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Breakthrough in solar photovoltaics
An anonymous reader writes "The Holy Grail of researchers in the field of solar photovoltaic (SPV) electricity is to generate it at a lower cost than that of grid electricity. The goal now seems to be within reach.
A Palo Alto (California ) start-up, named Nanosolar Inc., founded in 2002, claims that it has developed a commercial scale technology that can deliver solar electricity at 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. " As always, take these claims with a dose of salt the size of the Hope Diamond.
What about the cells themselves, the life duration ?
Could we "coat" a laptop with these in order to enhance its battery life duration ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
The flagship product, Nanosolar SolarPly, is a 14 feet x 10 feet solar electricity module delivering 120 watts per square inch at 110V.
Something seems fishy about this. Isn't the amount of sunlight hitting the earth only about a KW per sq. M?
I claim that I can fly by doing nothing more than flapping my arms... How about a demonstration of these claims?
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
on google news. This is setting off the crackpot alarm big-time, as much as I want to believe.
Everyone feels the same way about this - quite doubtful (but still somewhat optimistic inside). Wouldn't it be great to be able to charge your cell phone by exposing it to some sunlight? Solar energy has a lot of 'potential'. Even with its current state, it does have some uses. Eventually, one of these 'breakthroughs' might have some merit, and give the technology the push it needs to become more mainstream.
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
The semiconductor paint can be applied to a flexible substrate , such as a polymer sheet , through a simple web printing process, to create an array of ultra-thin solar cells.
Does this mean I can turn my roof into one huge solar panel by "painting" solar panel on it?
"You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
"The breakthrough has come through the application of nanotechnology to create components via molecular self-assembly, including quantum dots (10nm large nanoparticles) as well as nanotemplates with structural order extending through all three dimensions." Even more exciting, the raw material used in this process is snake oil.....
From what I read on the website: nanostructured materials, estimated lifetime of 25 years, made of "nontoxic semiconductor paint" suggests that it is about dye-sensitized solar cells. These are based on small TiO2 particles, the same that is used as a pigment in white paint. These do not absorb visible light by themselves, but can catch and transport electrons from certain light-absorbing dyes. These solar cells were invented around 15 years ago; the necessary components of such a solar cell, TiO2, dye, solvents, sandwiched between two glass plates, are relatively cheap, but the yield is still below 10% (sunlight power to electrical power).
Apparently, this company has found a way to mass-produce cells based on this principle using plastic films instead of glass. The glass was the most expensive component; the problem with plastic films is that it is hard to make them last a long time while still being impermeable to oxygen and the liquid solvent inside the cell.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
I'd belive 120 watts all told, which I believe would actually be a pretty good output; as stated it's ludicrous. Sadly, their website doesn't say; it hasn't been updated since November.
The article is reasonably well written, though I'm not used to getting major engineering announcements from The Hindu. (Presumably an Indian paper is reporting on events in Palo Alto because of the number of Indians working on the project.) Maybe they just botched the rewrite of the press release. Odd that I can't find the original press release on the web site, though. Fishy, as you say. Maybe they're better solar engineers than they are web site managers.
Their management team looks top-notch (ex-Intel, NIST, etc.); their partners include Sandia, Stanford, and Berkeley; and their investors include Stanford and Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
I think these guys are for real.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
Look, I haven't even RTFA, but isn't it the case that having a the best (i.e., cheapest, most efficient) technology doesn't guarantee you squat? (At least in the U.S.) Even if it's easy to implement, won't existing energy concerns have it in their best interests to block its adoption?
Before anyone questions the unimpeachable reputation of "The Hindu" - "Online Edition of India's National Newspaper", please keep in mind that they've brought significant news to us in the past.
How many of us would not be alive today had they not warned us about mysterious monkeymen?
I'm a big tall mofo.
However if it is indeed true, it should not be a huge surprise. The cost of solar has been falling in recent years.
I did speak to a solar firm about putting in enough to run my house ( 69 kwh/month ) the cost to install was going to be around 75,000 dollars, and in my area electricity is still to cheap to justify the cost.
However if I can install at this super low 5 cents/kwh, I just might bite the bullet. That is roughly 2 cents/kwh cheaper than my utility sells juice for!
Good article!
no, not unless you want to install all the tiny power wires by hand.
Not too good with reverse-logic, are we?
The reference is to a grain of salt because, with just a grain of salt, one wouldn't eat much of what's being served.
To take something with a dose of salt "the size of the Hope Diamond", well, one could conceivably eat the whole thing -- wait for it... -- hook, line and sinker.
This isn't snake oil. They have pictures up here.
Philip
Signatures are broken
From the article... "The flagship product, Nanosolar SolarPly, is a 14 feet x 10 feet solar electricity module delivering 120 watts per square inch at 110V."
;)
Cool. That's 2.4 megawatt a sheet. Damn, I need some of those.
If you believe these claims, I have a good deal on a bridge.
Just from reading the claims, they use the typical pseudo-scientific marketingspeak that's often used in selling scams.
"Using a high-tech space-age polymer developed by NASA for use in space, this mattress delivers the most comfortable sleeping experience scientifically possible!!"
http://www.nanosolar.com/articles.htm
They've got government contracts, funding out the wazoo, etc. They're not just a garage shop with fancy website.
This isn't the guy who claimed years back that powerline networking had infinite bandwidth because it was unsheilded, is it?
Actually, i don't think that the glass was the most expensive. Most of the cells used ruthenium dyes for their light absorbing dyes. Ruthenium is not exactly cheap. Moreover, it is not even all that plentiful. I remember hearing once at a conference that the amount of ruthenium expected to be in the earth's crust is only enough to make enough solar cells to cover the state of north dakota or something like that.
I think this is the main problem with solar cells. Until someone comes up with an effecient dye based on a more abundant metal there is no possible way that solar cells can become ubiquitous.
Though it is unclear from the site what sort of dyes this company is using -- perhaps they have found a new one. Though i suspect if they had it would be all over their site. I gather, rather, that they are just using the "nano" buzzword to make their stuff sound new and cool. Oh well.
OH, by the way i am not a solar cell scientist -- but i do work down the hall from a few. Cool.
Actually, I *am* a fan of nuclear energy; the economic case is only poor because the clean-up requirements are absurdly expensive - considering that coal-fired plants spew an order of magnitude more radioactive fallout across the countryside.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Even at five cents per kWh, it's more than 40% more than the target cost for other methods, which is around 3.5 cents per kWh. That's the range where gas, coal, and oil plants live, and where nuclear is striving to be (Westinghouse's 1000MW AP1000 reactor design is the only approved one that may reach that, and it came about because the AP600 wasn't efficient enough).
Anything much more than that without ample tax incentives (and maybe not even then) just isn't going to happen on a large scale.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
http://www.nanosolar.com/pr2.htm
No, that's correct - it is 120 watts per square inch. What they don't tell you is that you have to install a 300 foot diameter magnifying glass over your house.
If this cost # is true, then the cost of this solar panel is approximately the same as the cost of ashphalt shingles. And if *that* is true, there would be no reason to put any sort of roof on a house except for a roof made of this stuff...
Interesting that they are located near the airport. Perhaps it makes an easy escape from angry, torch carrying, mobs. http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%202440%20Embarcader o%20Way%2C%20palo%20alto%2C%20CA&ll=37.457703%2C-1 22.113719&spn=0.021729%2C0.049200/
Drat! I have to make room in my backyard among my cold fusion jacuzzi and hundred foot perpetual-motion wheel for these instant solar cells.
Or perhaps this was a transposition error, and they meant to say "120W per square meter" and somebody got confused.
Or perhaps this is all bullshit and these guys have nothing special.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Hey, if you can figure out how to run your roof through a high-speed printing-press, then go for it!
("web printing" is what is used to print newspapers, amongst other things)
What is the difference between a small revolutionary change and a large evolutionary change?
Also, the AG has written the binding opinion that anyone trying to exploit technology supposed developed by NanoSolar, Inc. would be open to physical coersion up to and probably including limb removal that would not legally be considered to be torture.
Go about your business. Nothing to see here.
Who modded this down as off topic? That's a great observation. I never thought about that expression before.
Ha, ha! Nobody ever says Italy.
