the infrared is more than 30% (unless by infra red they mean 1000 nm). Rememeber Watss = Volts Amps.
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
destroys it and sweeps the remaining dust under the rug. Five times more effective - that sure sounds pretty dangerous to them.
Watch for PR campaigns explaining to the layman just how dangerous this plastic is, why it shouldn't be used and researched and just how much better the good ol' oil is.
Oh my god... LMFAO... somebody please mod that up...
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Take off, ya hoser!
I think it's interesting that this guy is talking about having our sweaters charge our cell phones / iPods etc. First of all, who wants to have a large AC adapter plugged into their sleeve? Secondly, why not just make the piece of electronic equipment incorporate the material, so you wouldn't need to plug it into anything? Have any part of the device that's usually exposed be coated with this - you're talking about enormous amounts of "talk time" - imagine, plugging your iPod into the outlet only ONCE a day?
I notice his primary theoretical application was painting shirts so that you can charge your Ipod. What about buildings damnit!
With a nearly 5x increase in power efficency, and the ability to simply paint it on this material strikes me as being ideal for partially powering houses. You paint your roof every summer (Or if the paint is particularly durable every 5 years) and get a grid tie in possibly paying nothing during particiarly sunny monthes.
Of course I supose it ultimately comes down to how expensive this stuff is. When I last looked into solar grid tie ins, it would have cost about 30,000 (cdn.) to get only a few kilowatts of output- the panels were insured for 25 years; and it would have taken 20 for them to pay for themselves, and that dosen't count the concept of any of them breaking in heavy hail, or snow buildup. Not a great investment.
If this paint is durable enough to be put on clothes, and cheap enough to have that done as well, I think that painting the roofs of houses should be the primary applicatino, not keeping all your portable gadgets charged...
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post
all too frequently, people use this misconception. Heat is not equivalent to infrared energy.
You see heat in infrared images because things of the temperatures that are common on the Earth (people, plants, cars, etc. ) have blackbody radiation curves that peak in infrared band.
Don't get me started on people that confuse light amplification with infrared cameras.
The film has the ability to be sprayed or woven into shirts so that our cuffs or collars could recharge our IPods, Sargent said. "...somebody out there tinkering away in a bedroom or in a government lab is going to come up with a great idea for a new device that will shock us all,", he said in a phone interview.
I would love to be able to buy a quart of Rustoleum Outdoor SolarPaint (TM), and just apply it to the sunny side of my house and plug it into the grid, but I have a feeling it'll be decades before I can do that w/o applying for a second mortgage for just the paint!
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
It gets us the new measurement unit of "% of sun's energy." 10% of the sun's energy is roughly equivelent to 10,000,000 libraries of congress or 2,300,133 football fields of power. Use google convert for exact conversion units, or round to number of volkswagon beetles.
Slashdot does this every once in a while - announce some tremendous new solar energy technology. Folks, it's not easy to get 30%. And even if you do, you haven't won the war. The best, most expensive cells can make those ranges, but they are not something you can put on the assembly line.
I did some research into Cu(In,Ga)(S,Se) thin film solar cells, which have long been a promising material for this type of application. I don't claim to know all about the various options out there (there are a lot of them) but I feel I can safely say there just aren't any magic bullets to this problem. Let me give you some idea of what has to happen.
a) You need a cell with a high enough efficiency to make the power it can produce worth the hassle of installing it. This is hard and the focus of most solar cell research.
b) Even if you GET that cell, you have to be able to make a LOT of them. Cheaply. Very cheaplly if you want to compete with grid power.
c) These materials have to stand up to long term punishment, intense thermal cycling over the course of day and night temperature shifts for twenty years, etc.
d) You have to install the supporting systems - either connect it to grid, get a large energy storage array (i.e. batteries) or both. If you want a battery based local storage system that gets expensive, all by itself.
e) You need to build the industrial support required to make large scale deployment both possible and cost effective. Si, the current dominant material, has a lot going for it because a lot got learned over the course of decades of semiconductor technology. Those tools are somewhat applicable to Si. If you want to use something totally different (i.e. a thin film) you have to make all the gear more or less from the ground up. That's a big initial capital investment for a dubious return.
f) If you want flexible solar cells, you have a whole new set of problems to handle/test, like how the cell performs while being folded repeatedly in different temperature conditions, creased, beat up generally, etc. And flexible cells are a bit of a specialty market - the military likes the idea, sports folks like it, but for large scale fixed installation use (i.e. where bulk production would happen) flexible isn't all that critical. (Although it is nice when it comes to things like roofs withstanding hail storms, but apparently regular ones don't do so hot there anyway.)
g) THEN, after you solved the problems of cost effective production, storage, retrofitting of housing, etc. etc. etc. you have to convince people it's worth the trouble to install it. And I remind you this is the land of the SUV, so I wish you luck with any marketing effort that can't say "We're cheaper than grid power!". Grid power is CHEAP. VERY cheap. It's a really really hard target to hit, and the solar cell technology available today just isn't there yet. There are lots of "potential" 30% configurations - all you need to do, in theory, is have a multijunction device with the right bandgaps. But let me tell you, it ain't easy.
