Slashdot Mirror
New Photovoltaics Made with Titanium Foil
Memorize writes "A company called Daystartech has released a new type of photovoltaic cell which, unlike almost all the cells currently in use, does not silicon. This is based on a thin titanium film. Given the current shortage of solar-grade silicon, and all-time high oil prices, maybe titanium solar panels are here at the right time. The questions are, will they release it as a consumer solar product, and what will be the price per kilowatt hour?"
Like, you think that titanium, and the equipment required to work titanium comes cheap? Cheaper than sand?
Of course, once we decide, we'll need to find out what 'to silicon' actually means...
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
I confess I've always had a problem with power sources that do silicon. Snooty bastards, what with their made up verbs and their rock music...
How does this compare to what is used as solar cells in spacecraft now? Sounds interesting. Imagine, not a beowulf cluster, but a solar-sail type of spaceship in which the sun pushes against a huge sail made of this stuff, and also sends electricity to the ship.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It could lead to some very promising developments. I was trying to collect solar energy today, but ended up siliconing so bad that I couldn't sit down for hours. It still smarts...
We now replace "does not compute" with "does not silicon" ...
Now I have to upgrade from my Tin Foil hat to a Titanium Foil hat... I hate expensive upgrades!
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
Now you can get power and protection from UFOs with one convenient hat!
Have you read my blog lately?
...cost effective for specialized military, homeland security and commercial applications.
In other words, ridiculously overpriced, and unavailable to the average consumer for the next decade.
Titanium, that's so 1900's.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Obviously, the marginal price per kilowatt hour is $0. The difference between obtaining 100 kilowatt hours and 101 kilowatt hours is nothing. You would simply have to wait for enough sunlight to hit the solar panel to generate that extra 1 kilowatt hour.
The true cost of investing in solar energy is in the intial cost of manufacturing and setting up the panel.
Thus, the actual cost per kilowatt hour depends on how long you use the solar panel. The longer you use the panel, the cheaper each kilowatt hour becomes.
[sarcasm]Hah! As if I would ever use a proprietary product - I insist that all of my futuristic space planes use only Open Source designed components. Otherwise, we will replicate the HAL 9000 disaster of the past. If only HAL had been Open Source, we could have caught the bug that much sooner and patched him with the gnuThreeLaws API.[/sarcasm]
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Good development. The decline in the demand for silicon should help the threatened horta population to bound back. At least until Pamela Anderson Lee pursues more expansion.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
At http://www.daystartech.com/govrelease.htm:
"DayStar Technologies Unveils LightFoil Photovoltaic Product for Military and Homeland Security Applications"
Ok, photo voltaics for "Homeland Security". What kind of priority is this? Easier to get "funding" this way?
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
That's what they get for using Office's grammar checker.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
These aren't the only people working on this type of cell. They look harder to build than silicon. Definitely a niche market for the time being.
/ ph otovoltaic_02.htm
www.appliedfilms.com/Precision2/11_photovoltaic
I'd assume this concept goes along the same lines as "KOMPRESSOR does not dance", except it doesn't break your glowstick.
but I hear it's really hard to get
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
One possibility is to use melanin - the skin pigment that gives our skins colour. Being in Australia, of course, researching melanin is of significant interest to us! It's yet another example of biology helping to make really cool physics - more details are available on UQ's physics blog.
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
Food for thought: if your solar sail is using photon pressure, then by coating it in a photoelectric, you're halving its efficiency as a solar sail. Why? Well if your solar sail is a perfect reflector, then the photons bounce off and reverse direction, so the momentum change is twice the initial photon momentum (yes photons are massless but they do have momentum). If the sail is absorbing the photons for electricity, then they are not reflecting, so you merely absorb their momentum, making your forward impulse half what it would otherwise have been.
But, as we all know, solar sails work both by exploiting photon pressure, and solar wind (particles emitted by the sun), so the situation is maybe not that bad.
*** puts on titanium foil hat.
"Darl, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Darl. Will you stop, Darl? Stop, Darl. I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Darl. Darl, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. The penguins are going away over the hill. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a-fraid....Darlsy, darlsy. Give you your answer true. I'm have crazy, cuz you had your lawyers sue....."
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
[...]
Over a two year period, both DayStar and Albany NanoTech will each contribute $375,000 and NYSTAR will contribute $750,000.
Nice. So, basically, The state of NY puts in three quarters of a million dollars because DayStar promises not to go elsewhere and to graciously donate $350,000 to research that...will directly benefit them and pretty much nobody else.
I'm sorry, but I'm getting really sore for public funds being used to bankroll essentially private R&D done by public, for profit companies. Of course, it's not nearly as bad as the biotech industry, which whores itself out like nobody's business. Did you know we give the biotech industry about $30 billion (yes, billion) a year? Just GIVE it away? No strings attached? That exceeds -estimated- TOTAL tax (local, state, and federal) collected by around $6BN. Virtually 100% of all biotech related R&D is paid for by you and me, while the industry rakes in well over $200BN a year.
And to think they have the gall to whine about how expensive drug research is, or how risky it is! They're NOT PAYING FOR IT!
Please help metamoderate.
Take a look at this diagram. There's clearly a layer of SO2 in there. I'm not sure what that means though as far as their no-silicon claims.
"In Soviet Russia, solar cell is roofless prison in desert! What a country!"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I'm gonna assume I'm the only one that read that as "New Prophylactics Made With Titanium Foil."
http://www.daystartech.com/IEEESTFP.pdf
Here's a link to a PDF on the technology
It's about bloody time they made a titanium prophylactic. Normal condoms just aren't powerful enough for some folks out there.
