Solar Power Becoming More Affordable

prostoalex writes "With both startups and large companies such as Boeing working on solar power, the technology is becoming more affordable, MIT Technology Review says. Solar power concentrators are all in rage now: 'The thinking behind concentrated solar power is simple. Because energy from the sun, although abundant, is diffuse, generating one gigawatt of power (the size of a typical utility-scale plant) using traditional photovoltaics requires a four-square-mile area of silicon, says Jerry Olson, a research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in Golden, CO. A concentrator system, he says, would replace most of the silicon with plastic or glass lenses or metal reflectors, requiring only as much semiconductor material as it would take to cover an area the size of a typical backyard. And because decreasing the amount of semiconductor needed makes it affordable to use much more efficient types of solar cells, the total footprint of the plant, including the reflectors or lenses, would be only two to two-and-a-half square miles.'"

Comments

Obvious to me...

[Fishbulb]

Why all the talk of centralized power generation?

Solar panels are the way to put power generation into the hands of the people. When I look out at all the rooftops in the area - houses, office buildings, Super S-Marts and their enormous un-covered parking lots, all I can think of is if every one of those surfaces had a single solar panel our energy demands from centralized (corporate :p) energy would a fraction of what it is now.

Have we learned nothing from decentralized computing?

Solar Energy - Been looking into this the past few

[majutsu]

years. One of the major problems of concentrated solar power is the heat - normal photovoltaics would melt. The benefit is that concentrated light also has better efficiency than the normal ~10-22% of normal solar power. One of the traditional ways around the heat problem wasn't to use a photovoltacic as all. An energy farm in Australia uses dishes to focus the light and at the focal point places a stirling engine, with only the heat powering it. Interesting stuff. I hope to have my own workable solar power system power my property one of these days.