Now, somebody might make a sudden miracle discovery of a cheap 30% cell material. Such things do happen. But I'll want to see a lot of (reproducable) proof, and peer review, before I'll buy it. It's good advertising to claim high performance, but I'll be impressed when someone goes through the nitty gritty and comes out with a viable product.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Didn't RTFA, but how does this compare to other state-of-the-art solar panels for efficiency? I'm wondering if it is more or less efficient; if more I'd presume it could lead to satellites that are smaller and lighter, allowing for cheaper satellite launches...
Geee, you got us there! The US has only done stupid things like the pioneer the computer, flight, space travel, countless drugs to better humanity....blah blah blah.
I hope he means "shock us all" figurativley.
enough said
A few things the article seem to miss:
What is the longevity of this material? Can you spray once and leave it for years, or does it degrade over time?
How much does this stuff cost? They mention quantum dots, so are we talking about exotic materials which are going to be expensive?
How do environmental factors affect this stuff? Will it hold up to rain, wind, sun?
How nasty are the chemicals in making it? The process to make most solar cells involve some nasty chemicals, granted, compared to coal ash and massive pollution, it might be worth it.
It sounds exciting, 30% efficancy might make me a convert to solar.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Umm, yeah, except we're already using that to, you know, heat the planet's surface. So the oceans stay liquid. And stuff.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
look how they moderated me:
>>>>.
Moderation -2
50% Troll
50% Flamebait
Extra 'Troll' Modifier
>>>>>>.
"Extra 'Troll' Modifier"! That's rich!
What did the borg say to the room-temperature superconductor?
Sargent: "the new plastic composite is, in layman's terms, a layer of film that "catches'' solar energy. "
VC: looks sceptical
Sargent: "ummm, with the laser beams, umm, clayven"
VC: inks the contract
It's only a matter of time before people relize how much money they can sav on bills if the put one on top of the house or on the roof of a car. Perhaps it will not make your house or car 100% solar but I'm sure that hybrid houses and cars would be good for the enviroment and our wallets!
with those new solar cells that convert heat to electricity, we can finally dispense with the whole bunch of fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, which are all based on the outdated paradigm of...oh wait...
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
"They love all the big profit they are making, and would never jeapordize that"
Ok, so you're saying that they're in business to make money, but since this will presumably make lots of money and solve many power supply problems, they won't do it?
Explain how that makes sense.
Oil companies are businesses, not evil entities like you suggest. They are governed by boards of directors, who are (generally) LEGALLY REQUIRED to do what is in the shareholder's best interests (usually meaning make money). Yet you surmise we'll never get this technology because...why? If it can make money, we'll see it. Period. Because regardless, someone somewhere WILL develop it if it has potential, if it will make money.
the consumption of the world's most addictive substance: OIL
Patriotically as always,
K. Trout, CTO
Fuck you! We're taking insulin back. Let's see your overweight asses live without us Canadians.
I did some research work when I was a physics student, and I took data for a bunch of researchers at the National Renewable Energy Labs back in the mid-nineties. My specific project was working with a new CdTe based thin-film material to be used in solar cells. It was so easy to deposit on glass substrates that we referred to it as "painting the glass." This made it very easy to mass produce.
However, the new material mentioned in TFA is very different from that. The material I worked with only derived energy from visible light - this material works in the IR bands, and I find that even more interesting as it's vastly under-explored. I'm not so sure about his "weaving it into fabrics" idea, but for sure it will help boost traditional solar cell (PV) gain.
Solar shock troops!
They do not have to invest in this. This will show up on highway signs (how about road markers), cell phone covers, even laptops. I am suspecting that roofing shingles will get replaced with aluminin covered with this to generate electricity for the house (heat if nothing else). The energy companies will have no choice but to tap it. Where they will need to put their effort into is energy storage, so that they can pay a little and charge a lot.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I don't get it, they talk about painting this stuff onto some surface. In order to carry the charge away I think you need to connect wires to the positive and negative polls of the charge generator.