You see? Capitalist thinking isn't so bad. :-)
Does this mean all stories posted on the Slashdot front page then?
You should arrive at something in the vicinity of 1400 W/m^2.
If you check out their site you'll see immediately that they are seeking finantial backers. I'm sure their intention is to create some buzz to attract more investers. Unfortunately for them, making outlandish claims may have a reverse effect.
It looks like a combination of technologies to raise the efficiencies.
Even if it's easy to implement, won't existing energy concerns have it in their best interests to block its adoption?
Why people say this, I can not understand. The companies that make and sell energy are in the energy business. That means that they make money selling energy. They don't care how they make the energy. If a new solution comes along and it's cheaper than their current way of making energy, they will implement it to lower their costs and raise their profits. That is the way the companies work. Failure to implement anything that lowers costs risks them being undersold by a competitor that does.
That said, I'm still skeptical of what they say about 5 cents per kwh (kilo watt hour). Last time I checked coal was around 1.7 and nuclear at 1.2 cents. (extra cost is due to line maintenance and costs of people) However, that was at the cost to the companies for direct generation and not to the consumer. I'm not sure which that 5 cents figure is supposed to be.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I claim that I can fly by doing nothing more than flapping my arms... How about a demonstration of these claims?
Yes, a demonstration is definitely in order.
You jump and flap, I'll record the results.
-kgj
-kgj
Based on cost, that would be true. But you also need to compare expected lifetime between each.
It may cost the same, but if you're replacing your roof more often, you haven't saved much money.
--
Brandon Petersen
...please call their lead photovoltaic physicist and public relations VP...Bat Boy (formerly lead editor for some of the world most respected check-out line journals).
I saw a program on Scientific American Fronteirs yesterday showing how a guy had created solar panels that could be 90% damaged (with holes through it) and STILL produce useable amounts of electricity.
It was in this episode called Hydrogen Hopes
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
The 3.5 cents/kwh you see for a modern power plant is for the cost at the plant, not to the customer. You have to add in the costs of supporting the network, billing, and transmission losses.
Solar power at your house for 5 cents/kwh is a lot cheaper than 3.5 cents/kwh a hundred miles away (which ends up being about three times that to the customer).
Hmm. The abundance of ruthenium is about 1 ppb in the crust, so that would be about 10^14 kg. IIRC, you need only a few mg of pure Ru per square meter, so I don't think this is the issue. Of course, it might be hard to extract that kind of amounts from the crust, but that is a different story. My old 1986 edition of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics lists a price of US$4 per gram.
I agree that the dye is expensive, but I think that that has more to do with the fact that it is a complicated organic molecule that surrounds the ruthenium atom.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
To put it another way, you can potentially air-condition and service large buildings with solar panels on the walls and heat sinks in the basement, but you will not solve the eventual oil crisis while people are still commuting from suburbs to those buildings. You would need a social transformation that moved the economy back to where people live, so that transport costs are minimised. The real snake oil is the so-called hydrogen economy which depends on making the centralised power available via transported hydrogen gas, supplied by the existing oil companies. It will enable the oil companies to maintain the social structures and the distribution system which enable them to make so much money - and society will have to pay the cost of conversion of the distribution system, vehicles etc. while maintaining their strangehold on the economy and the political system.
Of course, I might prove wrong and society might be prepared to change its ways in the necessary time frame - but if it does, I will be pleasantly amazed.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
This is awesome, and I know I may be late in replying to this story, but at the rate we're having breakthroughs in solar energy, in a few years the power will be too cheap to meter!!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I pay about 23 cents per kWh. So 5 cents per kWh is way cheapo for me. This also tells me that the story is a bucket load of snake oil (or the production is not possible for another 20 years), since if the story was remotely true, they would sell million of those panels per year over here.
I'm designing a solar vehicle as we speak (actually, my multimeter is measuring a mere .3mA @ 3.4v on a small 2' x 4' solar cell, in sunny Cambrdige, MA) and one caveat is that the measurements of different solar cells vary WIDELY, despite what the MFGR says.
My question is, has anyone done some outside comparison research on the efficiency of solar cells, beyond what the MFGRs claim to generate?
What! 14ft x 10ft panel delivering 120watts per sq inch. That's a panel that's 20,160 square inches. So that means almost 2.5Megawatts per panel. Don't fancy that on my roof ! Solar Radiation only has an intensity of 1500 watts/square meter.
I suspect somebody has got their units mixed up somewhere....
"take with a grain of salt" means "be skeptical". The phrase with this meaning comes from ancient Latin, and as far as I can tell the cause of this meaning is unknown.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Absolutely not, and I would mod you up if I could.
I wonder if this is part of the "most Slashdotters are Trekkies" effect which presumes that all power in THE FUTURE is generated by antimatter reactors, and so if we haven't found a power source that can replace everything, it must not be any good.
Morons.
+++ATH0
If the raw material is indeed snake oil, then that puts environmentalists in a quandry.
Which is the greater evil, slaughtering millions of snakes for their oil or having coal fired generators spewing toxins into the air?
My gut instinct was to say that the purpose of the salt was to balance the (artificial) sweetness of something too good to be true. However, after some research, it turns out I'm wrong.
The phrase apparently stems from ancient times. It was apparently first written as "Cum Grano Salis" by Pliny (23-79 AD) and apparently intended to either counteract bad taste of a poison remedy -or- to help fight the poison. Read the following and draw your own conclusion.
Some references: 1 2 3 4
(assuming it's real, of course)
Why not have something like those folding sunvisors people put up in their windshields to keep out some of the heat? You could sit out on the beach on a nice sunny day, unfurl your solar panel, and plug it into your laptop as you write code, research proposals, or whatever you use your laptop for.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
It's a bit unfair the company is now being criticized for an error in the article in the Hindu Times. Clearly, the claim of 120 watts per square inch is bogus. But then again, I couldn't find this claim on their website, so it could simply mean the reporter made an error here. If I understood correctly, it's the output they claim from one whole panel. Which isn't that impressive, but would still be interesting if the price is right.
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
Good to see I'm getting *some* backing.
Slashdot: 24 hours behind every other site or your money back!
It doesn't make it better to continue to post both crap and legitimate articles and to put "take it with a grain of salt" at the end. Whether or not Slashdot science links are snake oil or legit news seems to be random. Basically, not enough of the editors can tell the difference. Slashdot needs a qualified science editors!
Their website lacks simple details. If you look at other sites that sell BP solar panels, they say "You can expact this many KwHr from a 20 2'x4' panels." They show pictures of the 14x10 array, but it doesn't actually commit the output of it. It says the per square inch figure. The commercial page mentions installations of 1Kw or more... 1Kw would be 10 square inches of their product. Very odd. If normal solar panels were less expensive I'd be all for it. If every house had a 2Kw array, it would definitly help reduce load during peak times in the summers, and reduce overall consumption. I did some research, and if I were to pay $60,000+ (new price) for a solar array, after 30 years I could expect to have saved $30,000. Groan.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
I've heard it stated that the amount of energy in sunlight on Earth's surface is between 1 and 6 KW per square meter, probably being closer to 1 KW per square meter.
.65 Watts per square inch, with 12% efficiency would be about .08 watts per square inch made by these solar panels.
There are 1550 square inches in 1 square meter. Even if there was (optimistic) 6 KW/sq meter of sunlight hitting the Earth, you'd only have 3.9 watts per square inch.
So their claim of over 100+ Watts per square inch is obviously an error. I don't think they'd even claim that since it doesn't even come close.
They also claim that their panels are 12% efficient, so a more realistic figure would be 1 KW of sunlight per square meter, equalling about
But far be it from me to give a Slashdot staffer any credit for correct use of the English language.
pretty much, which is why so many people are wanting this technology. ill get it if it turns out to be true and economiclly viable. Invest in these companies NOW ;)
Mess with the Best, Die Like the Rest
OK, since this is a solar photovoltaics post:
Someone is going to claim that solar will never be practical, because it is 10 - 15% efficient, while internal combustion, etc. is 30%+. Please, consider that you have to *buy the energy* that goes into that 30% efficienct machine, while the 15% efficient solar panel gets it all free - then run the numbers. The only cost that matters is the dollars per Watt capital cost of the cells upfront (which is still too high, but coming down.)
