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.

Comments

Re:Downsides

[hcdejong]

That means you NEED enough GAS powerplants to power the whole world too, as they're the only type of power plant you can literally turn the dial and turn up the output.

No, they're not. Hydro plants can do this as well. The UK uses several hydro plants like Dinorwig to cover peak loads. Dinorwig can go from 0 to 1320 MW in 12 seconds, and has a peak output of about 1800 MW. It is built as an accumulator system, pumping water up the mountain at night (using excess capacity from nuclear and fossil fuel plants) so it doesn't depend on a huge water supply (river). Efficiency (W generated vs. W needed to pump the water up the mountain) is about 70%.

Grandpa was a Buggy Whip Salesmen

[maggard]

Actually, my Grandfather was a buggy whip salesmen.

After returning from The Great War, WWI, he was disabled (indeed he'd been declared dead & in the morgue at one point - mustard gas.) The job he could get was selling buggy whips, and his territory was the US Midwest & Canada. He was away from home for long stretches of time, and as you can imagine had some pretty amazing tales to tell of traveling to remote ccommunities back when travel was HARD.

However he saw the car taking over and once he'd saved up enough money he did the smart thing: Opened a service station.

Later it went bust in the Great Depression. He then started again, in putting in power lines, then power plants, and eventually became VP of a a large construction firm and responsible for many of the major structures still standing in Kansas City including the Liberty Memorial, Nelson Gallery, and the Starlight Theatre.

The point is, he really was in the buggy whip business and when the new technologies came in he adapted and took advantage of them. Then when the bust came he reinvented himself again and took his skills and when into an entirely new career. Not a new high-tech story, rather from a fella raised in a sod hut in the Oklahoma Territory where buffalo were a constant threat.