30% is very good, but only an additional 6% above what an experimental silicon cell can get.
Some figures:
Highest experimental eficiency: 24.7% monocrystalline Si, 19.8% multicrystalline Si
Typical industrial products: 17-18% mono, 13-15% multi
Other experimental crystalline materials vary between 10% and 20%
The maximum theoretical efficiency of a Si cell is in the 29-33% range.
BTW, these are numbers from 3 or 4 years ago.
Jw
were to paint the the inside of the case of your AMD machine with this stuff, would all of your computers become 10 megawatt generators? I believe we finally have the perpetual motion machine.
Replacing nuclear power?
Using thermonuclear fusion for removing salt from sea water for watering fields is a very old, known technology. It's called "rain".
let's hope we don't have to scorch the sky later! :P
That is so obviously wrong. I have not RTA but I can't help but point out that it should read "converts 30% of the perceived sunlight into electricity".
Cuz if you need a sure-fire way to fry Earth that'd be to convert 30% of the sun's energy to electricity down here.
Broken Hearts are for Assholes. - Frank Zappa
I'm just kidding. I'd move to Canada in a second if I could. Unfortunately Canada doesn't want yet another American attorney up there to muck everything up.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
No, I meant the incident light energy.
Light doesn't just come from the Sun.
Any article that starts with that phrase, or something like it, will eventually make the point "And you will! Sometime in the amazing year 400 billion!"
Eh, but who am I to harsh their buzz? At least someone's thinking about it.
--- Ban humanity.
After all, the sun does set in most places, at least half of the time.
I agree that discussions of cost weren't mentioned, and that the big advantage is in its five-fold efficiency gains. If it is less than 5 times as expensive per watt capability, it'll be a tremendous boon for massive solar power generation.
Solar can only be a part of the green-e solution, due to the pesky Earth rotating in between the sun and the solar cells and mankind's desire to use electricity when the sun is down or behind a cloud. However, since solar production occurs during the day -- when we use the most power -- solar electrical generation does a great job of reducing the peak demand, which is a huge boon.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Making headlines:
Cold fusion solved!
Microsoft opens sources Windows (You were right all along!)
Cold snap in Hell, everything frozen over!
It took little or no labour at all.
Another point to mention about light from the Sun and from other stars:
The spectrum is different for different stars as another poster so dutifully pointed out. Thus space probes that go to other stars will need to have different types of solar cells that are tuned for the spectra of the star to which they travel.
This is a real point, and not trivial.
Space cadet news article - 30% (note the "could"). Nat. Mat. article - 3% (internal at that!). Data meets reality. Catching some of the IR light that is nothing but waste and converting it to electricity - good. Practicality - a long ways off.
2002 CNN article about "paintable solar cells".
The advance in here is that these new cells also use infrared. Also, solar cells are only ONE of the possible applications of this new technology (Nanoapex news article).
Nice. AFAIR, the break-even point for silicon cells was only about 10% - it was not attainable at the time. If it's cheaper to make and install than the standard cells, getting just a 10-12% conversion would put it into the realm of practical as a source of renewable energy.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I suppose the same thing could be applied to electric and hybrid cars. It would make their electrical use more efficient and give them more mileage. Plus you wouldn't have an unfashionable and ugly solar collector on the roof, it would just be integrated into the paint job.
Guess it would give new meaning to "Electric Blue" huh...
-AlPhAbEt
If we could pave the Amazon Rain Forest and replace it with a 1000 lane dragstrip, that would be wonderful.
It sounds like some small scale prototypes of devices that can detect infrared have have been developed but there is no solar cell. My favorite quote from the University press release:
"Professor Peter Peumans of Stanford University, who has reviewed the U of T team's research, also acknowledges the groundbreaking nature of the work. "Our calculations show that, with further improvements in efficiency, combining infrared and visible photovoltaics could allow up to 30 per cent of the sun's radiant energy to be harnessed, compared to six per cent in today's best plastic solar cells."
The two key points being "calculations" and "plastic solar cells". In other words the 30% figure is a theoretical one and unlikely realistic. Also, six percent is accurate for plastic solar cells, but more modern multi-material cells are up around 35% or better. In short, this is just PR.
Ever acre of land covered with a solar cell array is an acre of land that can't be used for farming or for wildlife in the same way that it would if the solar cells weren't there.
The efficiency of the cell is dependant upon the angle of incident light so that it only gets that peak performance at one time during the day. Tracking the cell towards the Sun is a non-trivial operation.
I beg to differ. Their new tourist slogan is...
Canada! It's not just for deserters anymore!!!!