Someone is going to claim that solar panels produce less energy over their lives than it takes to manufacture them. This has not been true for about 40 years.
Someone is going to claim that solar panels are a toxic danger to human health. Please consider that they are manufactured using identical processes to microprocessors, are easier to disassemble for recycling, and last 20 - 30 years plus, as compared to the five year or so length for most consumer electronics.
Someone is going to claim that solar only makes sense in certain parts of the United States. Keep in mind that, for instance, Albany, NY gets 80% of the solar radiation of Reno, NV. Since you pay twice as much for electricity in Albany, solar panels actually make more sense there. (Remember, most solar panels go on rooftops and spin meters backwards - you get retail price ($.08 - $.15 / kWh,) not wholesale ($.02-$.04) like a power plant.
Someone is going to claim you would have to blanket the desert with solar panels to make a workable power plant. Is this what you do with a distributed, smart, resource, that can occupy unused roof space anywhere? Did we take all of our microchips and assemble them into one giant supercomputer in the desert? Solar panels belong in a distributed network of generators - at the end of the wire, and putting them there is cheap and practical.
Someone is going to claim the solar industry can never meet real-world power demands. Check any industry publication for an interesting statistic - in 1996, 100 megawatts of solar were manufactured. Jan - Dec. 2004 saw about 1100 MW (about $ 6 billion worth) manufactured. Still pretty small, but an amazing growth rate.
What does solar cost now? About 1/20 what it did in the 1970s, but still about twice as much as grid electricity. Once you buy the panels, and finance them with, say, a home equity loan, you're looking at $.18 - $.25 /kWh. Getting closer every year, but still not quite there.
Finally, a comment on the article. Yeah, Nanosolar is pretty neat, but I think that Konarka is quite a bit further along - and doesn't share nanosolar's tendency to overpromise. Here's what needs to happen. Their efficiency is fine, don't care - a 5% or 10% efficient cell, as long as it's less than $1.50 / Watt, the world will beat a path to your door. However, their longevity is not there. A normal silicon solar panel lasts at least 20 years, these things last more like 5 right now. Hence their strategy of putting them in consumer electronics that have about that lifetime anyway.To be a real power generation source, they need to get that lifetime up by a factor of 4 - doable with the right encapsulants, some chemistry, getting rid of liquid electrolytes, etc. I bet one of these poeple will be at $.10 / kWh in five years - but the conventional silicon cells can probably get there in about 8, with manufacturing and scale improvements. So it's a real race...we'll see who pulls it out.
Their investors are well-known and have funded or founded some very "real" companies. They include Benchmark Capital (who funded eBay), USVP (who provided initial funding for Sun), and the founders of Google (Brin and Page).
First, by "manufactured by printing", they don't mean a roll to roll process like a printing press. They propose to deposit materials with an inkjet-like mechanism.
Second, what they call "nanotechnology" is surface chemistry. There are ways to make semi-regular structures by bulk chemical means, and that's what they're doing. They did throw a reference to "bioengineered self-assembly" in, but that's not how they do it. The processing looks much more like processes you'd do in a wafer fab. There are common fab processes like electrodeposition, chemical removal of support substrates, and heating in an inert atmosphere.
The basic idea is to address the reasons that solar cells are inefficient. In bulk materials like silicon, only a small fraction of the photons do anything useful. Most of the photons are at the wrong wavelength. And many of the photon interactions that do occur don't result in an electron being delivered to the output. They're trying to fix both of those problems.
Their policy seems to be to shut up until it works. It might work, or it might not. They're not selling stock, and they're not issuing press releases. They have VC funding and some money from DARPA.
Hell, I'd settle for 120W/m^2. Roof your house with these suckers and you'd have to draw a tiny fraction of the utility power you draw now. Not to mention the potential gains from mounting these on hybrid cars.
+++ATH0
Actually, I'm not certain that that's where the expression comes from at all. To be taken with a grain of salt comes from the latin "cum grano salis", and was used by Pliney in describing Pompey's discovery of an antidote for poison that had to be taken with a small amount of salt to work. Since in Roman times, they believed that salt was linked to intelligence, the phrase "cum grano salis" was adopted and came to mean "(take) with a little common sense", which is similar to the "be skeptical" meaning of todays idiom. The other modern day explanation generally given is that a small amount of salt can make something unpallatable taste better. It's been common practice to raise the amount of salt by how dubious you believe the story to be for quite a while.
Quoting from a random site here, but it sounds about right if you give it a bit of thought.
TO TAKE WITH A GRAIN OF SALT
In the chambers of the great king Mithridaes, Cneius Pompeius discovered in a private notebook, in the king's own hand, the formula for an antidote: two dry nuts, the same number of figs, and twenty leaves of rue ground together, with a grain of salt added; whoever took this on an empty stomach would be harmed by no poison that day.
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
First: four grains are a carat, and a carat is 200 mg, so 20 grains go into a metric gram.
Second: The Hope Diamond is about 67.125 c, which puts it at 13.425 gram.
Third: A dose of 13.425 gram of salt (NaCl) is considered hazardous to human health, and 30 gram are almost a deadly dose.
So if you ever think about taking a dose of salt the size of the Hope Diamond, make sure, the 911 call will get through.
What we really need is a photovoltaic material that is extremely hard. Something that can take repeated stresses of thousands of kilos per square centimeter and still produce a small amount of electricity from sunlight. It should have a high friction coefficient also.
Then we can replace the asphalt in road surfaces with this material. Roads take up a huge amount of land surface in inhabited areas and they are always facing direct sunlight. They go where the people are, which is where the electricity is needed.
In a sense this research is all too little, too late. It should have been done thirty years ago when the Arabs invaded Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish calander, and cut off America's oil supplies. At that time, America couldn't respond to the seizure of the oil supplies because it had just been defeated in the incredibly stupid and wasteful Vietnam war. They basically had to surrender to the Arabs on the terms that they demanded through their front organization OPEC.
Actually it is the Arabs who should have been investing hundreds of billions of dollars in alternative energy research. Their primary vision is the defense of Islam, and no one in the West would hesitate to allow the destruction of Islam and its holy places if it were a choice between Islam and oil. By investing hundred of billions in energy studies, they could have developed technology and infrastructure by now that would have removed the necessity for having Westerners occupy militarily the Gulf oil fields and the holy cities that are in the area. But they chose to instead just buy jets and expensive automobiles and then just toss them away like used tissues.
Eventually it will be small companies like this one who develop the technology to move out of the oil era. And it will be done first in remote and unnoticed places where the Western media pays no attention. The situation will someday reach the point where the bankrupt 'superpowers' who believe that they are are in control of the world's destiny become only entertainment for people in places who have developed their economies outside of the oil-military power matrix run by the Arabs and the Americans.
- then where exactly are you going to get your solar power? From glow-in-the-dark stickers left on your ceiling? I don't think so! Or maybe you'll just burn lots of dead plants to make light... still not very efficient....
From the article: The flagship product, Nanosolar SolarPly, is a 14 feet x 10 feet solar electricity module delivering 120 watts per square inch at 110V. The company is now offering solar panels at below $1 per peak watt.
I find it hard to believe the 120 watts per square inch claim, but we can extract the cost of a panel from the information above. 14*12*10*12*120 = 2419200. 2 ½ Million Dollars per panel. Now for your laptop it would only need a 1 inch Square of material to supply 120 Watts and cost $120 for that square inch.
I am extremely dubious of these claims.
Letter To Iran
I'm all for alternative energies, but the problem is rather the unrealistic views some (especially the greens) have of it.
It's not as much a question of *IF* it helps when their is alternative energy available, but rather the amount it can replace - at least, when you are diosmantling (as happens in my country) nuclear powerplants that provide about 60% of the total power. This was due thanks to the pressure of the greens. No-one seemed to have wondered at that time, where that energy should come from in the future - apart from some nonsensical crap about windmills and the lot.
Ofcourse, it's plainly obvious that those won't do by a long stretch, so then it DOES become important to know how much it can replace. Solar can't do it, not even a tenth of the required energy. Neither can wind. Or hydro. Or geothermal. Or biofuel. And all taken together, they STILL wouldn't replace more then half of what is needed today, let alone in 5 years, when nuclear powerplants are shut down.