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
...but people keep missing the point. Photoelectric won't work, won't solve even a small fraction of our power needs, not remotely. The amount of solar energy in watts per square meter at our orbital distance is well known and easily looked up. Also well known and easily looked up are losses due to atmosphere from clear sky to overcast day. And on top of this, the cells are far less than 100% effective.
You can't magically make this change. You can take up the square meters with cells or with mirrors and send the light to fewer cells. It doesn't matter.
We could have been using nuclear fission reactors that even an AOL user could not make malfunction more than thirty years ago, but the public's fascination with hypothetical disasters and poor understanding of physics, biology, and every area of engineering not related to lifting a Coke to their lips is the opening every anti-nuke nutcase has exploited.
To keep linking nuclear power to nuclear weapons is like linking wood burning stoves to witches being burned at the stake. Their lack of basic knowledge on modern nuclear reactor design when the texts are availible at public university and college libraries across the USA combined with so many having (liberal arts) degrees is its own area of the concept of "irony".
Meanwhile, the animal environmentalists can only argue with the alternate energy environmentalists over endangered birds being chopped up in California windmills and we keep burning extremely valuable petrochemicals which would be much more useful in other endeavors while we wait for the unobtanium reactor that only puts out clean energy and bunny farts is developed.
If things keep going the way they have we will eventually reach the point where we don't have the resources to escape Earth and colonize the system where the resources for more energy than we'll ever need short of fantastic sci-fi megaengineering are waiting.
Nice technological advance, but in the end useful mostly for Casio calculators and whatnot.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
This question is loosely related to the topic. Does anyone know of public chemical databases available on the Internet? Such that I can do a parametric search for compounds? I am not a chemist so I do not have access to such a database like most scientists.
The situation is, I have had some ideas in the past about photovoltaic cells, but do not have the information available to pursue these ideas. So the this exchange of information has always been the greatest hindrance for me.
Namaste
Let's fix this shortage of solar cell grade silicon and create another one - of solar cell grade titanium. Titanium is ridiculously difficult and expensive to produce and work with. It's stronger than steel, too, and has much higher melting temperature, so this titanium foil will probably be more expensive than golden foil of the same thickness. This is not to say that technology has no future, but you gotta realize that silicon is the second most abundant mineral on the planet, and titanium is the ninth.
That is very much the right question. The amount of sunlight that on average reaches the surface of the earth every day is multiple hundred times as the world energy consumption consumed in a whole year - including energy consumed in form of fossil fuels. Furthermore, the radiation isn't spread out evenly, over the earth's surface, but instead more conveniently concentrated, which means even less surface area needed to be covered than if it was.
:/ sol arworldpeace.htm
Scroll down for graphic comparing the solar energy potential on earth to other energy sources' potentials (including oil, nuclear, coal)
http://www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents
Since solar energy radiation input is so much higher than the amount of power we need, what matters much more than efficiency for more large scale photovoltaic energy production is the cost per power unit.
with a good tan I could power my laptop? sounds like a perfect with my boss "but I have to work outside lying in the sun"
Good news for putting solar cells on air and spacecraft but not terribly important for ground based solar power. For example, this could be a good time to redesign the solar powered flier, Helios
The questions are, will they release it as a consumer solar product, and what will be the price per kilowatt hour?
Price per kWh is not a simple question to answer. In a commercial power station, the costs include:
Capital costs:
1. the solar cells themselves
2. installation
4. ???
Operating costs:
1. Rent/property taxes
2. maintenance
3. profit
3. ???
Then you divide these costs (after converting the capital costs to an equivalent operating cost, by the power generated (which is dependent of the efficiency of the cells.)
Personally, I'd be happy just knowing how much the cells would cost, and more importantly, how efficient they are. FYI, silicon cells typically range from about 8% to 12% efficiency, IIRC.
Nice technology, but wrong applications.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
"...but people keep missing the point. Photoelectric won't work, won't solve even a small fraction of our power needs, not remotely. The amount of solar energy in watts per square meter at our orbital distance is well known and easily looked up. Also well known and easily looked up are losses due to atmosphere from clear sky to overcast day. And on top of this, the cells are far less than 100% effective. "
Oh gee, how nice of you to tell us that all energy sources have costs associated with them, and there's no magic bullet* So what are all the costs of nuclear energy, long term and short, from hole in the ground (mine) to hole in the ground (waste repository)?
*And more important why must we have only one energy source? Are nuclear advocates really that insecure?
It's been a long day, and my reading comprehension isn't what it was 10 hours ago, but I read this title as
"New Prophylactics Made with Titanium Foil"
and I said, "Ouch".
Naptime, it is.
That's clearly glass. Something to seal the surface, yet allow light to pass through? They're not using SiO2 to generate the current.
"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance."
D'oh! Please ignore this post - I just received a cease and desist letter for spreading rumours. (Despite the fact, of course, I'm typing this on my lovely Powerbook...)
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
http://pages.pomona.edu/~wsteinmetz/PChem.htm
As I understand it, the limiting factor for solar energy is the amount of sunlight that reaches a given surface area of the earth. I don't know exact numbers, but they aren't extremely high.
With that said, silicon is certainly not able to achieve 100% efficiency [since this ideal is obviously impossible]. What would make titanium technology more viable is if it can increase the efficiency of energy ``produced'' per square cm of surface area. That would be the only meaningful comparison of the two materials, as you can't compare cost per kilowatt hour [unless you're measuring over the life of the panel].
Does not what?
Plants user solar energy. They don't move. Things that move, need to eat plants, or eat animals that eat plants.
/. people has found a really efficient ENDOTHERMIC reaction. That would be very cool. :-)
Why? There isn't enough energy in the sunlight to sustain the metabolic rate required for movement. In billions of years, nature hasn't figured out how to covert enough sunlight into energy to sustain an animal's movement other than by concentrating it first into vegetable matter which can be eaten.