Good thing this is in the hands of our neighbors to the north. Thank you, University of Toronto!! Now we can invade!
If you are reading this, then you are one of those people whom I just can't take seriously.
Photovoltaic solar energy is economic depending on the circumstances. I saved my employer big bucks by retrofitting remote equipment with solar panels in the 'seventies.
One of the things keeping solar panels from being cost effective for many applications is, as you note, the cost of the supporting structure. Low efficiency cells are often not cost effective even if they are free. Having 30% efficient cells reduces the cost of the supporting structure by a factor of about five! Now we have something that might work for a lot more applications.
The other thing to remember is that although the cost of electricity on the grid is cheap, getting the grid to where you are is often not cheap. Thus, we have solar powered parking meters located right under power lines. It is much cheaper to put in the solar panel than it is to run the necessary wires.
Bottom line: If this comes close to working as predicted, it is indeed a very big thing.
I've researched this a bit.. painted 30% efficient makes a world of difference! Here!
No, spraypainting this stuff on aluminum foil will cause a short circuit, generating heat. The IR generated by the heat will be absorbed by the coating again, generating more electricity, contributing to the current being fed into the short circuit. This positive feedback will ultimately cause your head to explode!
Slashdot's name? When my compiler sees
Although we are doing better with efficiency than we were doing in the 80s and early 90s.
Yes! Ummm... As long as you are willing to completely cover the Earth's surface with solar cell, this is true. If you take the sunlight for electricity generation, you lose it for other purposes: plant growth, heat, vitamin-D production, natural light, etc. I hate statements like these. They imply that the only reason we can't move to a completely solar economy is lack of investment, when there are larger issues at work.
The points about clothing and paint were very cool though.
I'd like to see the source of stats like this. Is this because the newer ones can capture such a wide band as infrared so that the percentages are being adjusted?
Not truly wireless; you'll still need a cable from your photovoltaic clothing to your cell phone/PDA.
These things don't have sufficient surface area to be recharged by having their outer skins be photovoltaic. In addition, many people carry them in their pockets or purses rather than on an external belt clip. Therefore you need an external power source (such as your clothing). This means the phone needs to be plugged into your clothing somehow. Not THAT big a deal, but one worth mentioning.
How well does it handle being washed in standard washing machines? Dry cleaning everything would be a major pain in the ass. (Assuming that the chemicals used in dry cleaning don't degrade the photovoltaics since the cleaning agents were not made with "quantum dots" in mind.)
I don't mean to be a naysayer, but the article is extremely vague and doesn't give a link to more information (if it's even available). I'd rather be skeptical now and see how it can be used rather than proudly (and prematurely) announce that this solves all our problems and cooks dinner to boot.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
So, how long before this new tech disappears forever after being bought out by the power companies? Remember that carburetor that lets gasoline engines burn water? I hear some Detroit auto-maker bought the design and buried it away for good. ;)
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
2x is a big increase, but it's a lot less than 5x.
"When you have a material advance which literally materially changes the way that energy is absorbed and transmitted to our devices... somebody out there tinkering away in a bedroom or in a government lab is going to come up with a great idea for a new device that will shock us all," he said in a phone interview."
Great. Some sick geek is going to discover that you can unplug your Ipod from your solar powered shirt and put the circuitry from a Taser in its place. Then he will shock us all like an electric eel gone postal.
"Material" != "Cell".
The headline says "Efficient paintable solar cells", but the story is about a new material. This is like announcing a new programming language that is designed to improve database design with the headline, "New improved database design."
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I'm a big fan of Nanotech, but even a bigger fan of accurate science/technology HISTORY; esp. with people who are making history.
In the article, Josh Wolfe says, "When the Internet was created nobody envisioned that the killer app (application) would be e-mail or instant messaging."
Sending a message from terminal to terminal, fingering (unix command) a user, etc. and email have always been the "killer" app of ANY network, including an InterNet[work]; but the issue like most technology adoption rates or scenarios has to do with critical mass. What many people didn't understand was if average joe's and jane's would never be able to get and use Email and Messaging technology. ANd would there ever be enough Email and Messaging users to make the technology useful for mass communication.
Then Bellcore created an email APPLIANCE and tested with Seniors in Flordia, proving that any one/any age would like Email and use it if the User Interface (UI) was good enough.
http://www.hawknest.com/
However, these things are effectively made out of glass. To keep them from being killed by kids with flying baseballs they have to be ruggedized to the max. They're also heavy, expensive to manufacture, and all that.
So, now these guys have got material that's three times more efficient than the amorphous? It can be painted on, and it's flexible?