In fact, from your entire list, only two CAN have a reasonable chance of providing enough energy now and in the future; and those are nuclear and/or coal.
I think that's what ppl mean, when they say alternative energies are not real options as yet. Sure, anything that helps is welcome, but in any realistic viepoint, ALL of the above mentionned energysources - apart from nuclear and fossile fuels - even combined together will NOT be make more then a drop in the ever power-hungry ocean, at least in large parts of the western world.
I think the only real solution is fusion. But untill that because viable, the use of coal will rise, alternative energies will remain largely a fringe activity (at least on large scale demand) and closing down nuclear reactions without providing real alternatives remain political idiocies without equal in a socio-economic sense.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
As always, take these claims with a dose of salt the size of the Hope Diamond.
Slashdot
Hearsay for nerds. Stuff that never happens.
OK, the Holy Grail of solar power has been realized. Don't jump for joy before you clear the nails from the area.
Society is controlled by Big Bu$ine$$. Big Bu$ine$$ controls the di$tribution of Power to the masses (us!).
Cheap solar power destroys that fragile balance. Inventors around the world are constantly finding new and cheaper ways to create usable power. This will most likely be crushed and the inventors "canceled and removed" before anything can result.
Nothing to see here.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
Claiming a DARPA contract does not mean you actually have one.
Okay, when can I roof my house in this and at least use it to power the water heater?
MORTAR COMBAT!
Now I can power my 100W radio by solar power on Field Day, and get the contacts AND the extra points for using alternate power!!!
;-)
No more QRP for this ham!
No matter where you go... there you are.
Great, and the only thing that calms my kid down is letting him suck on a block of salt rock!
Yall really ruining my day!!!
hmmm...good catch, i guess what was ment was readily avalible ruthenium. Interesting. I suppose that is what i get for repeating what i heard without checking it out first. Such is life.
:)
the cost of ruthenium has also gone up a bit, i think right now it is somewhere around $50 per gram. Yeah, something like that -- if you get the trichloride stuff. Still not all that expensive. But more than the glass i think.
The organics CAN be expensive. Though i belive that you can get decent effeciency using just bipyridine ligands. (correct me if i am wrong)wich are not all that much. (~$4 a gram)
Again, though i am just talking based on the chat i hear in the hall. I could definately be wrong
Seriously though, we're going to be needing that power soon enough here.
.
In February 2001, Pat Gelsinger, chief technology officer at Intel Corp said . .
"within a decade, microprocessors could run at up to 30 GHz but that, if nothing is done, the power consumption will be 10 kilowatts and the leakage current will be one-third of the power consumption."
New Rule:
(which congress should pass but never will)
Oil companies should not be permitted to buy this
company, or the patents.
Guess who owns nickel-metal hydride battery patents? Yup. Exxon-Mobil. No electric cars here, move along, nothing to see.
If there is a threat to their business model, energy companies will buy out the corporation which developed the tech and drown it in the nearest toilet.
Every single /. article about alternative energy gets posts from people dissing it because it can't do it all. Where did this requirement come from? Is single-sourcing all of our energy even desirable? Is it possible? Where does this stupid meme keep coming from?
It comes from the same place that the Linux-Is-The-Only-Necessary-OS meme comes from.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I'm willing to concede that I'm not entirely right, at least on the origins, but I think the accepted usage of the expression is not the proper usage. At the very least, it's a point worthy of discussion.
Slashdot: 24 hours behind every other site or your money back!
I think enough people have vested interests in the energy infrastructure to raise doubts both for and against alternative energy sources. There's enough people with enough at stake so that easy, simplistic reactions will be raised about various energy sources over and over again. The article itself has innaccuracies(exaggeration?) Why should we expect the responses be any better informed? Or are you slyly suggesting there's a conspiracy by Big Oil to spread FUD on Slashdot?
I certainly didn't mean to say anything bad about The Hindu. I didn't look at the rest of the paper but the reporting level was suprisingly technical for what appeared to be a general-consumption paper. I assumed that the mistake that the great-grandparent post was pointing out is just a mistake in the process of re-writing a press release. Or it may even come straight from the press release, which is usually written by the marketing staff not the technical staff.
I'd love to see general journalism in the US do as well with technical articles. Generally when a science story comes out I glance at the headline and make a note to myself to wait for Science News to come out with it. Just today I saw an article in the Washington Post (my hometown newspaper but also a major journal of record) claiming that 16% of children were above the 95th percentile in some category.
Often I assume that when Slashdot references a paper like The Hindu, it's usually a wire story or press release that got picked up and could have come from anywyere. We get the reference to whatever paper the submitter happens to read.
But, for example, I'll feel a lot more strongly about the accusations of secret laws in the John Gilmore article when they're picked up by a more reputable paper than the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It's not that it's a bad paper so much as that I don't know its reputation and so I can't evaluate the quality of its claims. When only a single paper reports an issue I tend to dismiss it (not being of the mind that the government is deliberately, but not entirely effectively, clamping down.)
Its toward the end... http://www.nanosolar.com/video/ModernMarvelsTV.MPG
What is missing in this analysis is this usage of energy - in the south energy is used to cool homes during the summer. This is great for solar - as temperatures rise, more energy is available. In the north, energy is used for heating in the winter, because the summers are already cool. During the winter, the north get 0-2 hours of 1000 watt insolation equivalent (or about 120 Watt-hours) per day. That would not heat your home above freezing...
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
"the problem with plastic films is that it is hard to make them last a long time while still being impermeable to oxygen and the liquid solvent inside the cell."
hmm... what about the tech that we use for soda bottles (i.e. HDPE/EVOH/HDPE, where the '/' is an adhesive (e.g. maleated PE))? that gives you a pretty good barrier layer, and it's relatively cheap... PE is fairly transparent, and the EVOH layer could be really thin (e.g. ~20), and still work. i've done transmitted-light microscopy on sections of material like this... has anyone tried this for solar cells?
Actually, peak electrical load in the northeast is in the summer, also for air conditioning. It does get hot (and humid).
In fact, the electrical demand peaks and solar availability peaks are fairly well aligned, making solar power (if affordable) a decent source to help cover peak demand.
Raw electrical demand data for New England, by hour: http://www.iso-ne.com/Historical_Data/hist_data.h
Most heat around here comes from natural gas or oil.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
Today DARPA released a bid request for a 50% efficient solar cell.
There is no reset button in life; however, there are bonus levels.
This sounds like the kind of mistake made by somebody who's used to working with the metric system writing down the wrong name for unfamiliar foreign antique measurement systes, rather like most of us tend to misread things measured in pecks per square furlong or whatever.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
On Saturday evening, talk show host Art Bell had an interview with journalist Douglas Mulhall in which they discussed this new solar cell technology. The Hindustan times is the first paper to cover this development (American media is too obsessed with the Pope and Chris Rock). Bell is typically a ham (both figuratively and literally), but occasionally he hits on some very leading edge issues, which make listening to the other 80% of nonsense worth it (and the nonsense is entertaining).
"120 watts per square inch at 110V"
:
I'm not so good doing math with feets and inches (how many inches in a square feet ? 144 it seems...)
140 square feet make 20 160 square inches
@ 120w/sq-inches, that nifty panel would produce
2 419 200 w, so it is 2,5 Megawatt...nice, could use that...
"He claims that the Nanosolar SPV cell costs only $ 0.36 per peak watt."
"The company is now offering solar panels at below $1 per peak watt"
So I don't really know what a peak watt is (" Peak watts: The measurement of electricity produced by a solar generator at noon on a sunny day, under predetermined standard conditions" is quite unhelping...) , but
0.36 * 2419200 = $870 912 for a 140 square feets panel...(140 sqfeet=13,01 square meter...)
or $66 941.74 / square meter.
or $6220/square feet
So either my calculations are totally f*ed up, or a 140 square feet of this SPV panel costs the same as a nice, large car...at minimum cost...
Now the post mentions 5 cents per kilowatt-hour...dunno where it comes from...
Anyone cares to do the math ?
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
120w per square inch at 110v!!!
so if I cover my room with this, and switch on my 40w light bulb
I'll effectively live in a dark hole, right?
could that be used to create a space/time travelling machine
seriously this sounds cool, but does it run cool too?
what if my seagles friend on the beach decide to dump their natural dejections on it, would that impact the perf?
what is the cost of maintainance?