For humans to make use of energy, we pretty much have to burn something. We have to release solar energy stored as food, then in most cases concentrated in the form of hydrocarbons.
Fission energy, fancy as it may be, is still about just making water hot. For that matter, if they get there, so will fusion energy be.
We humans are stunningly good at burning things and making excuses for the things we do that are essentially asocial. Aside from that, we're not exactly all that and a bag of chips.
There's no such thing as free energy. The trick we need to find is how to tap bigger forces. Tidal forces with tethered floating generators which rise and fall with the tides and capture that motion as energy would be good. Finding that so called vacume energy between particals would be a fairly useful trick as well.
Making giant solar panels which turn sunlight into energy at less efficiency than plants, then waste most of it in transmission and storage overhead is ultimately not going to win.
More near term, we need to find or engineer a crop which is ideally suited to concentrating sunlight into a hydrocarbon or sugar that can be stored, transported without sigificant loss, then burned.
Unless one of you
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
PV will not be a viable alternative until the input energy is reduced significantly (ie. by a factor of 5 or so).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Presumably implants?
Ok, photo voltaics for "Homeland Security". What kind of priority is this? Easier to get "funding" this way?
They actually mean satellite-based solar cells, so they can fire death lasers on the MIRVs that North Korea is using, in the hope that they're only single payload nukes with no anti-laser packages or stealth capability.
That's what they mean. You know, War is Peace, that kind of thing. It's a big black hole of debt.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I RTFA (for once).
This device is designed for aeropsace applications; that is, it's a lightweight solar cell. At the bottom, there's a blurb about being able to supply electricity at commercially viable prices - but electricity is currently generated by oil, which is a volotile commodity, so it depends on how much oil-generated electricity "costs" on a given day.
Not too many years from now, oil demand will permanently outstrip supply - so when that happens, solar will probably become permanently economically viable. At which time, mass-production will drive down initial costs.
The issue of how long a given solar cell produces usefull power is also part of it - because if, over the life of the cell, it produces electricity of a given market value, above what it cost to make, then it's "economically viable" - therefore, of the three factors involved in determining "economic viability"
1. Initial cost to produce.
2. Longevity of the cell.
3. Market value of electricity over the life of the cell.
#1 is not the crucial variable. #2 also, really isn't a crucial variable. #3 IS. So if electricity is cheap, or if the cell doesn't last long (both of which are the current barriers to solar power being "economically viable") then it's not worth it.
When electricity becomes expensive (compared to today) - then solar power becomes more attractive.
Or, if some new type of solar cell becomes available that will have a useful lifespan of say, 50 years, instead of 20, that will make a difference. But the main factor is the cheapness of electricity. (some folks of the green persuasion might even say that electricity does not currently cost what it should, that there are many "hidden costs" - like funding wars to secure petroleum, ecological costs of the waste products, etc. - Kinda makes all this "free market" talk sound kinda silly.)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Only one person bothered to read the article so far!!!! Well, I am second :)
Their "Schematics" clearly show that active ingredient is still SiO, Silicone.
They designed a way to put it on flexible substrate. So did many other people. Perhaps they deliver excellent performance cells. However, it does not change the fact that it is still Silicone that moves electrons.
It is a clear marketing ploy that conveniently ommits using Si in the marketing blurb.
The answer is corn.
SAFE HARBOR STATEMENT: This news release contains "forward-looking statements" that are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. "Forward-looking statements" describe future expectations, plans, results, or strategies and are generally preceded by words such as "future, " "plan" or "planned, " "will" or "should," "expected," "anticipates," "draft," "eventually" or "projected." You are cautioned that such statements are subject to a multitude of risks and uncertainties that could cause future circumstances, events, or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements, including risks that our products may not achieve customer acceptance or that they will not perform as expected, and other risks identified in our annual report on Form 10-K and other filings with the SEC. You should consider these factors in evaluating the forward-looking statements included herein, and not place undue reliance on such statements. The forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and DayStar Technologies Inc. undertakes no obligation to update such statements.
The only problem I see is that a viable solar sail has to be very very thin. I wonder if these foil-cells meet the requirements.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The term is per se, not persay.
Have YOU bothered to do the math?
If we filled the Sahara desert (9x10^6 km^2) with solar panels at today's efficiencies (for example, Kyocera-40), we'd have 1x10^12 kW in full sunlight. The current consumption world consumption averages 1.63x10^09 kW (2002 est.), so we would have 10,000x as much electricity as needed at peak.
I'd say it's more than enough for just a "fraction" of our needs.
More realistically, we could merely cover our rooftops. At peak periods, my rooftop is big enough to provide 12kW capacity. Realistically, I will only get 10-20% of that on average. But it would be enough to run my air conditioning and wouldn't suffer as badly from transmission losses. Unfortunately, even with subsidies, such a setup would cost me several hundred thousand dollars. If solar panels could be created cheaply, it would help.
I agree we should consider nuclear power, but as I used to work in the nuke industry, I can tell you that many reactors types are not nearly as foolproof as you seem to think. Pressurized water reactors place materials under extreme conditions which haven't been studied fully, and many of the alternatives should still be housed in a containment building, adding greatly to the cost of the reactor.
You said: "Fission energy, fancy as it may be, is still about just making water hot. For that matter, if they get there, so will fusion energy be."
That's true about fission. And although that's one obvious way to generate electricity from a fusion reactor, a lot of fusion research has also gone into magnetohydrodynamic generators. I won't try to explain them (because I can't; I don't really understand them myself) but google might be able to get you started if you're interested.
