Slashdot Mirror
Quantum Dot Recipe May Lead To Cheaper Solar Panels
Science Daily is reporting that scientists have developed a new method for cost-effectively producing four-armed quantum dots that have previously been shown to be particularly effective at converting sunlight into electrical energy. The discovery could clear the way for better, cheaper solar energy panels.
From:. asp
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060603/bob8
"Both the Los Alamos and NREL teams calculate a maximum of 42 percent conversion of solar power to usable electricity. Conventional cells, by contrast, operate at 15 to 20 percent efficiency."
Wil McCarthy has an interesting book called Hacking Matter, which talks about Quantum Dots and explains a bunch of applications.
Quite an interesting read, and well written. And I think you can download the book online at his website, as well.
Highly recommended - entertaining, informative read.
Even though there are several breakthroughs and no real results yet, I'm hopeful. Even if none of these individual methods are exceptional, if each one provides a 5% improvement over what we already have, we should be able to make solar realistic at some point.
I've run the numbers for my house more than once. I have a favorable rebate program (Austin Energy) and a prime location (south facing roof with no obstructions and a greenbelt behind me so no future buildings being erected). Even with those factors, my payback isn't realistic enough. I've even run them for wind.....but then there's the whole HOA thing to fight.
Any of these improvements that can reduce my payback are welcome.
Layne
I don't know where on earth you get that from, but it can take over a decade for a new oil field to come online. You think that they're sinking money a for things that will pay off a decade or more down the line but they're only thinking on a 3-6 month timeframe?
Part of the problem is that it *does* take a while to shift production. You can reopen old wells or expand an existing field in half a year to a couple years, but brand new projects take many years to get started. Consequently, they have to do a lot of gambling on what the state of the world will be. There are tons of oil resources (bitumen, coal liquifaction, oil shale, arctic and deep sea extraction, etc), but we're running out of the "cheap" ones. The question is, how much of the more expensive ones do we think we'll need, ten years down the road? Will Nigerians be sabotaging pipelines, or will the crisis be resolved? Will the middle east have calmed down or will a whole new can of worms have opened up? Will foreign governments make nasty surprises on your projects, like Russia taking over Sakhalin or the Venezuelan goverment taking over joint ventures with PDVSA?
Not exactly an easy problem to solve. Bet wrong, and you'll go out of business. But you have to bet. Oil companies don't stay in business for half a century or more by only looking at their next year. Yet, that's exactly what the supermajors have done -- stay in business, decade after decade.
No, she's fine. My associate is vomiting for a totally unrelated reason.
Exactly.
The technology is already there, but it's the economics that haven't been worked out yet.
I remembered back in December, Slashdot covered the high efficiency multi-junction solar cells with a 40% conversion efficiency from Boeing's Spectrolab. According to the press release, they already had a fully functional 33 kilowatt generator in the Australian outback.
Too bad according to Wikipedia, it costs up to $40 per cm^2.
http://www.boeing.com/ids/news/2006/q4/061206b_nr. html l lium_arsenide_.28GaAs.29_multijunction
href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell%23Ga
There has actually been fairly consistent, gradual improvement in solar panels.
If you're interested, get a hold of the May 8th Economist and check the Technology Quarterly. The article is online but requires an Economist subscription. There was an article on solar panels that was very informative. First, on price:
There is also a very interesting quote on how the technology can be compared to other technologies dealing with silicon and thin films.
There is also a graph in the article showing installed solar power capacity from 1994 to 2004. In 1994 there was about 0.2GW of installed solar power. In 2004 there was about 2.5GW of installed power.
From the article, you could go ahead and make up a 'Sol's Law', similar to Moore's law. It would not have anything like the 18 month double of transistor packing, but may have 10 year order of magnitudes of increases in installed solar panels and considerable reductions in cost.
I notice oil companies are heavily involved in solar energy, are they securing their future and/or slowing solar tech down?
Oil companies recognized a long time ago that much of their business was selling energy - or the means to obtain usable energy. And long before the whole "global warming" flap (back during the last "here comes an ice age" flap, actually) they recognized that using their products caused pollution, and people were looking for cleaner ways to get energy - which might reduce their market.
It makes sense for them to be able to make money from the big-business end of selling people the means to get usable energy. That way, if the market suddenly shifts to something else, they get to make money off that to compensate for the lost revenue on the old stuff. And if research is needed they had a LOT of money to invest in it - just as they invest in exploration for more oil deposits.
So they did a lot of research on ways to make money by enabling people to make energy OTHER than by pumping, refining, and selling oil.
One of those was photovoltaic panels. ARCO, for instance, did a bunch of work on that, eventually bringing quality modules to market at prices that make them practical in a large number of locations. (That operation has been absorbed into BP Solar if I have my players sorted out correctly.)
They'll be happy to sell you oil to burn in engines. They'll be happy to sell you photovoltaic modules. (They'll probably be happy to sell you fusion engines if they ever work out, too.)
Trying to keep solar energy out of the market does them no good. If somebody else comes up with something practical and they CAN'T stop it, they lose revenue on oil and don't get compensating revenue from the replacement. So their best strategy is to be in that market with a product competitive enough to give them significant market share, at a price that gives them a decent return but doesn't cripple the consumer. (And first company that makes a breakthrough that starts the switchover gets the lion's share of the money to be made.) They're smart enough to realize this.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"Power conversion efficiencies from these cells are typically below 4% (eg. 1.8% original report, Sun et. al Nano Lett 3, 961). A good crystalline silicon cell will give you 12-15%."
2007/04/18: -> "Plastic solar cell efficiency breaks record at WFU nanotechnology center"
The global search for a sustainable energy supply is making significant strides at Wake Forest University as researchers at the university's Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials have announced that they have pushed the efficiency of plastic solar cells to more than 6 percent.
http://www.wfu.edu/news/release/2007.04.18.n.php
Because they are flexible and easy to work with, plastic solar cells could be used as a replacement for roof tiling or home siding products or incorporated into traditional building facades. These energy harvesting devices could also be placed on automobiles. Since plastic solar cells are much lighter than the silicon solar panels structures do not have to be reinforced to support additional weight.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
It is hard to find panels that cheap because the raw material supply is tight just now. As this clears up in the next couple years $3/Watt should be pretty common (delivered not installed). The other thing that has kept prices high is lack of industrial scale. You can look at page 20 of this report http://www.redrok.com/pvreport.pdf to see that a 500 MW production plant reduces costs by a factor of 4. One of at least two plants of this size going into the US this year is described here: http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/stor y?id=47621. As these crank up,
you should see prices drop even farther. If you want to signup for renting panels from the other plant follow the links at http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html.
The telling thing is that they are no longer oil companies. BP hasn't called itself an oil company for years - it has called itself an ENERGY company for years. The energy currently is mainly oil, but BP and others are certainly not wedded to it - they'll deal with all energy production and storage.
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