I'm willing to concede that the accepted usage is probably not the proper usage, and I did find your explanation very interesting. It's dismaying how infrequently people pay real attention to whay they're saying :)
http://www.science.doe.gov/sbir/awards_abstracts/s bir/cycle16/phase1/041.htm
No offense, but is this documented in any news source other than The Hindu? I'm reminded of the kid Lucknow who fraudulently announced his award from NASA. The Indian press apparently ate that up.
Hmmm - I live in downtown Chicago, and conditions are apparently very different here. We do use A/C in the summer, but the peak electric bill is during the winter. As far as I know, there is no gas/oil heating of skyscrapers - piping explosives around large buildings would be pretty dangerous. Maybe some of them use central heating, I don't know (at least ours does not!).
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
you can be sure the oiligopoly will never let it reach the market in a competitive form.
hydro-quebec is producing electricity at less than 1 canadian per kwh, with water, not sun
I wonder if these were deployed en-masse if it would result in accelerated global-warming.
Don't solar panels produce heat as a by-product?
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
As per Nanosolar's website:
OPEN QUOTE
----------
Q: What is the expected cost per square meter of typical Nanosolar solar cell module?
A: A square meter of (an array of interconnected) Silicon solar cells (a "module") has a product cost of approximately $300 (or $2.75/Wp) from today's cost leaders in Silicon. Nanosolar solar sheets/modules are based on much thinner cells (up to 1000x thinner in their active layer) and tend to cost as little as $30 per square meter, or 10x less. Note that this does not mean that there is a cost/performance difference by this same factor, however, as Silicon solar cells will continue to be the efficiency leaders for the forseeable future.
----------
END QUOTE
Note:
Wp as in "$2.75/Wp" is Watts at standerdized peak-sun levels.
So there technology seems to be significantly cheaper... although they dont mention there own power generation levels ($2.75/Wp that is mentioned is for current solar technology), but they seem to imply it is similar to or better than (although not necessarily significantly so) current solar technology.
END
I would have put it more simply...
New study shows that solar panels may cause damage to internal organs..... when swallowed in large quantities.
"The amount of intelligence on this planet is a constant. The population is growing." -Cole's Axiom
Ah, yes, that's all very nice in theory, but alas not very plausable to work in reality (a bit like communism).
Something the size of alaska? Who would actually build it? Seems a bit overstreched for one country. A group of countries, then? What about the third world? And where exactly would you build it? You say; the ocean, but minimise the possible problems with that concept (much as windmills here in my country). In theory, we could perhaps create 20% of our energy that way, if we put every square meter of our beach full with them. In reality, we all know that isn't going to happen, because no-one wants that, ppl find it disturbing, environmental issues are abound (nesting birds, etc), etc.
The same goes with your proposal. You claim it wouldn't impact the environment; but how do you know? Did you have any studies on it? Isn't it possible that sea-life dependen on the sun, would get affected? Will it not become a burden to the sea-routes and a danger to ships? Who would be legally responsable? What if they are layed in international waters? What is the cost of maintainance? How many will get wrecked by storms? Will it be economical viable?
All these questions need a reasonable answer, before even contemplating it. And I think that, in practise, such a project would not work, certainly not without having considerable drawbacks, and it being not economical viable.
In fact, if you are pondering about sea-floating power-units, there are already hybrid wind/wave generators (or detailed plans thereof) that show a lot more potential then mere solarcells. But even those are not yet build, or at least not in large numbers, because their are also considerable doubts on their viability. And one has to wonder what countries will have to do that don't have large coastal areas or sea-access.
I'm afraid it's not at all that rosy, in regard to alternative energies. It shouldn't stop us researching, ofcourse, but I fear many greenish dudes are simply letting their judgement be clouded with self-delusions. I mean, c'mon: even with giant breakthroughs, mass-production, reduced costs, etc. Their are inherent limits to almost all alternative energies. You can't build windmills on every square meter, you can't continue to build geothermal powerhouses (provided you have that option in the first place), nor classic waterpower by dams. Their are is a rather limited possibility for it, especially in a lot of smaller european countries.
And what if there is no wind for some days, or no sunshine? Sure, you could provide some redundancy, but it still is a fact those energysources are not providing a steady, regular stream or amount of power, which makes it harder to manage. The only possible exeption are probably wave-powergenerators.
No, the real solution will come when we can build (economical) workable fusionreactors. Untill then, coal, oil and nuclear will remain the main energy-provider, some countries (like Iceland) excluded, ofcourse.
On an individual level, I do see a future for solar-energy, ofcourse, but I doubt it will have a huge impact at a household, untill the moment it becomes viable to have enough electricity for everything we do now, derived from an area the size of your roof-top, even when half of the time it doesn't see any sun.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
I was mistaken about the amounts. You need about 1 g RuN3 dye per square meter of solar cells, which corresponds to maybe 100 mg of pure Ru, or $5. Glass is actually more expensive than you'd think from looking at a wine bottle, as most parents of football players know.
The organics CAN be expensive. Though i belive that you can get decent effeciency using just bipyridine ligands. (correct me if i am wrong)wich are not all that much. (~$4 a gram)
I didn't realize that they're easy to sythesize. However, I believe that there are patents on many of these dyes, so they are not free as in speech. Neither as in beer for that matter.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
I know its popular to bash oil companies, but its also disingenuous, especially when you lie.
The patent for NiMH batteries is held by ECD Ovonics, which is owned by Texaco and Mobil.
The question a thinking individual might ask is why are oil companies interested in developing better, more efficient batteries when it would mean less oil being consumed to keep them charged. The answer is simply this - oil companies dont' care about oil. Oil is just a highly profitable commodity. What oil companies care about is energy.
The vast majority of research being conducted into renewable and environmentally safe energy sources is being conducted by the oil companies, not by governments. The biggest advances in materials sciences are coming out of universities that are getting loads of cash from oil companies. And the biggest conservation and reclaimation efforts are being done by oil companies.
Please, please...stop swallowing the anti-capitalist rhetoric you're being spoonfed, do some research, and think for yourself.
I'm disabled, with multiple sclerosis. I drive a cool Jazzy 1113 electric wheelchair nowadays. I love it - it's small, it's responsive, it's comfortable ... and, thanks to the small batteries, it's also not real good for tooling around outside. Around here, I can take the bus to the grocery store, and make it back, then she needs to be recharged again before I do anything else.
I'd love to get something using these, maybe as a "sunroof", to allow me to make an extended trip far from power plugs. 120 watts may not sound like much, but that's 5 amps at 24 volts, continuous, all while it's in sunlight.
I'd spend the cash on it in a New York minute.
Lemon curry?
Organic cells use thiophene backbone polymers. There is a host of organic compounds that absorb light. Do you think your car painted with Ruthenium? I agree though, there aren't many details on the website. Now 10 percent effiency, that is something to be skeptical about. To date the best organic solar cell is 4 precent.
Finding someone competant to review scientific matters for slashdot is not the problem. Finding someone who is both competant and a left winger like the rest of the slashdot editors will be utterly impossible.
No idea about those polymers; maybe that's what these guys are doing. But note that there's only one gram of dye on a square meter,and 100 mg of oxygen over the course of 10 years suffices to kill the cell. The surface-to-volume ratio kind of sucks.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Not to totally karma-whore ( I don't need the karma, folks, I wast all my time on this damn site ), anyone want to help me get together a list of symbols to track? Here's a start :
MSFT SCOXE SCOX IFLB.OB SNE RNWK TWTC
I may just make my first journal entry because of this... it can serve as a meeting-point for those of us interested in tracking stocks by slashdot preference...
You may actually be right. Maybe what they wanted to say is that, given enought solar power, each square inch could produce up to 120 Watts (before saturating, melting, whatever). That means you can use mirrors and the like to reduce the size of the panel. ...or the number could just be completely off.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I'm not usually so critical, but I also read the per square inch number and did the math on their 10x14 and figured I must be missing something, because there's no way you're they're generating that much power on that size array at that cost.