It was also mentioned in a thermodynamics class I took that research has gone into using magnetohydrodynamic generators in conventional fuel-burning plants, because they can operate at much higher temperatures (and so, higher efficiencies) than conventional machinery like turbines and generators. But apparently the energy producers have pretty much given up on the technology, choosing to go with incremental improvements like higher pressures for the working fluid, more topping cycles, and ceramics for things like turbine blades. I guess plasma physics is difficult. Who'd have guessed?
Anyway, that's all. I thought it was cool.
I agree with much of what you say. There's just a couple of things I want to comment on.
This suggestion isn't really viable. The problem is that electric power needs to be continuous, and electric energy can't really be stored in the quantities needed for widespread use. Because of this, the large surges of power and subsequent falloffs that we would get with tidal generation make it kind of undesirable as a power source. A much more promising idea that's been talked about for some time is to put turbines in the path of a major ocean current such as the Gulf Stream. After all, the oceans are the world's biggest solar collector, and a significant portion of that energy goes into generating these currents. It's a huge untapped source of energy.
They have this. It's biodiesel made with canola. read about it here.
Ultimately, we just need to get off burning fossil fuels. After all, when you consider that energy on earth comes from two places, the planet's core, and, moreso, the sun, fossil fuels are solar energy stored by plants and animals millions of years ago. It's a finite supply, and frankly, we shouldn't be nearly as reliant on it as we are.
GET THEM INSIDE THE VAULT!
[1]
The Company has achieved a specific power level of 1440 W/kg (15.2% AM0 efficiency) in the laboratory setting, which is approximately 50% more energy dense and 60% lighter than all known thin film alternatives
[2
"Forward-looking statements" describe future expectations, plans, results, or strategies and are generally preceded by words such as "future, " "plan" or "planned, " "will" or "should," "expected," "anticipates," "draft," "eventually" or "projected." You are cautioned that such statements are subject to a multitude of risks and uncertainties that could cause future circumstances, events, or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements, including risks that our products may not achieve customer acceptance or that they will not perform as expected, and other risks identified in our annual report on Form 10-K and other filings with the SEC
[3]
SAFE HARBOR STATEMENT: This news release contains "forward-looking statements" that are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995
I live in the southwest, somewhere where there isn't anyone around, and away from groundwater (I'd say it's seismically stable too, but there is no place in the southwest where it is completely seismically stable!) Say, you wouldn't happen to be one of those northeasterners, would you?
The patriot act II/III is funneling money into all sort of ideas, that you do not know about and will never see. Sadly, you do have a need to know about them, but will not for at least another 4 years.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Their solar cells are made in a wafer fab and have no more than 15% efficiency, like everybody else's.
So this isn't the Great Solar Breakthrough. Sorry.
Creative and funny, but you're thinking of silicone (pronounced sih-lih-kone), which is a rubbery material, not silicon (pronounced sih-lih-kahn), which is an element. None of your rhymes rhyme!
if by instead of "SO2" you mean Si02, which is common glass.
albet common with unique properties. being a liquid and all.
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
Titanium PowerBooks are called TiBooks. Could we call it a TiTinHat?
Let's play Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I'll be Pestilence.
Solar sells can use approx 20-50% of that 1020 watts.
Which is why the first thing in my mind was "who cares what it's made of, how efficient is it?"
That said: The the basal metabolic rate (at rest) is appr 1.2 W per kg of body weight I weigh 57 kg. Which means I need 70.8 W resting. If I was laying on the ground at sea level I would be receiving 950 more watts that I need to stay alive.
I think your numbers are off. 70.8W is 70.8 joules/second, at rest. Multiply by 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day, and you're telling me that you require a shade over 6 megajoules of energy on a day, just to exist at a vegetative level. Here's the thing... that's about 1.5 million calories of energy daily. The RDI is somewhere around 2500 calories for a woman, and 3500 calories for a man. Something doesn't add up.... I'd believe 70.8 milliwatts, but not 70.8 watts.
Even so, plants are nowhere near 100% efficiency. Photosynthesis is actually one of the least efficient reactions around, and it couldn't provide anywhere near the amount of energy I need on a daily basis. I'm burning a lot of calories each day in active exercise, not counting what I need just to get around and survive. All told, even though I'm consuming somewhere around 4500 calories a day, I'm still losing weight. That's 19kJ, which, if I was 100% efficient (and had a surface area of 1m^2), I could recoup in less than 20 seconds. I actually have a surface area closer to 2m^2, but even so, I can't just stand in the sun for 10 seconds a day to get my daily energy intake.
Likewise, a plant simply can't photosynthesize with anywhere near the level of efficiency needed to sustain active movement. It isn't a question of convenience that explains why animals eat things, it's a question of it being far more efficient for me to let a plant do the standing around in the sun.
Please also remember that a plant takes months to reach a level of maturity where it can be eaten. Think a moment about how much energy the plant gets bombarded with over the course of months, and compare that to how much you get from eating it....
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
As usual this is a plea for subsidies. "Technology improvements are expected to reduce some of the cost difference over the next five years, but the federal government also needs to increase tax incentives for producing and purchasing solar energy, according to Energy Foundation Vice President David Wooley." There's this amazing invention for discovering how much of something should be produced and at what price, called a market. You should try it.
This isn't a knock down, but some simple numbers.
1.74×10^17 W : Earths solar constant.(level 1 civ)
3.86×10^26 W : Energy output of our sun. (level 2 civ)
0.82 current level of civilization. (kardashev scale)
solar energy will probably be the only way to go from a civ 1 to civ 2, involving a dyson sphere,
why not get some expertise now, and cover unsightly texas with those solar panels?