Even if these guys charge out the wazoo for the paint, the overall cost of putting solar on a house is going to drop 'way down. I checked out solar panels before I moved into my current house; even if these things cost as much as the current panels (unlikely) you're going to get three times as much electricty out of them. How would you like to get payback in five years rather than fifteen?
Yeah, everybody says, "Show me the product, first." But if these guys are right the results are going to be earthshaking. Forget the attic batteries. Put these things on your roof and, during the summer, you'll be both cooling your house and selling power back to the electric company. The electric co. will put this stuff into businesses and the grid.
Remember, max power isn't at night, it's during the daytime when people are working.
As much as I hate to say this, this thing ranks up there with cold fusion in terms of what it could do for the environment and the world. And, like cold fusion, it had better be checked before we all start going crazy.
I don't know much about electricity (yes, nor about english :). How the electricity is pulled from that er... painting if its over clothes? And how much electricity could generate the area i'm exposed to sun? Some things could need few charge to do its job, but a car with that kind of paintings will not need batteries in dayligth? a notebook?
...while such a luxury may be five years away, the technology knows no bounds...
Well crap...why the hell is everything always "five years away"???
This should be OK, as long as you do it when the MLB satellites are not overhead.
That's pretty damn powerful. All you have to do is connect it a few times, and the sun is pretty much reduced to a burnt-out husk. 30% energy reduction at a time!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Reading this made me think about a very heavy flaw in a hell of a lot of developments in solar technology... bssdically, as it stands, we're paying the electrical companies costs to build/run plants, and effectively 'rent' of their machinery. what we're handed here is a very different subject where we BUY the machinery ourselves, plus deal with our own maintenance costs. So, whilst having them on your roof is brilliant, a powerplant consisting of a 'field' of solar cells seems a whole lot more viable as it allows for progressive 'sign up, sign out' billing, as most won't be able to afford the initial cost hit of solar cells... and without demand the prices will never fall... and without pricing falling the deman... you get the idea. ...........Which is a shame because solar panels on everyones house could solve a hell of a lot of problems and make powerplants more like backup....
If it's turning infra-red into electricity, well I live in a hot desert. Not only could I get electricity to run my air conditioner from painting this on the outside walls and roof of my house, but I'd expect to have less of an a/c load to start with if this is turning 30% of the energy into electricity.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Here is a new substance, power generating paint, improving on the previous, paintable and everything, and all the slashdotters can do is nay-say, criticize and complain. (this is a complaint too, ironically). /.er can do that math... let's see...area of all streets in US times power of sunlight times 30%...whats that come to...?
I would have thought that all you bright guys would come up with new and novel application ideas for this stuff. The best idea that actually was presented was to paint a car with the stuff, and thus provide a small fraction of the power required to run it. On that note, I suggest that we paint all the streets with the stuff, and find a way to transfer the power up to cars....
If streets are all painted with the stuff, maybe that would solve the energy crisis and provide enough energy for the whole country...
maybe a
I would point out, that -mostly yer right- some elements can find non-standard solutions, near montery there is a lake that is used for hydroelectric generation on a 24 hour clock.. during the day this lake pours downhill generating electricity, and at night it gets pumped back up to the lake above.. in effect, a giant battery- profitable because the utility company pays via a time of day meter, enough for the daytime demand/rate of pay to the owners- over the consumption of the pumping during the night at a reduced electrical charge rate. Your point D is what made me think of creating my response, you cover it in the base, get a large energy storage array (i.e. batteries) these don't have to be chemical- and it's important people continue to look for solutions- "outside the box"-- I think you do.
ideas I've had sparking since typing this up-how many different mechanical means I wonder- are their, for a necassary 'energy storage array' -- compressed air, a normal water tower, a series of springsthat get wound up.. the options are quite broad....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
30% has been demonstrated in prototypes.
Gallium is rare and expensive. Huge areas of gallium arsenide cells aren't going to happen.
The energy companies will invest heavily in this technology. They will buddy up with the inventors, and through business dealings put themselves in a position to aquire exclusive rights to the products. The original inventor will be bought out for a large sum of money, before the energy companies will bury the technology forever. The government will do everything it can to help the energy monopolies. because they pay taxes on the profits from selling us energy. People producing their own energy will destroy the energy companies monopolies, and reduce revenue to the government.
I would beg to differ with that... I remember singing the praises of email back in 1985, telling people that, although it was text-only at the time, all that was needed was a standard and efficient way to encode images, and email would be able to replace faxes for images, and still keep the advantages of simple text mode for pure text messages.