I suspect that they have very small "units" which have high efficiency but but they're mixing the article to also talk about their current flagship product, which must not use this newest technology.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
That's not necessarily true any longer. Most larger power coops will actually buy power from their customers. In the desert southwest, for instance, power companies have realized a cost savings from customers who use solar and dump their excess back into the grid. Since the power companies don't have to maintain residential solar power setups, and because they pay less than the going rate for consumer generated power, its become a real treat for them. The only thing slowing the adoption of solar in most areas is a) the expense (not just of solar cells, but large battery banks and inverting equipment) and b) less than favorable weather. This development alone may make it practical in the southwest (even to the point that power companies change their business models to just the distribution and brokering of customer generated power, with some backup of their own), and make make solar an option in less sunny climates.
Also, there are a few large coops (Progress Energy I believe is one) who in the past had advocated a distributed power distribution network based on new safe reactor designs.
One thing that should be factored into the cost of oil in the US is a major portion of the DOD budget. We have spent about $200B so far to conquer Iraq and hopefully, it is clear to everybody by now that was entirely about oil and had nothing to do with defense. We will quite likely spend another $200B before the Iraqi's ask us to leave. You can buy one heck of a lot of solar cells for $400B. You can also institute a heck of a lot of conservation measures. For example, in the US we could classify SUV's as cars (which they clearly are) for the purposes of CAFE. That would cost almost nothing,
...the people who dis it the most can never answer a simple question. Show us where they have a guaranteed price where they are right now in kw/hr for their homeowners electricity for the next ten or twenty years. Hard to do any projections and cost analysis without it. You can get that figure with any of the homeowner alternatives, because you can outright *purchase* it, with grid supplied you are leasing the delivery infrastructure in perpetutity, never to be paid off, with zero price guarantees on the supplied and delivered product. Kinda nutso when you look at it that way, but everyone is so used to it they don't seem to notice that aspect of it. Would people buy their home like that? Nope, they would think it's crazy, and it would be. But with something as vital to modern living as electricty they gleefully sign up for that sort of contract, content to wait for government or the grid suppliers to "solve the energy problem". Well duh on a stick, them boys ain't never gonna do anything that won't result in you sending them a fat check monthly forever and two days, no matter if it's allegedly green or not.
Anyway, glad to see more research being done in PV I thoroughly like it, clean, quiet and functional.
The premise being that if we are developing improved green energy production technologies, and at the same time we are also improving the overall energy efficiency of the devices we use daily, at some point (a highly fuzzy point, actually) the two technologies would be within a tolerance of eachother that it would be economically foolish *NOT* to employ those technologies on a large scale.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It seems the best of these ($399) will satisfy the great-grandparent post's need for 20 W (well, assuming that he can get close enough to its maximum output of 25 W). And, for only $150, he can get one that will extend his battery life as he's requested, with a maximum output of 15W. Of course, the cheaper one's not flexible, but it's not as big (in surface area), either.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I would like my roof to be impermeable to water, support a coupla' feet of snow adn withstand significant wind.
so that's 3 reasons right there.
Here's the one taken during the day
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
How is this any different that this:
1 /1 0/1832253&tid=126&tid=14
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/0
Ok I didn't RTFA, but it sounds the exact same. I am getting a bit jaded with all these "Anouncements", which I am learning are nothing more than advertisments, PR, and bs.
This seems to follow the video card buisness model where you make a paper card and you never see it.
Much like like the vaunted PS3 and the CELL processor... Can I buy one? No. I will believe it when I see it otherwise its all so much marketing bullshit.
No doubt whatever company released this information wants to go public or the researchers are trying to get money or whatever.
Nano mumbo jumbo paint saves the world! Weee!
When someone acutally produces it, and someone acutally buys it, and someone else actually applies it and see how it functions in the real world, then I will get excited.
Isn't solar power free after the first investment? How is cost calculated?
Even a quick calculation of the amperage coming off of this sucker is ludicrous.
14' X 10' = 140 ft^2
140 ft^2 * 144 in^2/ft^2 = 20160 in^2
(and 120 W/in^2)
20160 in^2 * ( 120 W/in^2) = 2419200 W
(delivered at 110V)
2419200 W / 110 V = 22000 A
!! 22 thousand amps! Yow
You'll need a 1/2" X 6" Bussbar to conduct that much current.
We have a lot of information for conventional silicon photovoltaics. They are indeed very robust and seem to live forever unless physically damaged.
These panels, on the other hand, are quite different. Until we have some history of them installed under actual field conditions, we can only guess at the lifespan.
A detailed plan for generating electricity in the Sahara already exists. The technology is called Concentrating Solar Power or CSP and has already proved itself on a large scale in the Mojave Desert. The details have been worked out by TREC, the Trans-Mediterranean Energy Cooperation. See http://www.trec-eumena.org/
The results of the EU ECOSTAR CSP program have just been released at a workshop held last thursday in Brussels. The 140-page report can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.dlr.de/ecostar. CSP power stations occupying an area the size of France in the Sahara, using available technology, can produce the current total energy consumption of the whole world.
As owner of the Hope Diamond, I must say that a grain of salt the size of the Hope is no big deal. I've had better diamonds in my time.
You're probably mistaken about generator companies. There probably won't be all that many, unless they are maintaining the panels on the roofs of buildings and carports. If you put the generation right next to the points of use, you don't need any more transmission and distribution equipment and your capital costs go way, way down; the companies which sell power along with a contract to maintain a roof are going to beat the other guys, because they'll get their real-estate for free.
Note also that if the cost target can be hit (note that Nanosolar doesn't have any recent press releases, so take carefully) the cost minimum for electricity will not be late at night, but in the mid-morning when the panels hit their full output but demand for e.g. A/C hasn't come up yet. Expect new markets to come out of the opportunities for arbitrage.
And as long as morning juice is cheap, why not charge your car and replace some motor fuel?
Sustainability and energy independence essay
While solar for electrical generation is still barely cost-effective if at all (and I have seen a few studies indicating that it takes more energy to produce most solar cells than they are likely to produce in their lifetime), solar hot water heat is DIRT CHEAP and very efficient.
:)
And it works very well even in areas with not much sunlight. My father installed a solar hot water heater in the family's first house when I was a little kid. The backup gas-fired heater barely got used, even in the dead of winter in central New Jersey.
It definately can't replace everything, but if you like long hot showers, solar can pay for itself very quickly.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Actually there are some obnoxious Dell laptops that have a huge power brick rated for 130Watts.
There are also many companies that make desktop replacements and use desktop processors. I haven't looked but I wouldn't be surprised if some of those models suck more than 120Watts.
What I would love to see is a hybrid gas/electric or ust plain electric that had solar panels. I don't think the panels are cheap enough to do this but I also think you would never see a major car maker produce these anyway.
If you can sell solar at retail prices instead of wholesale prices, it makes sense. With those kinds of price supports, almost any kind of energy makes sense. I could easily set up a propane-fueled generator and sell the electricity back and do well.
This says it all. The article says this can generate electricity for as cheap as $0.05 a kW. You say electricity costs $0.02-$0.04 a kW wholesale. It's still not cost effective, even if you don't want to make a profit on it.
I read the sci tech posting. At 12% efficiency, surely they mean 120 Watts per square meter.....
If you-all'd install PV panels a few inches off the roof, you'll get a dual benefit.
You'll have the equivalent of a "fly roof" (google it, I've only seen them in Australia) shading your real roof, and you get the electricity.
HG
10 watts per square foot is typical, 120 watts per square inch is a ludicrous claim.
/. has taught me a new word today.
Even at 30% a lot of applecarts are going to be overturned. Hang on, it's going to be interesting.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Every single /. article about alternative energy gets posts from people dissing it because it can't do it all. Where did this requirement come from? Is single-sourcing all of our energy even desirable? Is it possible? Where does this stupid meme keep coming from?
Maybe no one is saying one has to supply all energy. Maybe instead they are saying that one has to be economically feasible. Cost per Watt has to be below a certain amount otherwise people will keep using cheaper fuels...
I'm guessing this means that maintanence and replacement of solar cells keep the price steady otherwise wouldn't the expense of the solar panels drop off after the solar plants are all installed and operating for some time?
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
Notice that it's from Hindu.com, and they're all metric over there... I'll bet that nobody in the editorial chain has a good enough grasp of English units to have caught the error.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
and you can site the turbines off-shore or in places of high wind.