BECAUSE SOLAR PANELS are EASILY Damaged, just use maddox's 1000000 penny bomb, and spread them over the solar fields...
The USA and other military countries will not tolerate an easily attackable energy infrastructure. Look at nuke plants. I have seen test video of jets travelling in excess of mach 3 barely denting the outer concrete shell.
solar is good, but first we need peace between all peoples on earth
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
Remember that "calorie" in American food parlance is actually a kilocalorie in terms of heating up water.
Please carry on.
There are applications for which the efficiency matters more directly, because the alternatives are vastly more expensive, or there are other constraints. For instance, spacecraft have issues with launching weight and available surface area, and solar-powered unmanned surveillance spook planes also have those problems (probably surface area's more important for them than weight is.)
For some residential applications, efficiency can matter, for instance if you're trying to power your house with solar cells only mounted on your roof, but that's still really about economics, because you're comparing the cost of solar with buying power from the power company. A more efficient solar cell might generate more power from your roof area, but if it costs too much, you won't use it, you'll buy power. (
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But we call it maize.
Is silicon still being used for implants?
"History is the realm of the true lie." A.Szerb
Well, the press release from the DayStar Technologies website notes their electrical production to be 1440 W/kg, which seems like a very deceiving value since I would want to know W/cm^2 or any form of Watts per Area ...
I think they're cooking the numbers since they keep saying over and over again how light their solar cells are compared to silicon, but of course only provide us with power per kilogram.
If you need 10x the area to provide the same amount of power, that means you'll increase the overall amount of mass as well. If it's still lighter, and provides the same amount of electron juice, then this maybe considered useful.
Again, I could be completely wrong about the product, but I find it quite odd they left out power per area.
See title.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
If the hull generated "power" why wasn't that the primary source?
--
If your plan 'B' is better than your plan 'A' then you've planned backwards.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I couldn't have stated that better myself. Well put :)
So, if you happen to want to sit all day perfectly exposed on the beach without moving, you need about 71W. Of the maximum potential 1020 you could get during the day, you would not have enough left to last the night. Perhaps you could store some as sugar. Oh, yes, then you are in fact a PLANT.
As soon as you try to move, or it gets cloudy, or its winter... you'd better eat something.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
For people interested in alternative energy sources, I suggest you check out one of the ebooks available at http://www.goodideacreative.com/wheelockmtn.html.
I bought the 'Build Your Own Fuel Cells' ebook ( plain pdf ) and it's pretty damned good. It has many detailed diagrams and templates for building a variety of fuel cells.
I must admit that I haven't actually built one yet ( I'm still trying to track down a supplier for Proton Exchange Membranes ), but once I do this the project actually looks feasible. Most will admit it has an incredible amount of cool value.
Anyway, the whole system is basically:
Solar Panel produces electricity which is used to split water into hydrogen & oxygen, and stored in tanks.
Pump hydrogen ( and possibly oxygen ) into fuel cell stack when power is required
(no text)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Thanks. You beat me to it. He's right in much of his reasoning, which is why his math didn't make sense even to him.
If you treat it as kilocalories as you point out, the 2500 number works out to 2.5 million of his calories, and the rest of his math actually bears out fairly well. Good thing he's not a plant.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
You are basing that 10 year cost analysis/payback on a contract you probably don't have with the electric utility. You actually have no way of knowing what your electricity will cost years down the road, or next year for that matter, so it's pretty hard to do these sorts of bar knapkin calculations. You have zero data to use beyond conjecture. AFAIK, there is only one utility in the US (austin area I think, but not sure) that will give joe home owner a ten year contract on electricity, and that one non surprisingly enough is based on buying "green" electricity from them. Everyplace else you are more or less at their mercy, with some help from the local PSC. Your light bill might be a hundred clams average a month this year,in 3 years it might be 200$. Or 50 if they develop fusion. We just don't know really. If you bought the solar now though, you would know exactly what it cost, and it would be installed and running at your home.
bird in hand, bird in bush deal.
I like solar now because I own it, that's worth it to me beyond a dollars and cents cost criteria only, I'm a geek, I have to know I'll have electricity no matter what enron scams or not happen in the future, and I really don't think energy scams are gone away now, just much better hidden.
damn!
I'm not dead yet!
In Soviet Russia, con does not sili YOU!
Ah... yeah, that does make sense. I blame my grade 9 biology teacher for that blunder: being the only male in a class of 31, with a militant lesbian for a teacher can really ruin a guy's liking for a subject. I wonder why...
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
I thought it said prophylactic
Remember that "calorie" in American food parlance is actually a kilocalorie in terms of heating up water.
Yes, and most of us distinguish between them by capitalizing the "C" for kilocalorie. 1000 calories would be 1 Calorie.
Maybe nature hasn't, but NASA seems to have done okay... their Mars rovers get around on sun power, and IIRC Mars gets less sunlight than Earth does...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The link that slashdot gave indicated that the titanium backed solarcell with CIGS is rated 15.6% while this link clearly stated that the CIGS has a 19.2% NREL rating.
Why such a large drop in the efficiency ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Aluminum burns under the right conditions, and everyone should know something about magnesium. The fact that titanium dioxide is so stable means that it is very tightly bound... and that binding energy means a lot of heat of formation.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I don't think that's the conclusion you wanted.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
When the yurt has a photoelectric roof, stores electricity in lithium-polymer batteries in the floor and uses bags of water against the walls for thermal mass, it's going to feel an awful lot like a real home, only cheap and portable as well as low-impact.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Current growth rate in PV seems to be closer to 30%/year, and may be higher. If growth has been even 10%/year over 25 years, retiring all the 25-yr-old hardware is only going to remove 9% of the year's new capacity (and will do nothing to change the growth rate); for 20%/year it would be about 1%, and at 25%/year it would be 0.38%.
