Slashdot Mirror
DARPA Awards $53 Million for Solar Power Research
mygadgetbox writes "Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will be giving a consortium led by the University of Delaware nearly $53 million in funding to more than double the efficiency of terrestrial solar cells within the next 50 months. DARPA wants the consortium to develop and produce 1,000 Very High Efficiency Solar Cell (VHESC) prototypes that are affordable and that operate at efficiencies of at least 50 percent. The goal is to create solar cells that operate at about 54 percent efficiency in the laboratory and 50 percent in production."
Most of what Parent says is true- for the applications in question (home use, vehicle use, consumer use in general) the cost of solar cells is the limiting factor. However, this is DARPA we're talking about here- as well as a bunch of commercial clients. The applications mentioned in the article (primarily the military) rely heavily upon efficiency and not so heavily upon cost efficiency. Yes, it would be nice if GI Joe's GPS solar cell only cost fifty cents, but if it weighs a hundred pounds? I'd rather have a five-hundred dollar solar cell producing enough in half a pound. Efficiency is important in some areas, cost effectiveness in others. Research into efficiency isn't a total waste.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
if you double the efficiency, you only need half as many cells.
this would reduce the cost, even if the price-per-cell remains the same.
personally, i say let's try for both.
http://kered.org
That kind of land is probably cheap. In fact, power companies and government probably own loads of it, unutilized, already.
Come to think of it, isn't Area 51 surrounded by a bunch of wasteland desert?
Either way, I want solar that can pay for itself quicker than I have to pay off a loan for it, else I can't afford the capital investment. I'd plaster my whole roof with it.
Solar roof shingles and solar standing seam metal roofing are too expensive, too.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid I really encourage you to read the whole post.
~CK
I'm also quite positive I remember stumbling across a webpage for a US Defense/space contractor, where they offered up solar panel "scraps" (stuff you could still assemble into working modules, with a fair bit of labor) for sale to the public. Efficiency was substantially higher than anything I've seen on the commercial market, though I don't recall figures off the top of my head. They probably cost a lot more to manufacture, but $50M amortized over -possible- solar panels sounds pretty expensive too.
Why couldn't we just give a $50M grant to homeowners to buy solar panels?
Please help metamoderate.
This was not their original plan at the outset. --Basically, they bought a property, and cleared a lot far back from the road. Then they learned that to have AC lines brought to their house from the mains, the local power company would charge them over $10,000 for the job of sinking four poles and running cable.
They thought, "Wow. Ten grand? Sheesh. What other options are there?"
The result was some research and a re-jigged construction plan using alternative energy. They spent about the same amount of money installing Geo-thermal and solar panel solutions.
10 big cells cost them about $8000 CAD. The rest of the money was spent digging trenches and laying thermal transfer pipes, air ducts and house wiring. Now they have all the power they need.
Strategic spot lighting using 12 volt halogen bulbs rather than bathing entire rooms in light minimizes the impact on energy reserves. Laptops are used instead of desktop computers, and various other appliances, like radios and televisions are run with DC to AC converters. Water is pumped from a well to a reservoir at the top of the house which provides pressure. Even while feeding the needs of an active family of four, the array of 5 big chemical batteries which stores electricity from sunlight never dipped below a 95% full charge on any of the days I visited. (The power readings were set on a cool display for all to look at.) --And the house is also absolutely enormous; 5 bedrooms, plus various huge family rooms the size of small churches, etc. A total mansion, and after the initial investment, it costs exactly zero to light and power.
Cooking is done on a big gas range fed from a pair of large propane tanks which contain enough propane to last more than a year. Water is drawn from a well. Refrigeration was the only puzzle still to be worked out, and while pondering it, the family had spent two years eating fresh foods while keeping milk and other such items in a basic camping cooler in the kitchen. Half the things people normally keep in their fridges don't really need to be there; milk and beef doesn't go bad all that quickly, eggs don't need to be refrigerated at all, and chicken and fish are simply bought fresh the day they are intended for consumption. --After realizing that this worked without any problems, the family basically concluded that they didn't really need a fridge in the first place. --Though, they told me that they had found a super-efficient 12 volt DC fridge on the market for homes exactly like theirs, but that they didn't think they really needed it.
Half the problem is not the power source, but the notion that we need so much electricity in the first place. --If we change the parameters of the problem, we can start using different solutions which have already been accepted by industry. Simple.
Despite the opposition, alternative energy is here for anybody who wants it.
-FL
The article discusses that the goal is to improve the efficiency of solar cells to 50%. As I mention earlier in this thread, silicon-based semiconductor photovoltaics top out at a theoretical efficiency of about 25-26%. Other semiconductor technologies top out somewhere around 35%. These are the two technologies people think about when they imagine solar cells. I think the outlook for discovering and commercializing a semiconductor-based solar cell that's 50% efficient in the next 50 months to be very poor. I won't get into the physics, but the theoretical limitations have to do with the fact that semiconductor photovoltaics make inefficient use of the solar spectrum: a red photon will produce as much electrical energy as a blue photon, even though the blue photon is more energetic.
/. lately). Instead of trying to burn a ship, the focused sunlight heated sodium to about 1200 Celcius, which liquified it. That sodium was passed through a heat exchanger to boil water, which made steam, which turned a turbine, in a similar closed-cycle technology to a nuclear plant.
But solar power is not limited merely to what one can do with photovoltaics. When people talk about the many terawatts of solar power that falls on the surface of the earth, most of that solar goes into two things: photochemistry (like in plants) or to heating the earth's surface. Plants make very efficient use of the solar power that falls on them, and a black, nonreflective object will convert the incident solar power to heat (or reradiated infrared light) with extremely high efficiency. If we could focus efforts to developing technologies that capture sunlight first into chemistry or raw heat and converting that to electricity, rather than the direct conversion to electricity that photovoltaics do, we may have a better chance of reaching the 50% goal.
For instance, there was (is?) a solar power project that in the California desert that was a solar-thermal generator. Hundreds of mirrors focused sunlight onto a tower, much like the Archimedes death ray (which has received some press in
I'll admit this isn't much use in the battlefield, which is what DARPA is aiming for, but it is not out of the question to consider a smaller solar thermal unit for an encampment, which used a different medium than sodium.
Not just for solar, but for alternative energy in general. With our oil supply set to become uneconomical within forty years, we are literally in a sprint to find a replacement for fossil fuels wherever we use them today, and if we don't our society is going to hit the reset button for about a century or longer. Our entire economy is based on cheap and plentiful fossil fuels, ALL OF IT. Our commitment to alternatives so far is a joke in the US. $53 million isn't even a rounding error on what we need to be dedicating to this effort, which is likely already ten years late.