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Solar Power-Cell Breakthrough
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from the Nanomaterials Research Centre at Massey University in New Zealand have developed synthetic dyes that can be used to generate electricity at one tenth of the cost of current silicon-based solar panels. These photosynthesis-like compounds work in low-light conditions and can be cheaply incorporated into window-panes and building materials, thereby turning them into generators of electricity."
No, what will really piss them off is everyone using the grid as a giant storage cell.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Hell yeah!
Imagine the checks they will have to pay out now that people can set up their roof as a money farm for 1/10 the cost!
That was the big problem with getting people to install solar. The initial cost was too much. We'll still have to pay for the breaker box upgrade so we can feed power back to the electric company, but at least it won't take 20 years to pay off the solar collectors now.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Not the world, just day-to-day life as we know it.
Here's the problem with that: even if we started cutting back our CO2 output (disregarding all of the other pollution we put out that's causing us problems now) by 1% cumulative per year it would still be a long time before we stopped putting out more CO2 than the system can ordinarily handle. But the system is already overstressed, and as you point out the total amount of CO2 will dissipate only slowly. Even if we stopped emitting CO2 today, aside from that which is absolutely necessary, there would still be too much CO2 for quite some time to come.
Besides global warming, there are other excellent reasons to reduce CO2 output (and that of other undesirable emissions.) Probably the most serious issue at the moment is the acidification of the oceans. We've already been killing off oceanic algae with pollution, like oil spills. Now we're not only threatening algae, which definitely prefers a certain Ph range, but coral reefs have been hurting badly and the acidification of the ocean due to CO2 gas exchange is implicated. Oceanic algae produces the vast majority of the oxygen that we need to survive. CO2 is also toxic and even small increments in the percentage of the atmosphere it makes up causes health problems including dizziness, nausea, and general malaise. Although we can survive exposure to environments which are over the usual amount, it's not good for us - or probably any other mammal.
The point is that we really needed this technology decades ago, and we're already late on getting started using it. Putting sequestered CO2 into the atmosphere is simply a Bad Idea(tm). Anything we can do to reduce that NOW means that we're going to be in less trouble later. Since we can't immediately stop all CO2 use and we can't go back in time, the problem will get worse before it gets better.
I cannot disagree strongly enough. If we could actually follow the so-called radical agenda, which I like to call the rational agenda since we all live in the atmosphere and we will all suffer if it becomes less hospitable to human life, then it would be a positive thing. We are quite simply living beyond the means of the Earth to sustain us. The only truth in your statement comes from the fact that the "radical" environmentalists can only push the obstinate defilers of the planet so quickly. But without them asking for a certain level of change, we would be unlikely to have even the positive change we are currently implementing.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, human greed will kick in - ie market forces. I don't know how you can say cost has nothing to do with it, because if you reduce the time that solar panels take to pay for themselves from (let's say) 15 years to 9 months (if this is both 1/10 the cost and works better on cloudy days) it's quite obvious that more people will buy them. I also don't know who this "they" is that will keep money out of our pockets. Barring patents, there will be competition in this market (and even if there are patents they'll expire). If company A can convert your roof to solar power for $X, and Company B can do it for $X/10, guess how much business Company A is going to get? "They" don't get to decide what the market price for the product is, the market does that. And if production costs drop by a factor of 10, that cannot help but affect the consumer price unless it's a monopoly market.
Are you suggesting that greed kept the memory companies from giving us 2 gig blocks when we were playing with Commodores?
Those BASTARDS!
Seriously though, it takes a lot more effort to get higher grade products. Better grade is needed for better density, quality, and reliability.
But, I've been hearing about doped polymer based PV cells for a while (along with this 1/10th the cost and 1/2 the efficiency) and they are still not something that I've seen actually working, not to mention actually deployable for a residential application. Interesting idea, hopefully becomes something.
The memory in your computer is made of sand, and I'm sure a 2GB chip doesn't contain much more sand than a 16KB one.
This is absurdly reductive. If you honestly believe the volume of silicon used in production is the only valid factor in price differential between chips, you're quite welcome to try replacing the RAM in your PC with sand. If not, your argument is intentional sophistry.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
Very good question. These are not just dyes--they're fluorescent dyes. They absorb a photon in a certain energy range, which puts and electron in an excited state. After a certain amount of time in that excited state (i.e., the "fluorescence lifetime") the electron drops back down to the ground state and emits a photon of lower energy (the difference in energy between absorbed and emitted photons is called the Stokes shift). Every time an electron jumps to that excited state, it can potentially react with an oxidant and destroy the fluorescence (this is known as "photobleaching." If you mix antioxidants with the dye solution you can decrease the rate of photobleaching--such an antioxidant solution is called an "antifade." There are other ways to reduce photobleaching, such as sticking certain chemical moieties onto the dye.