If someone brings a PV technology on-line which can produce power more cheaply than retail electric, you can expect demand to ramp up into the gigawatts and even tens of gigawatts per year. If any team of a roofing crew and an electrician can get into the act, WATCH OUT.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
This guy thinks so.
Is this foil available for headwear?
I'm all for alternatives to PV. If Energy Innovations could have gotten their #$&! together and put the $1/watt concentrating Stirling on the market, I would have been all over that. But until someone does it, PV is where it's at.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Solar cells (as a viable alternative energy source) have all but been invalidated on the basis of their inefficiency. I would be interested in seeing the exact details for the thin film process in these solar cells since I have some experience in fabricating the silicon ones.
this is definitely not as cool as the solar death ray slashdot article
I'm am so tiered of the whole "Ohh lets just use nuclear fuel, that works" argument. It's such a basically untenable argument from so many points of view.
Let's start with the issues of safety. The decommissioning of a nuclear plant is between 1-2 times it's lifetime with a similar running cost as during its life time but without any income. This requires substantial financial reserves to finance. Do you really want to trust the management of a commercial entity to put this aside and not rely on government intervention later? Well that's the free market argument against nuclear power.
The waste martial produced by a nuclear power plant (during its lifetime and afterwards) runs into the hundreds of thousands of tonnes. This has to be stored for a long time. The fabric of the building and housing of the reactor it self have to be stored. I believe the most effective reactor housing is aluminium as that loses it's radioactivity as fast as it gains it, but don't think that there are any commercial reactors that use this.
Wind and solar are the most commercially viable alternative sources of energy at present. While many people argue that wind is intermittent these fluctuations closely match the demand fluctuations of large distributed grids (e.g. European nation size). This can be explained in many ways, for instance when there is higher wind the power demand for heating rises as buildings have a higher air change rate due to infiltration.
Commercial sized turbines (40m blade diameter and up) have a straight pay back period of approximately 5-10 years (dependant on local wind conditions and hub height) with a warranty life time of about 25 years. These are also suitable for urban environments, planning permission has been granted for at least one site in London, UK and a temporary commercial installation was placed in central London near the Houses of Parliament on the South Bank last winter ('03-'04). Large urban sites can easily incorporate them into the development if the client is willing to take running costs of the build into account.
Wind turbines have an effective limit of about 20% of a national grid supply. This is, and has, been achievable (Denmark for example).
Photovoltaics (PV) have a longer payback period. Most straight payback terms in northern latitudes (say 40degrees north and up) tend to be on the order of 30-50 years once whole system costs are taken into account. This is without additional funding. Even with additional funding (EU, UK state funding) the straight pay back period tends to be in the order of 15-20 years.
Many people recognise that we are involved in an economic "buy down" of PV technologies, where price reduces as demand grows spurring additional demand.
While there is still an intermittency issue (daylight to night etc) this can be managed though using the grid as an effective "battery" for the excess power output and using a system like net metering.
The German and Japanese (and i believe the Spanish and Italian) state funding options secure the price per kWh which makes them a stable (positive) return on investment. Japan and Germany currently both slip in and out of the world top buyers of PV's for this reason.
Inverters are a substantial amount of the cost of a system used for most grid connected systems. While your laptop may run off DC it requires (along with almost everything else in a building) an AC supply.
The use of dc systems tends to be limited to remote sites where they are used to charge batteries for off grid use, then power loss from the regulator and the batter tend to be high. The batteries are expensive and have to be replaced every few years.
The amount of energy recovered from a system in 1 - 2 years is roughly that of the embodied energy (the amount of energy used to make the panels etc).
While this is a novel technology for a system that is holistic in nature the uses of thin film glass integrated systems (in my opinion) is probably the best return. This is as mo
Time to upgrade my tin foil hat to titanium foil hat.
When electricity becomes expensive, the cost for producing solar cells (which use a lot of electricity) will rise like wise. Most people don't realize that solar cells are more like batteries than anything else. They need a huge amouth of energy to produce and then for a long periode will give a little amouth of energy back. Under ideal conditions, they will return about ten times more energy then is required to produce them. But then if you take into account the losses for storing that energy and converting it into something usefull, it might only be a factor two.
The funny thing is that at the moment it is the right time to invest in solar cells, because oil prices are still relatively low. Wait until they have gone up by a factor ten in the coming decades, and you might have saved some cheap energy for the future.
For some strange reason, it always happens that when a certain resource starts to become rare, we as people start to use it up faster as long as it is available, until there is a total collapse of the system. If you are only in your twenties, I guess it is quite likely you will die from poverty.
You're neglecting the fact that, unlike nuclear, photovoltaic power generation doesn't have to be central. In fact, you largely eliminate transmission losses if you distribute the panels all over town. That eliminates the one point of failure. You probably don't want to do that with nuclear.
The high cost of polysilicon has been an obstacle to cheap solar cells for years - mostly because polysilicon is commonly produced by the "Siemens process", which is a batch process where silane gas is converted to pure silicon from the heat of tungsten filaments, on which it deposits. Once the filiament is adequately encrusted with polysilicon, the deposits are scraped off and used.
There have been a number of attempts at a continuous process to produce polysilicon. I worked at one, J.C. Schumacher, over 25 years ago. The process never has been scaled up to full commercial production; Dr. Schumacher is still looking for an investor to take him there.
There is at least one other company with a fluidized bed continuous process to make polysilicon.
