Slashdot Mirror


Solar Cell Achieves 40% Efficiency

Fysiks Wurks found on the U.S. Department of Energy website news of a breakthrough in solar energy efficiency. From the article: "...with DOE funding, a concentrator solar cell produced by Boeing-Spectrolab has recently achieved a world-record conversion efficiency of 40.7 percent, establishing a new milestone in sunlight-to-electricity performance." A page linked from Wikipedia's article on solar energy calculates the land area that would need to be covered by solar collectors at 8% efficiency to meet the world's energy needs (using 2003 figures). At 40% efficiency, it looks like a square 265 miles on a side in the American southwest would do it.

1 of 632 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Finally! by gunny01 · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    That comment is so ignorant, I'm gonna included an equally bigoted comment of my own!

    Why not use Lebanon? They don't have any oil and the knowledge of the falafel has been safely exported.

    --
    kill all the fucking niggers