I didn't forsee IM applications, but I never came up with idea of Instant Messaging, but it wasn't much of a push from people being able to exchange email messages on a 1-minute turnaround basis.
Actually, now that I think of it, Unix had IM since the 80s with 'talk' which had a network-capable version. Plato also had a similar system, and I remember online chatting with people around the world via the 'net long before ICQ and AIM were even a twinkling in the eyes of their designers... -- the big difference being that the UNIX and Plato variants allowed character-based transmissions rather than line-based, so you got to watch your counterpart try to figure out how to spell prestidigitate.
I guess that that's why I didn't see ICQ as such a hot thing when my roommate glomed onto it. It just seemed so... passé.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
The title is obviously for the sensation. Using the figures in the article, the solar cells CAN'T be 5 times more efficient. The article says by "combining infrared and visible photovoltaics could allow up to 30 per cent of the sun's radiant energy to be harnessed, compared to six per cent in today's best plastic solar cells." Problem is, current plastic solar cells are no where near as efficient as some other types. And whenever someone says up to they mean anything from you'll be real lucky to get that much out of it to the damn thing doesn't really work, we were just "optimistically extrapolating" ha ha... And notice the 30% comes from including the visible conversion, or in other words combining these cells with the conversion done by existing solar cells. So at best, this new IR version would be 30%-6% or no more than 4 times more efficient. The article is obviously playing fast and loose with numbers for the faithful. If this thing turns out to be as efficient as standard PV cells, we'll be lucky. Guess we'll find out in "five years"...
Right. But if we're talking fuel cells, you're still most likely going to be much less efficient because you have twice as many energy conversions with hydrogen fuel cells (chemical -> thermal -> kinetic -> electric -> chemical -> electric -> kinetic) as with burning gasoline in the car (chemical -> thermal -> kinetic). I am no engineer, but it seems to me like the hydrogen generation process and the fuel cell cars would have to be amazingly well engineerd to be as effient as a gasoline car.
On top of that, cars are a fair piece cleaner than our existing power plant infrastructure (at least in the USA), so it's going to also take a whole lot of 1/2%s in the realm of cleanliness to make hydrogen fuel cell vehicles result in less pollution, too.
Of course, you don't hear about this. You see, the big bucks (energy industry) wants a hydrogen economy really badly because in a hydrogen economy, we are still just as dependent on their ability to burn fossil fuels. If you pay attention, it's Detroit and Big Oil that is funding the hydrogen research, while real alternatives that might actually result in a cleaner planet seem to be relegated to academia.
(Note: I'm not saying hydrogen can't possibly be cleaner; I'm just saying the technology is nowhere near being there yet, and I personally doubt that fuel cell only vehicles will ever be a great option from an envrionmental standpoint.)
Looks like this stuff will be illegal in europe before it ever makes it out of the lab.
The caption on the microscope image says you can make out the individual atoms of lead and sulfer.
Lead based house paint and lead clothing are likely to go over as well as lead balloons.
DING! BRITISH PETROLEUM! The big oil companies that want to stay in business have already begun embracing solar technology. The rest will die out. That's called capitalism. Also, why wouldn't the government be interested in this? You could build much better spy satellites, solar powered surveylance aircraft, all kinds of neat stuff.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
The twin problems are initial expense (which with traditional solar panels is horrible, typically you can expect economic breakeven (at today's wholesale electric prices) in around fifteen to twenty years), and the fact that we can never base our entire power production on (ground based) solar. Solar can be used a lot more than it is, but we can't do everything solar because we don't have a good way to store electricity.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
So can anybody calculate how mutch more power would these new type of power shells produse if they where to implement this tecknology in ISS (International Space Station)
1 .htm
:)
I mean if they where to change the plan and from now one use this new stuff to produse power on the station.
There are now produsing what ? http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast13nov_
Serbia has one large reversible power plant on Drina River. Its efficiency is about 2/3.
Water is pumped during the night (when thermal plants produce more than system consumes - and you cannot stop/start thermal plants every couple of hours), and it generates electricity during so-called "peak hours". Great thing, although a bit too large for our needs - it was designed for larger system (i.e. system of former Yugoslavia).
No sig today.
They are also accepting terrorists, communists, anti-semites and sodomists. Apply now, all it takes is the promise to hate America and you're in!
We just saw the sun yesterday for the first time in 2005, with little hope of seeing it again anytime soon. So if anyone out there remembers what the sun used to look like, can you please direct some of your solar energy this way? Thanks.