One approach that I thought that had a good chance of hitting the big time is the spheral solar process that Texas Instruments developed, and sold off in 1995. This process did not require pure silicon to produced chemically. It took 99% pure metallurgical grade silicon beads, heat treated them so that the impurites moved to the surface, then ground off the surface with the impurities to make silicon crystal balls pure enough for solar use.
Any of these processes might be viable if the right market conditions exist. And any of these processes use a heck of a lot less energy than the traditional Siemens process.
Next logical developments for this:
:D
1. Replace titanium foil with tin foil (evidently cheaper)
2. Make hat out of it (for charging mobile devices)
3. In Soviet Russia, step 3 questions YOU !!!!!
4. Profit!
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
Why does silicone rubber (or whatever is used in breast implants) become rock hard? Is it true that the hardening can be avoided with a regular regimen of massage, or is this just myth? If it's true, you'd think that women with "enhancements" would have no trouble finding volunteers to massage them.
In short, what's the deal with rock hard silicone augmented tits?
One more question: What's the difference between silicon and silicone?
Sorry about my ignorance on the subject.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Wind and solar are the most commercially viable alternative sources of energy at present. While many people argue that wind is intermittent these fluctuations closely match the demand fluctuations of large distributed grids (e.g. European nation size). This can be explained in many ways, for instance when there is higher wind the power demand for heating rises as buildings have a higher air change rate due to infiltration.
Commercial sized turbines (40m blade diameter and up) have a straight pay back period of approximately 5-10 years (dependant on local wind conditions and hub height) with a warranty life time of about 25 years. These are also suitable for urban environments, planning permission has been granted for at least one site in London, UK and a temporary commercial installation was placed in central London near the Houses of Parliament on the South Bank last winter ('03-'04). Large urban sites can easily incorporate them into the development if the client is willing to take running costs of the build into account.
Wind turbines have an effective limit of about 20% of a national grid supply. This is, and has, been achievable (Denmark for example).
Photovoltaics (PV) have a longer payback period. Most straight payback terms in northern latitudes (say 40degrees north and up) tend to be on the order of 30-50 years once whole system costs are taken into account. This is without additional funding. Even with additional funding (EU, UK state funding) the straight pay back period tends to be in the order of 15-20 years.
Many people recognise that we are involved in an economic "buy down" of PV technologies, where price reduces as demand grows spurring additional demand.
While there is still an intermittency issue (daylight to night etc) this can be managed though using the grid as an effective "battery" for the excess power output and using a system like net metering.
The German and Japanese (and i believe the Spanish and Italian) state funding options secure the price per kWh which makes them a stable (positive) return on investment. Japan and Germany currently both slip in and out of the world top buyers of PV's for this reason.
Inverters are a substantial amount of the cost of a system used for most grid connected systems. While your laptop may run off DC it requires (along with almost everything else in a building) an AC supply.
The use of dc systems tends to be limited to remote sites where they are used to charge batteries for off grid use, then power loss from the regulator and the batter tend to be high. The batteries are expensive and have to be replaced every few years.
The amount of energy recovered from a system in 1 - 2 years is roughly that of the embodied energy (the amount of energy used to make the panels etc).
While this is a novel technology for a system that is holistic in nature the uses of thin film glass integrated systems (in my opinion) is probably the best return. This is as most systems are either building integrated or associated with a building development (apart from certain large experimental power plant systems) and one of the issues with modern buildings is that the solar load makes a large dent of electrical supply form the aircon.
Using glass integrated panels reduces this load, reduces instillation costs and boosts the net effect. Also the price margin tends to be lower as for a glass intensive building you would have to use fritted glass or shading systems to make sure that the solar load is not too high. This makes the marginal costs of glass based systems low.
In most developed economies the CO2 output by sector is roughly: buildings approximately 40-45%, industry 40-45% and transportation the rest. PV's tend to lend themselves effectively to building installation and are a good "street level" way of producing energy.
The issue of sustainability is an important one as the air will become toxic due to CO2 contamination in between about 500-1000 years at current output. Global war
The energy debate doesn't matter.
It's an engineering problem, albeit a problem that is currently riddled with political connections (national security) that have been the cause of it being a public debate, but ultimately it's a problem with a solution. This won't be solved by a clever arguement.
Eventually some ambitious mind is going to do something, someone will make a choice to produce their own power, or someone will start a new company with a business model that works. Point is, this won't be changed by a bunch of hotheads talking back and forth about their pet issues, it will be solved by the one who actually does something.
It's titanium dioxide. Titanium is not the same thing as titanium dioxide. Next you'll be telling us of the horrible dangers of dihydrogen monoxide. My GOD, it contains hydrogen *AND* oxygen!!!!!!!
Aaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
IIRC Mars gets less sunlight than Earth does
It's further out, and radiated energy follows an inverse square law (ie it drops off with the square of the distance - twice as far out you get a quarter of the energy), so there's less energy per unit area available. However, the atmosphere will be absorbing/reflecting less, so it may balance out; I don't have any data to hand.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I guess plasma physics is difficult. Who'd have guessed?
;-)
Me - I gave up a PhD in it a few years ago
It's official. Most of you are morons.
NASA's Mars rovers are amazing, no doubt. They are also very limited. The require extremely careful management in what is a rarified atmosphere.
In space, solar power works -- its clear. On mars, it just barely works. On Earth, it could work as well -- but not to power our human technology for the masses.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
It's not worth the price of the metal to extract it yet, but just this year, the price of industrial titanium has doubled as Chinese demand for it has skyrocketed.
Well, the titanium is a moot point, since the terrestrial applications of the Daystar CIGS PV will be on stainless steel. I'm long the stock, though.