In short, the stability of the dye system really depends on the dye structure and the presence (or absence) of oxidizing molecules. There are plenty of fluorescent dyes used in lasers, but I don't know how long they last before bleaching. If the dye is in the right solvent (such as DMSO, perhaps) it might take a damn long time to bleach. But the point is that dye is cheap compared to refined silicon, and replacing bleached dye might be as simple as flushing out the old stuff and pouring in a new solution.
In my opinion there are only two reasonable long-term solutions to solar energy production: 1) Imitate photosynthesis using fluorescent dyes. 2) Let the plants do all the hard work of turning photons + water + carbon dioxide into sugar, then figure out how to imitate cellular respiration and turn sugar into energy (specifically, a separation of charge).
This site has tons of information about various fluorescent dyes, though it's geared towards use in molecular biology, not photovoltaics (unless you count the voltage-sensing dyes).
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
It's a funny thing, people everywhere always have the idea that technology will come along and save us. Some future tech will make it all better....
.....
Bah Humbug. We have everything we need right now.
solar power can be put on new homes. It just isn't.
small and quiet wind generators exist. They could be put in everyones back yard. They just aren't.
We have efficient vehicles. They're just not popular.
Most people live within 10 miles of their work. They could bike. They just don't.
We've had the tech to clean water using plants for 40 years. It's just not used.
We have the tech to build efficient homes. Instead we slap up quick and crappy ones.
Etc.
We have the tech. Tech is not the problem. The only thing holding us back now is the culture and will to do what we can already do.
Don't go looking for a miracle solution. They exist, lazy people just don't use them.
-T
P.S. I hate you all.
That was the big problem with getting people to install solar. The initial cost was too much. We'll still have to pay for the breaker box upgrade so we can feed power back to the electric company, but at least it won't take 20 years to pay off the solar collectors now.
I know a wee bit about dyes, probably just enough to be dangerous, and one thing these people are apparently forgetting, is that so far, no one has invented an organic based dye that doesn't fade, so in this case, what will be the annual recoating costs in order to maintain the efficiency at an acceptable level?
Sorry to rain on all the parade plans, but I suspect the short lifetime might be a put off.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Zoe: "Sir, I think you have a problem with your brain being missing."
--Episode #2, "The Train Job"
If I cover only the south-facing parts of my roof with current Si solar cells, I can over-produce my own households consumption comfortably by a factor of ten or so. At, say, $5k or there abouts for the installation. If there were solar cells with twice the "efficiency", I could overproduce my consumption by a factor of twenty.
And why would I want that?
"Efficiency" is typical oil-industry brainwashing. Unambiguously the mindset of a consumer of a finite, limited resource. Sunlight is unlimited - "efficiency" doesn't play a role anywhere. I don't want, nor need solar cells that can squeeze a few percent more wattage out of a square foot of roof. I want cells that are cheap, period:
If the whole installation was $500 instead of $5000, then I wouldn't care if the whole thing breaks occasionally or if its efficiency drops over time or whether I have to replace the complete thing every 5 years. I simply don't care. The only reason people keep whining about these things is because they keep thinking in terms of dense, high-power, expensive hi-tech nano-gadgets. Once you think of them as something low-grade, cheap, and abundant, there's a thousand times more surface area available than you could possibly need.
A 2kW installation on each of 100million roofs in the US would cover the entire US electricity consumption right there. But let's say you can collect for really cheap - how about the surface area of not only all the highways, but the strip between the highways as well? Imagine a couple suare meter of cells on every single high-voltage transmission line tower - not for "generation" so much as for "regeneration"; supplying just as much as is lost in transmission between two of these towers. Suddenly the grid itself is a producer, and the larger it gets the less it matters whether there's actually any power plants plugged in anywhere. Heck, they're towers - why not have a little windmill on top of each one as well? As long as you're thinking "expensive equipment that needs to be serviced" that won't fly, but if you can swing it for cheap, low-efficiency it'll be worth it and you just won't care whether the one or other one breaks occasionally.
There's no energy crisis. There has never been one and there will never be one. There's more than enough energy to go around. All we have to do is start tapping into it. Turns out that that is difficult to do in such a way as to make some few people super-rich -- and that is why it isn't done...
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.