Current:
Accel (hydrocarbon -> thermal -> kinetic)
Brake (kinetic -> thermal)
Hybrid:
Accel (hydrocarbon -> thermal -> kinetic)
Accel (hydrogen -> electrical -> kinetic)
Brake (kinetic -> electrical -> hyrdrogen)
Charge (grid -> electrical -> hydrogen)
Pure:
Accel (hydrogen -> electrical -> kinetic)
Brake (kinetic -> electrical -> hyrdrogen)
Charge (grid -> electrical -> hydrogen)
Adding in the fuel cell lets us reduce the amount of energy loss to the environment by closing the acceleration/braking loop. This adds some equipment mass, reducing overall efficiency. In turn, we drop the hydrocarbon --> kinetic chain to drop the mass of the mobile omponent of the system back down to the original mass (or less).
Realities just a bunch of bits.
The CTV lacks imagination - the press release talks more indepth about the technology. To be honest, it's not what the CTV spin claims. Rather, the quantum dots are more photosensitive to infrared light than previous materials. The upshot is that any infrared application, from military wide-aperture night vision goggles to solar cells to clothing which detects injuries.
/ item_022003a.asp
Quantum dots,incidentally, are fingered as one of the most exciting nanotech material configurations, but don't get as much play as buckyballs or carbon nanotubules. They're also far older. Medieval glassblowers used quantum dots made from rubidium molecular rings - albeit unknowingly - to produce a glass with irridescent properties. For a time it was fashionable among the rich to buy these.
For more information about Quantum dots, look up a guy named Moungo Bawendi at MIT. He's pretty much 'the man' for quantum dots right now. http://www.electroline.com.au/elc/feature_article
There's also some interesting reading in the books "Hacking Matter" and "Nanocosm".
Actually, fuel cells can have better well-to-wheel efficiencies than the standard gasoline internal combustion engine. In the May 2004 edition of Scientific American, this article http://www.sciamdigital.com/browse.cfm?sequencenam eCHAR=item2&methodnameCHAR=resource_getitembrowse& interfacenameCHAR=browse.cfm&ISSUEID_CHAR=CB826BAE -2B35-221B-6E2587F29CF2C88A&ARTICLEID_CHAR=CB9BE5E 6-2B35-221B-6F2461DEF9B52B9C&sc=I100322 shows that a fuel cell powered by steam reforming has a total efficiency of over 20%, while an ICE has an total efficiency of about 10%.
Daily energy news and discussion: theWatt.com
Remember, it took energy to make the machines that run the factory, the trucks that supply it with raw materials, the extraction and refinement of the raw materials, the energy consumed by the people running the plant, and so on.
I suspect that studies that say that solar cells are net positive in energy production are being less than honest about what they count as "solar cell manufacturing energy consumption". They may count basic manufacturing steps but leave out all the other costs unique to solar cell production, which leaves us with a less-than-honest break even perspective.
The particle is four nanometers - billionths of a meter - in diameter. Individual atoms of lead and sulfur can be resolved in the image.
I'm a big fan of solar power, but lead based paint seems like a non-starter to me. Bummer.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
I guess your mama doesn't show you the bills eh ? If the price that commodity items trade at on the market have in fact become lower, the savings are not being passed on to the consumer. Our electric rates are not cheaper than they were a decade ago, and many would use the term skyrocketing to describe the rates in recent times. Natural gas prices have tripled in the past few years. Fuel oil for heating homes are not decreasing. Perhaps you could login and explain yourself you fucking retard.
Don't forget that the fuel cell energy has to come from somewhere. You can't just dig it out of the ground like you can with fossil fuels.
My wife has been aftert me to take down that 30-foot perpetual motion wheel in my backyard. Now that we have 30% solar cells, we don't need the wheel anymore.
Whoever submitted this wrote an extremely misleading write up.
Other people have pointed out, the article claims that this has the potential to get 30% of the energy from the sun (as opposed to DOES get...). Even that is wrong.
This technology gives plastic-based photovoltaics access to 30% more of the power output from the sun. Notice that is NOT 30% more than today's silicon based solar cells, just 30% more than the plastic.
Furthermore, this stuff has an efficiency of 3% at best (from the actual Nature paper).
Now that I've bummed you out, let me tell you why this is still really cool.
The technology involves joining quantum dots with semiconducting polymers. By changing the size of the dots you mix in, the polymer will absorb different frequencies of radiation. Thus, you can custom make photvoltaics for a very specific band, or a very wide band with one material. For instance, they created plasics that have a photocurrent when hit with infared radiation (specifically 980nm, 1200nm, and 1355nm). Previously, plastic photodetectors only went up to 800nm. Also, the 3% efficency might not seem like much, but that's around 1000 times better than what was done previously with these types of systems. The only caveat is that it was 3% for an infared laser, not a wide band.