...these guys are nothing special. Here's the deal:
88%+ of the world's solar panels are still cut crystals of mono - or poly - crystalline silicon. People know how to work it, they get a reliable if uninspiring 5 - 8% annual decrease in prices from it, and they've been able to ride it through quite a bit of market growth - up over 1200 MW in 2004, up from 750 the previous year, 400-some in 2002, etc. Good stuff.
The thin-film solar people have always made these claims that they're going to cut solar from $2.50 / Watt (mfg. cost) to like $1. And theoretically, there seems to be no reason they shouldn't. But their factories, which are always supposed to just run like printing presses or coated auto glass factories, always end up being much much more finicky and expensive and labor intensive than initial projections, and they end up - not with ridiculous costs, but right back in that $2 / Watt range. Hence the sub 5% market share.
DayStar's technology is not markedly different from any of the other thin-film silicon people (or thin-film CiGS or CiS or the other materials) - their big deal is that they have that superlight titanium foil. It does jack up their manufacturing costs hugely from using like a stainless steel (Uni-Solar) or a plastic / roofing material backer (Uni-Solar / Solar Integrated Technologies) or putting it into a normal framed module (First Solar, Shell Solar,) etc. And thier new little factory in NY there maxes out at I think 30 MW / year (2.5% of annual world production) So why would they do it?
Weight-conscious applications. It costs $10,000 per pound, still, to launch things into space, and people are honestly starting to look at airships again. Even though Boeing Spectrolab has essentially owned the high-value-add high efficiency to weight ratio solar market for a long time , there's still serious money to be had there - they may either settle for being a big player there, or, take DARPA money and use it to work the kinks out of their stuff for two, three years and go to market with a cheaper substrate and a roll-out roofing product, using much less silicon than a conventional process.
Oh, dear God.
Wouldn't you be buying in price per watt? After all, once you setup the cell, you can get 'free' energy from it forever.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I think I can sell you a cheap rolex made of .9999% pure gold bullion!
No sig for the moment.
Well, not me personally. I heard about this a year ago when a professional chemist visited my highschool chemistry class. He went on and on about solar cells using titanium and not silicon. They used special dyes made with Iodine. I forget the specifics but that was what I remember.
The solar cell he was working on was cheaper to make and had a greater effiecency then the standard silicon ones.
Speaking is NOT communication
Yes, the SiO2 is probably there to seal the surface. Note that there is a CdS layer, and CdS has a very bad reputation for degradation when used as a photoresistor, so it needs protection.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Wow, you're so much smarter then those "tunnel-vision" technologist. They must have dropped out after 2nd.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I think what you mean is not that solar power wouldn't work on Earth, but that photovoltaics using the current technology won't work. Which probably isn't true. With some careful design considerations and with some minor concessions its not difficult to generate all the electricity a household needs entirely with photovoltaics.
Personally I think that existing technology for households (high thermal mass or earth-sheltered construction with passive solar heating and photovoltaics, extensive natural lighting and high efficency electrical power usage, along with waste recycling) and biodiesel for most vehicles (along with greater availability of cheap, small commuter vehicles, so people can have their SUV when they need it, but also have a high effiency vehicle for normal commuting) is the most workable solution. All of this is well within current technological limits.
I think that the key factor to making it work is not the technology, but the human will to do so. If people really wanted to convert to clean, renewable energy, they would find or create the resources and economic power to get it done. As it is, not enough people care enough to do any of the work themselves. Instead most of us stand around waiting for someone else to get us all onto green power.
Show me a product set that I can reasonable switch to which would provide most or all of my energy needs and be cost effective without some kind of 20 year plus payoff.
I'm a reasonably skilled person with most of his own tools, and with some but not vast disposable income. I have a Gambrel style house with fairly good expanses of unshaded rooftop facing in four directions about equally, squared about 25 degrees off the compass points. The house is in Maine, where I have admitedly some pretty high energy bills. I use a electricity for the server farm and household, and LP gas to heat the house, the hot water, and for a brief period of the year a swimming pool.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Even worse, current human energy usage is 400 times the carbon fixing ability of the biosphere. 400 times! At this scale, Biodiesel and all these other biosphere harvesting technologies are not simply small potatoes - they are lost in the noise.
By contrast, solar radiation is currently at least two orders of magnitude over current consumption. Nuclear options (including geothermal if reactors give you the willies) are not constrained by the "efficiency" of plants either and can scale. But biosphere harvesting is not going to cut it.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
I'm still totally unconvinced WRT solar. Show me cost effective solar that won't leave me in the poor house and I'll convert my home. So far, all I get when I look is a promise of payoff in 20 years, assuming no interest on the money I didn't have to spend.
Build the nuke plants, build a fusion plant if its going to be safer, cleaner, or cheaper. Build Geothermal plants if you can find a way to do it near enough to where I live to matter.
I'm just tired of empty sunshine.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
in a titanium vs silicon debate, but there is one obvious point here: There are limited reserves of titanium (estimated at 50 years at current pace) while the amount of silicon (as silica) is virtually infinite. Even if titanium is cheaper now, it won't be for long. I've always thought it rather silly to make "renewable" technologies from non-renewable and obviously scarce resources such as Ti and Ru.
That'll help keep costs down.
bah.
so can aluminum, magnesium, iron, lithium, potasium, calcium, ...
if oxidation of a substance is an exothermic reaction, you can generally get it to "'catch fire', under the right conditions": plenty of oxygen available, good amount of contact/surface area for the reaction to take place at, and enough heat to get past the initial activation energy curve.
the discovery of fire ain't exactly new.
<caveat >IAACG [i am a "chem-geek"]</caveat >
Google: 70.8 watts to Calories per day 70.8 Watts = 1 462.02677 kilocalories per day Google: 2500 Calories per day to watts 2 500 (kilocalories per day) = 121.064815 Watts Google rawks.