However, as a founding member of the Solar Energy Society of Canada Inc. (SESCI), it's good to see this at last.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If you want the utility to supply you only when the sun isn't shining, expect to pay a lot of money for them to keep the lines, generators etc. working just for those times you need them.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Consider electric vehicles while you're at it. If you're feeding 5 cent/KWH juice to a car (electric or plug-in hybrid) which uses 350 WH/mile, your "fuel" cost is 1.75 cents/mile. To equal that with a gas car, you'd have to be getting 100+ mpg at current prices!
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Not a product yet but . . http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/01 14_050114_solarplastic.html
"As always, take these claims with a dose of salt the size of the Hope Diamond."
/.?
This, from an editor on
Voila, you've burned coal with no carbon emissions.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
The argument isn't over whether to use solar energy, it is whether to use it more directly, or less directly.
And of course, solar energy is nuclear energy; it's just the reactor is already built, and near enough to take advantage of.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
If the stuff is manufactured as a sticky-backed sheet, you might well be able to just clean an old, tired set and stick down new ones on top just like you'd nail new shingles over old.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
If you read the really scientifically written article, youd see that you can get 120W per square inch. That means a 4ft x4ft module could deliver 276kW. Should be enough for running a few lightbulbs....
:-)
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Like the battery from black light power, I'll believe it when I see the panels hit their claimed price point.
Yeah, I Googled for more information as soon as I read about this, with the exact same results and conclusion. Plus, check out the images on the Nanosolar Products page -- they have two black JPGs on there, one with gridlines.
I'm not calling BS just yet, but I can't say I'm convinced this is anything more than a hoax right now. If it turns out to be true..... well, it'll be something to think about once I become a homeowner.
So I look at the website linked under his sig. That is much weaker than nanosolars IMO. Very unapealing. Before criticizing, look within.
What a load of crap.
Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia Emerging and Ecotopia?? :)
Lucky for me I always have Emergency Pants!
Not sure about Chicago but I can tell you that Cleveland has a central steam generating facility that provides heat to most of the downtown area. Hell, you aren't allowed by fire code to use inductive electric heaters. The steam distribution system can be seen by driving around on a cold damp day, quite a few manhole covers will be billowing steam.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
You are probably off by a factor of 10.
I just had a row of shingles torn off my house in a 75+ mph storm recently. I got quote for $800 to replace them. I balked at the cost and ended up figuring out how to do it myself. It cost me $23 to do the work, including purchase of the following: 1 pack of 20-year asphalt shingles, 1 pack shingling nails, one cat claw, tube of tar
The rest of the cost is labor, liability, and all the safety precautions needed, scaffolding, etc. You are equating this total cost for asphalt installation vs. the cost of the materials for solar installation.
On top of typical installation, for the solar cells you have to drill the decking to add the wiring, you have to wire them up in your attic, you have to integrate them into your electrical infrastructure, etc. You will not be breaking even by a long shot.
I don't own a car, but there is probably not much ruthenium in my bikes. :)
Dyes in dye-sensitized semiconductor photovoltaics need to satisfy different requirements than those in paint. Most importantly, it should release an electron to the semiconductor when it absorbs a photon and should have a low probability of recapturing that electron from the semiconductor. How DSSC cells operate is very different from purely organic cells. The latter still have very low efficiencies and often a mediocre lifetime---they won't survive 25 years in full sunlight. Now 10 percent effiency, that is something to be skeptical about.
Indeed, at least if it had been a fully organic system. The first nanocrystalline DSSC cell ever made directly had an efficiency of 7%. Actually it is more disappointing than too good to be true that the efficiency has climbed so little in 15 years time.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
you always salt the structure - it's the impurities that tranlate the light frequencies into energy.
do you want pepper with that?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If you read the article they specifically reference IIb VIa and Ib IIIa VIa semiconductors. This refers to stuff like CdS, CdSe, ZnS, CuS.. etc.
The cool thing about nanoparticles of semiconductors like these is that when they absorb light the generated exciton (electron and hole) are constrained and thus have a higher excitation energy giving better efficiency.
Patterning nano particles is big money research. If they actually perfected the process they describe it's worth mucho $$.
Um, I think someone took you for a ride - the steam coming from the sewers is related to how hot the sewers are compared to the outside air, it has nothing to do with heat distribution. (Think about it, they aren't trying to heat the outside, are they? Why would they let the steam escape?)
Some buildings use steam, so by extension I suppose a small downtown area could use a shared system - but you would have horrific losses if you spread such a thing out to cover downtown Chicago.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
I'm all for solar power and reducing use of fossil fuels, but I'm against anything that promotes sprawl as this surely will.
It is here in Hicksville, Ontario, Canada - er, I mean, Ottawa, a.k.a. Silicon Valley North, a.k.a. the Nation's Capital:
Hydro Ottawa: Hello, how can we help you?
Me: Hi, do you support net metering or have any plans to support it in the near future?
Hydro Ottawa: Er, uh, duh, net who?
And while we're on the subject: why is it called "Hydro Ottawa"? Why do people think that "hydro" = electricity? "Hydro" means water! I expect a "hydro" company to supply my faucets, not my electrical outlets!
But, it's tight. My wife and I live in a 400 sq ft apartment, with gas appliances and heat. Our electric bill is rarely more than 100 kwh/month, and that's in the summer with two fans running. In the winter it's regularly around 80 to 85 kwh/month. I expect that if my wife read more and watched less television, it'd drop 5 kwh/month. Throw in a new (and equally small) fridge to replace the old one, and we could easily get by on 69 kwh/month. I pay about twice as much in "customer fee" than I do in electricity generation and delivery.
I'm not suggesting that everybody could do it -- but it's not outside the realm of possibility for couples (no kids) to do it in a city.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
How about a grain of salt the size of a white dwarf?
I know it used to be bad to look like a nerd, but I thought we were past those old prejudices. Perhaps it's only my cohort that is past those prejudices, and not all of the younger cohorts, yet. My impression is, in some areas at least, even in high school it can be cool to be a nerd. Perhaps that phenomenon hasn't reached your neck of the woods, yet.
Or, perhaps it's people who are trying to look like a nerd that look out of place. :)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
First off, despite what Enron did, the State of California dug itself into a hole because of NIMBY. There was little or no plant construction in California during the 1990s, a time when the population boomed. It was impossible to get permits for new plants and most new construction was tied up in courts over environmental issues. When the crunch did happen, Enron and others wrongly exploited California, but not at all in the way that has been oversimplified by the press or even the idiot Ralph Nader types.
California, because it had not built enough power plants, was importing power from other states.
In order to import power you have to have your own power system suitably balanced. It's not like you put electrons on trucks and wheel them in. To do this, you offer financial incentives to buy or sell power at various points on the grid. To this day, PJM does this on the east coast and you can actually check it out here PJM LMP pricing
Also, you have to adequate transmission rights to get the power in.
So what Enron did was rather clever. First, they had better software than the California ISO for determining grid imbalances and so they scheduled power deals to manipulate the grid. Import power in the north, export it in the south, boom there is an imbalance, and you can sell the power you exported back to the state for a lot of dough. Then, they would also go and buy up transmission rights into the state (which is actually pretty cheap), and then play games at peak times.
The amazing thing about the whole thing is that gaming California's stupid grid managers WAS LEGAL. That's right. Enron didn't do -anything- wrong by screwing the state of California. The state made its rules for its market place and Enron exploited them, but California should not have made those rules to begin with. To cap it all off, California deregulation stripped utilities of the ability to pass variable costs to consumers. So, if the price of electricity shot up, it should have shot up for consumers as well, and guess what, people turn their air conditioners down, and there is no power crisis. But oh no, California made it so that the utilities could not recover the costs and so they had to sell power at a loss, and all the utilities in California went bankrupt, and Enron made a mountain of money, legally.
The thing that got Enron into trouble was that they were lying on their financial statements, and for that, the company is now bankrupt, her executives are either on trial, and the accounting firm that certified those statements no longer exists.
This is my sig.
We should not play with Solar Energy!!!!
