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...
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.
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
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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.
"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.
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
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.
You have to choose your evils. If you want to avoid radiation, fine, but don't complain when you have to deal with other forms of pollution to compensate for the energy-thirsty needs of modern society.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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.
A quick Google search shows that on earth every square meter receives about 4.2kwh of energy per day over a 24 hour period.
A quick look at my electric bill says I use about 20kwh/day as a rough average -- another Google search suggests that the average US household uses approximately 25kwh/day
...So, finishing the math: using 15% efficiency solar cells, the Average US Household needs only 40 square meters (430 square feet) of solar cells to cover all its energy needs. Heck, I could use 5% solar cells on my roof in downtown San Francisco, and STILL have 2x extra capacity to sell back to the grid!
Don't get me wrong: Solar won't solve everything, particularly in applications like transportation where energy storage is an issue --- and cheap Fission IS something we should have figured out a long time ago --- but please don't resort to misinformation to make your points, it only weakens what you are saying.
Stagnant water causes methane producing bacteria to grow at the bottom of the lake, thus producing large amounts of methane.
Well, the amount of solar energy hitting us is around 1.5 kilowatts per square meter at our distance, that would be when the sun is directly overhead (and through the atmosphere). That drops off as a cos of the angle away from the point facing the sun. So if the sun passed directly overhead at noon, at 9:00 am and 3:00 pm (45 degrees away) we would be getting about 70.71% of the energy, or about 1 kilowatt. At 30 degrees lattitude, we would still be getting 75% of the maximum energy as early as 10:00 am and as late as 2:00 pm. So let's say we have 35% cloud cover (some areas could be much more sunny), that should account about for the rest of the hours in the day if we ignore them, but let us go ahead and take an hour off our peak time. So we'd have just three hours of sunlight at 80% (on average lets say) of 1.5 kilowatts, or 3.6 kilowatt hours per square meter per day. let's assume a solar cell that is 20% efficient, so we only get 0.72 kilowatt-hours per square meter per day.
Statistics show that hte US used 94.27 quadrillion BTUs of energy from all sources in 1998. From the conversion factors, that comes out to 27 trillion kilowatt hours. Divide by 365 and that's 74 billion kilowatt hours per day that we need. So we end up needing 103 billion square meters at 30 degrees lattitude to power the entire U.S. That's an area 320.5 kilometers to a side, about 1/7th the size of Texas.
And that's using conservative estimates. Plug in 30% efficency for solar cells, take into account the whole day and not just three hours like I did, and that area will shrink considerably.
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.
The problem is that the industry doesn't produce anything near a sizable fraction of the power requirements. In 2003, the total worldwide production was 732MW equivalents. Shipments from 1971 total 3,145MW.
World power consumption is 13.94 trillion kWh.
Even if all of those cells were in production today, it would still fall short by a factor of about 500, if my calculations are correct. It would take more than a century to replace everything, and that's assuming an annual 25% growth in shipped capacity with only 10% being replaced each year and zero growth in annual energy usage. As countries like China and India come into the modern ages as a rule, worldwide energy demand is going to grow even faster than its current (IIRC) 5% rate.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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.
Don't confuse photoelectrics with photovoltaics.
For example, Sandia Labs has a plant currently in operation that produces 5MW in 9 acres, by focusing light onto a tower that heats molten salt which drives turbines. It can produce energy 24 hours a day.
The United States' generating capacity a few years ago was 813 gigawatts, so at .55 MW per acre you'd need 1.4 million acres for all of the US's energy needs. That's about 2300 square miles or 6000 square kilometers, or about 1.5 Rhode Islands. We have many deserts that are larger than that.
Realistically, you don't need a power generation mechanism to be able to handle the entire United States energy needs before you put it in production. You just need it to be cheap (and cheap after the costs of fighting NIMBY lawsuits are factored in).
Sandia's web site doesn't say what their cost per megawatt hour is, but they do say the entire facility is currently worth $120 million. Since this type of system uses nothing exotic, I would expect economies of scale to change the numbers quite a bit. Assuming a life of 30 years, they'd have to be able to reduce the cost by about a factor of 10 to be competitive with today's rates. It could happen.
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!
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.
But this Department of Energy page does. They say such systems are currently at 9-12 cents/kWh, but expect 4-5 cents/kWh in a few decades. Which is certainly competitive.
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
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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 !
this is definitely not as cool as the solar death ray slashdot article
To clear up some common misconceptions you listed:
6 &cid=12073778
* Wind: Dead birds, intermittency in many areas, large surface areas, noise
Dead bird thing is mostly a myth. You will kill a thousand times more birds of prey by putting in a highway & getting them hit while munching on roadkill. Radio towers and bridges are just as dangerous as wind tubines to birds.
see http://www.homepower.com/files/birds.pdf
"Wind Generators and Birds: Power Politics?"
Large surface area: most wind farms are dual use, cows still munch the grass, only a small percent of land is lost to use, and that is mostly from access roads.
Noise: true for 1970's turbines. All new turbines are geared and rotate quite slowly. I've stood under one of the new 200' tall versions in 40mph winds.. you just hear a gentle swoosh. From a 1/4 mile away you don't hear it at all.
* Solar: Sigificant chemical wastes, large surface areas
just to note the really nasty galium arsenide solar cells are a tiny fraction (ie only NASA & similar use them). Most solar cells are made from recycled Si from the chipmaking process. That waste is already being made by computer chip makers; the solar cell manufacture process actually reduces existing industrial waste!
* Tidal: Beach erosion, corrosion of power units
Beach erosion? Please explain how dampening waves causes beach erosion? I just don't see it. Even if you unmix "tides" with "wind waves". Tide power is fairly hard to harness unless you live in an area of freak tidal range.
* Hydroelectric: Large loss of land, high greenhouse gas releases
The "high greenhouse gas releases" is a misleading arguement at best. Long and the short of it is that methane from anoxic lake sediment is not a net change to the carbon budget. Burning fossil fuels is.
see this comment for a fuller justification: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=14407
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
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.
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!
Silicon is a metaloid element (sits on the boundary of metal and non-metal). In pure form it is non-conductive, but if you heat it to around at least 1000 degrees, it starts to conduct.
Silicone is a rubber. Simply put, silicon has similar properties to carbon (being in the same family) like being able to form chains. However since it is a much bigger atom, it is a little too heavy to be able to form long chains. When it gets a little too long it pulls itself apart. So you form a chain interspersed with oxygen (which forms very strong bonds) ...Si-O-Si-O-Si-O... and so on... polysiloxane. Then they start hanging other side chains and cross linking, etc. and you get different types of synthetic rubber. Anyway, I switched to programming and IT about 10 years ago (after the silicon project ended), so I would have to pull out my books to any deeper anyway. :-)
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
...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.
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