This stuff is still basic research, it will get a lot better and may one day power your cell phone or house, but don't expect it out this summer.
maybe a TV can be powered by the remote, if you just channel surf enough!
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The sun will never burn out at that rate! In order to burn out the sun, you'd have to take 30% of its current energy. Then 30% of the remaining. Then 30% of that remaining. Then 30% ... You get the idea. You could never use all its energy taking 30% at a time, anymore than I could cross a room and bump my nose into the wall by continually crossing half the remaining distance.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Nowhere does the originating paper in Nature mention the prospects of the device as a photovoltaic conversion system. However one of the figures shows that when it is irradiated with 70 milliwatts of infrared light, it can deliver 130 nanoamps at 180 millivolts. The product of the latter two values is 23.4 nanowatts. Hence the energy conversion efficiency is 0.00003%, or roughly one millionth of the conversion efficiency of a Concentrating Solar Power electricity generating plant such as the one at Kramer Junction in CA. A CSP system also has the ability to store heat collected during the day so it can continue production during the night. No PV system can ever compete with that.
... flying car?
eric http://www.ericdfields.com/
Don't you just love statements like that. So the sunlight that hits the earth has 10,000 times as much energy as we need, eh? Ya, and we could get all the energy we need for a year from one bowling ball -- if only we could convert all the mass to energy. So what?
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
Just a small enquiry, what would be the colour of the paint?
That fact that our society runs on oil and we haven't run out proves nothing about how much energy it takes to extract energy from a barrel of oil. Suppose it take one barrel of oil's worth of energy to bring one barrel of oil to market. If you're an oil company and can sell one barrel for $40, you can still be producing "negative" energy while making lots of money! Profit does not prove a net energy gain! energy != money
I have to wonder, what with all the heat a human body gives off, might it not be useful to harness some of that?
I presume that these things absorb infrared energy, and are thus cool to the touch?
If so, an infrared absorbing t-shirt would be handy, even if it only involved the armpits...
And of course more efficient photovoltaics would also be a big benefit for high-altitude aircraft designed to stay aloft for months on end (e.g. to act as communications relays). When you are above the clouds, you get a lot of sunlight!
All the hydrogen produced today comes from reforming natural gas. So we do "dig" it out of the ground after all.
And that's why this new solar panel technology is so exciting.... it makes solar power more viable to run electrolysers to generate hydrogen, instead of further depleting our dwindling fossil fuel supply.
Daily energy news and discussion: theWatt.com
Web browsing is the killer app, if anything is. IM is fun, but email is best described as the app I'd most like to kill. Is that the same thing as a "killer app"?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
There are large streaches of dessert in which folks have planned to build solar cell arrays.
If they do they will effect the local ecology in a large way.
I would like to see arrays in space and the energy used to do manufacturing in space.
Real cheap solar cells plus cheap transportation to orbit probably means a very cost-effective solar power satellite system is possible which can make power available 24/7/365 without concerns about storage.
A network of orbital power satellites or putting a big solar cell farm in the L5 position is probably cheaper than the $16,000,000,000 the International Energy Agency says we need to spend to continue our fossil fuel habit.
Tech Public Policy stuff
but the theoretical 30% isn't bad especially for plastic cells. See here for the latest: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/8225/8225solare nergy1.html
It just takes a handful iterations to drain the sun's output down to 1% of its energy. It is pretty much spent at this point, agree?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It just takes a handful iterations to drain the sun's output down to 1% of its energy. It is pretty much spent at this point, agree?
I agree. However, this was a joke. Remember Zeno's paradox?
Required reading for internet skeptics
This article is misleading, and illustrates the caution needed when scientific research is described by non-scientists and read by non-scientists.
First, the new material is vaguely newsworthy. We already can produce photovoltaic material (organic solar cells) that will be able to be sprayed on to surfaces, put onto bending surfaces, etc. Their new material is newsworthy. What you can DO with their new material is already done.
Second, the main "interesting" thing about the article is a farce. One of the articles says that the researcher claimed "his *calculations* show the new material will yield efficiencies up to 30%".
In other words, we're not up to 30% yet, folks. Any research facility that can get 6% efficiency from solar cells is doing a bang-up job. I'm talking about a "real" 6%, as in, I'm measuring this right here, right now, with a voltmeter.
Let this guy actually get a measured 30% in the laboratory, AND THEN I'll be impressed.
Until then, solar cell technology is still not efficient enough to be economically viable for mass consumption.