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/solar.htm
If you size your array to meet most or all of your demand during the summer peak hours, you're going to have a surplus in the morning. That surplus is going to go cheap enough to attract uses: ice storage (run the A/C to make ice for the afternoon), vehicle power, and the like.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Guess what is by far the largest sources of domestic electricity consumption in cold areas?
/ index.ht m
Heating.
In hot areas... Cooling.
Neither of which require much electricity to accomplish. It's just easier and we're lazy and stupid.
My hot water tank has an 11kW element, the storage heaters in each room are 3kW each. I burn electricity to make heat.
On the other hand, solar thermal systems are far cheaper than photovoltaics, they're basically black pipes in a glass case. They are also far far more efficient, capturing around 80% of the energy incident on them.
They can produce decent amounts of heat even mid winter in the UK. Enough to heat up my hot water tank to scalding, a few more panels on the roof and I reckon a gas central heating boiler may not even be required. The result is a truly *huge* decrease in the amount of gas and electricity consumed in the home...
You still have a heating element in your water tank, and a gas boiler in your central heating but they spend most of their time inactive.
Big problem? Cost, even though thermal systems can be 80% efficient and are a small fraction of the cost of photovoltaics, the payback period is still 5-10 years.
Good intro:
http://www.galeforce.nireland.co.uk/solar
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
The article claims to deliver 120W per square inch, which is about 186KW per square meter. Considering insolation is less than 10KW per meter, where does all the "extra" power come from?
Actually when you factor in the cost of bringing power to far-flung locations -- cables, poles, roads for trucks, transmission loss over distance, etc. -- solar can be very successful, especially in countries with little existing infrastructure, even if it's more expensive per kWH than central-point alternatives.
more to the point - we were thinking of putting up a sun sail over the terrace, I wonder if you could apply the solar cells to that: it's already in a large sun-drenched area, unlike our roof which is tiled, it is a single surface, and it is detachable should the unit need to be taken down for maintenance.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
make exlusions for some countries. Take Iceland, for instance; even now, it already has an enormous amount of alternative energy, and it plans on completely replacing oil/gas products by 'green' energy within 10 years, I believe. And I actually think they can do it.
But does that mean any country can do the same?
Ofcourse not. Iceland has huge reservoires of geothermal sources, which can be used quite effectively. Try the same with almost any other country and you will fail.
Thus, it's dangerous to generalise. If every country had geothermal sources, or rivers and space in aboundance to provide for huge dams, or large stretches of land where the wind can blow unobstructed...well, yes, then it might be a solution.
In reality, this isn't true for most countries, and it certainly isn't true for mine (which I was aluding at, btw). I dunno how Denmark does it, but let's say they have placed windmills on their shores, and they covered 10% of their beaches with windmills...denmark having lots of coastal area. For the same effect, countries that have ten times less shore, would effectively place 100% of their beaches full; something that people just won't accept.
This simple example already shows how difficult it is to translate from one country to another. So I don't say it's technical impossible to derive 20% of ones' energy from windmills, even here...but at what cost? In reality, this is pretty doubtfull ever to happen, unless your country is suited to handle these things.
And, lastly, let's not forget those windmills, even in Denmark, are heavily subsidised. If they had to compete in a normal way, they wouldn't stand a chance untill coal and the lot doubled in price.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
The sun won't run out of fuel for another 5 billion years. :-P
until i see a screenshot!
Who, precisely, would be the authority on what is the proper usage? English, like all non-prescriptive languages, exists only as the sum of how its speakers use it. The only meaning "the proper usage" can have is as a synonym for "a usage widely accepted enough that virtually no one will call it 'wrong.'"
The most common usage of the "grain of salt" idiom these days is as the grandparent described: the more unlikely the claim, the more salt you need to cover it up. Even if this isn't how it was originally used in Latin two thousand years ago, that doesn't mean it's somehow "wrong" or, more importantly, that we shouldn't use it that way now.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I want to have some fun, like Microsoft, SCO, and whatever other companies there are ;)
But they speak of scaled-up commercial installations, and in that case you or the original author has confused cost and price.
Utilities generate for less than $0.05 / kWH. They generate for about $0.02-$0.03 depending on the technology and the organization's efficiency.
Then they transmit to your home. That adds more cost. Then they add a bit of profit and some taxes. In Minnesota, they sell us juice for between $0.07 and $0.10 / kWH.
It's great if they can indeed get scaled-up commercial installation costs down to $0.05, but they still need to cut the price in half to compete with directly with coal.
I live in Hawaii and hands down we have the highest electricity rates in the country. Any new technological breakthroughs give me a glimmer of hope.
Ah, the price of Paridise.
MrCheapStuff.com - Online Coupons
You are comparing the cost of a fuel with the cost per kilowatt of a cell which uses free fuel. This is completely idiotic! You can't even talk about $/kWh with a solar cell, why is there a time unit in there? It's harvesting energy from the sun.
Look, I'm a PhD student on the cutting edge of photovoltaics (the thin-film type, you know the ones that are in the running for the holly grail) and I REALLY must stress that until it is verified by NRL or one of two other testing facilities DON"T believe it! There has been a rash of people claiming effiecency records yet when it comes time to really show it they can't stand up. I will be the first to congradulate if they can stand the test. What about life time (not minority carriers)? Toxic to the enviroment? What else is there? mammoth_2k
what's EVOH? i thought soda bottles were just PET
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
I may be stupid, but the above statement, from the linked article, seems to be saying these cells will provide 120 Watts per square inch. In another part of the article, the company is claiming 12% efficiency in converting sunlight to electrical charges.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't think a square inch of sunlight, even in the most intensely sunlit areas, has anywhere near 120 Watts of power in it.
Maybe I misread something, or the article had a typo, but that statement certainly caught my eye. Other parts of the article seemed serious, at least compared to the wacko company that was claiming they had solved the energy crisis by developing a way to filter the hydrogen out of water.
Fundamentalism is a crime against humanity
I don't think that's canon.
As far as I know, the fusion reactors produce far, far less energy than is required for modern warp drives, although supposedly "back in the day" fusion was used to energize warp coils, but it was much less efficient and couldn't be sustained for long. The creation of antimatter aboardship is a time-consuming, low-yield, low-efficiency process. According to what I remember from the TNG and TOSmovie technical manuals, "bulk" antimatter is created in large spaceborne arrays which use solar power to run some kind of quantum device which changes deuterium into antideuterium. A smaller version of this device is built into most starships, but only as a sort of emergency measure or a long-term cruise extender.
+++ATH0
Peak sunlight is approximately 1kW of power per m^2 of surface. That is the amount of energy contained in sunlight, at high noon, during summer, in the temperate zone. A conventional solar panel of 15% efficiency will get you 150 watts (before considering thermal derate, which doesn't enter into the equation here) at that time of day, during that time of year, in this climatic zone.
They claim to be able to deliver 120 watts per square inch. According to Google, there are 1550.0031 square inches in a square meter, so this panel, according to the numbers quoted in the Hindu, will deliver 186kW per square meter. That would make these panels about 18,600% efficient.
Those with even a passing acquaintance with the laws of Thermodynamics will see the problem with this.
Now, I'm not saying they aren't doing something great, far from it. I just wanted to point out that their numbers are no good.
www.wavefront-av.com
Our annual electric bill is typically around $150 for the year. That's around the amount we're short of a 13yr payoff. So any improvements can get close to the golden number.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I've had this sig for so long, it would be a shame to change it. It predates 9/11 by several years, back when Echelon used to look for these words.
It came out of a discussion in rec.games.ultima-online when someone found that a few packets were going elsewhere, and we talked about how much it would suck to be the guy at Echelon watching UO for criminal activity. "U GT Arr0wz?" "bank buy sell vendor rescu repu" "We strike at the infidels tonight and watch america burn!" "guards!" "om om om"
Note that it's different from Carnivore - Echelon is an exchange between several countries that check up on the other countries' emails. They'd trade emails so each country could honestly say, "Nope, we're not spying on our citizens."
My hope is that there's someone, somewhere, who spends an hour each day reading all my email. What a fucking waste.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I think its amazing they work at all. Who ever thought organics could conduct electricity? Its like getting blood from a stone. :)
...don't you think they would have found something more profitable than oil? Yes, oil is a volume business, and the margins are lower than, say, potato chips.