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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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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
Start your own energy company.
Invest in a technological breakthrough.
In a Free Enterprise system you are free to do that.
You don't have to wait around for anyone else, do it yourself.
There is nothing wrong with big profit as long as you don't enslave people in the process. Also, if you make a lot, then you can share a lot.
Wealthy and powerful people are not categorically and necessarily greedy and selfish as you seem to imply with your post. But being wealthy and powerful makes one (I believe) more susceptible to personality traits that are loathsome to many others.
With great wealth comes great responsibility. Wealth in this sense is a curse. But the curse can be overcome.
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.
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.
This isn't actually as dumb as it first sounds - if you're wearing something that takes 30% of the infra red energy away then you are not going to get anywhere near as much radiated heat hitting you and you are going to be colder. Similarly if your house is painted in this stuff, not as much of the sun's energy is going to go into your house, and more is going to go into the paint.
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 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
A shed is a radically different thing than a house. There is normally quite a bit of insulation between the roof and the ceiling. In all the houses that I have been in during storms, snow, and hail, the only time that I became aware of the roof, was during a very heavy hailstorm and also during a 4' (1.3 meter) snow where other homes had to go and shovel to avoid roof collapse (and some did anyway) and we could stay inside since the snow slipped on its own.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
1) Right. That's why you need multijunction to do well - recombination always kills some of what you collect, and you want to use the high energy photons as efficiently as possible. But multijunction devices are difficult to produce - first you need an efficient wide band gap cell, then you need to be able to deposite said cell without frying the cell under it.
2) I'm not real familiar with quantum dot technologies, but they do sound interesting. What are some good introductory papers about them?
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org