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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."
They have the 10 years this will take to come to market to adapt. Remember, this is just an announcement that a university has done research, not that anyone even intends ends to develop it.
FTFA: "Within two to three years we will have developed a prototype for real applications. "The technology could be sold off already, but it would be a shame to get rid of it now." God DAMN it. I want a product now.
Whinging aside, I found this interesting: "They are also more environmentally friendly because they are made from titanium dioxide - an abundant and non-toxic, white mineral available from New Zealand's black sand." Very funny sentence. But anyway, titanium is one of the most common metallic elements on Earth. The problems with it are that most of it is oxidized, and until recently there has not been a worthwhile electrolytic process for its refinement (I don't know if this is catching on or not.)
I still think it's just stupid not to work on a first-generation product now, and at the same time, work on making the stuff more efficient. We need this tech and we need it TODAY.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
$100,000 in batteries, and they couldn't use a microwave? Something's wrong there. When you can spend $1k on an inverter, and get a LARGE pure-sine unit that will handle a microwave without sweating, and another $1k will buy you enough batteries to run that for an hour straight, it's hard to believe that a $100,000 setup couldn't do it.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
The mistakes that we have made WRT to energy is that we went to just several forms of energy. We have oil for transportation and coal for electricity (save a few countries, the majority is coal). Other than France, NO country is truly dependent on Nukes (America is 2'nd largest user at only 19%). In addition, NONE are dependent on alternative (though Greenland is heading towards geo-thermal in a big way).
So, now, you suggest that we should move PURELY to 1 form of energy? Hopefully, we will learn our lessons and just say No Thanx. I want to see alternative such as solar brought in in a BIG way, but it make good sense to continue using nukes. In addition, we should continue trying to obtain a fusion power. Somewhere down the road, either fission or fusion could be used for transportation to the planets or better other stars.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
1/10 of the cost? Great. Less than 1/2 the efficiency? Uh-oh.
In the long run, we're better off with the high-efficiency Si cells.
Also, we don't have a good idea of the durability of these cells. I'm a bit concerned because of the organic nature; how stable are they? What kind of reduction in efficiency will we see over, say, 20 years?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Then their future would be as power-broker. It still takes time and effort to maintain the grid, and a grid is still better than everyone having batteries, since you can use it to shunt power from where it's bright to where it's dark. Averaging over a whole continent would make solar power pretty reliable.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
This article is yet another "we have a new chemistry and it's gonna be really cheap real soon now" article. Here's the real deal in solar power.
Yesterday, Mark Pinto from Applied Materials gave a talk in EE380 at Stanford on where they're going. Applied Materials is the biggest maker of semiconductor fab equipment, and they've branched out into making fab equipment for display panels and then solar cells.
To get costs down for big flat panel displays is a manufacturing technology problem. Applied Materials went at it in typical semiconductor-fab fashion - scaling up the fab size. They're now making panels of about 5 square meters in area. These are then cut up into 50-inch TV sets.
Once they got that working, they adapted the huge machinery involved to making solar panels. This turned out to work quite well. Since they're adapting a process that produces higher-quality product than a solar cell, they don't have significant quality problems. The solar-cell only makers tend to have spotty quality; he pointed out that with some solar panels, not all the cells are exactly the same color, which indicates trouble in the coating process.
With size and quality working, the next step is volume. They're about to build the first "40 megawatt fab", one that produces in a year enough solar panels to generate 40 megawatts. These are big panels, 2.2m x 2.6m. The price of the electricity produced should be just about even with peak-hour energy costs in Spain, where this is going. Energy payback (when you get more energy out than was required to make the panel) is about two years. That plant comes on line in 2008.
The next step is the "gigawatt fab", a scale-up of that plant. This is part of Applied Materials' "Solar Strategy". Their position is that the technology is here; it's just necessary to get it into volume production, real volume production. Which is what Applied Materials is good at.
Now we're talking about serious production volume. Three or four such plants could build enough solar cells to cover Southern California's air conditioning energy load in five years.
Meanwhile, they have investments in some other technologies, including a "roll to roll" flexible solar cell technology, and some exotic ideas like tinted glass windows that also generate power. But they don't need a breakthrough. The current technology is good enough to be profitable, so they can start making product and shipping it in volume, while research proceeds on lowering the cost further. Pinto pointed out that about half the cost of solar power is now installation, and that needs to move beyond "a guy with a pickup truck".
So that's what's really happening. Big machines in big factories built by big companies cranking out big solar panels in big volume. Which is how you solve big problems.