Slashdot Mirror
Cheap Paint-able Solar Cells Developed
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "Researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology have developed an inexpensive solar cell that can be painted or printed on flexible plastic sheets. According to the lead researcher, "Someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers. Consumers can then slap the finished product on a wall, roof or billboard to create their own power stations." The team combined carbon nanotubes with tiny carbon buckyballs (fullerenes) to form snake-like structures. Add sunlight to excite the polymers, and the buckyballs will grab the electrons. The article abstract is available through the Journal of Materials Chemistry, with an illustration of the technology."
Hmm, I wonder if I can paint my car with this and tell big oil to !$#@ off?
Nope. Not enough power.
But maybe if you paved a couple acres and painted THAT you could collect enough power to charge your car.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
First, the article is the NJIT press release, with essentially the same text and pictures.
Second, this is yet another of those overhyped "minor advance in materials science" articles. The abstract for the technical article says only "The results indicate that C60 decorated SWCNTs are promising additives for performance enhancement of polymer photovoltaic cells." There's no mention of "paintable solar cells".
"Paintable solar cells" have been talked up before (they were mentioned on Slashdot two years ago) but nobody has actually made that work. There's this fantasy that you somehow spray something on your roof and get power out. But it's not likely to work.
Some guy at the University of Toronto has been hping this for several years now. He got quite a bit of press in 2005. But his actual cells were, according to Business Week, 3 orders of magnitude worse than existing technology, were more expensive to make, and had a limited lifetime.
I was much more impressed when I went to a talk by Mark Pinto, the VP of Applied Materials' solar unit. He spoke for an hour and a half, and never mentioned "eco" or "green". He's a manufacturing exec, and he sees this as a manufacturing cost problem. They know what to do; they just need to do it bigger, faster, and cheaper. Which is what Applied Materials does, very successfully, for ICs and flat panel displays. He has charts showing that in high-sun areas like southern Spain, solar power can now be cheaper than existing electricity sources. So they're building a big solar panel plant there. As the materials improve, they'll convert to new materials and processes, just like they do for ICs. And as with ICs and flat panel displays, they expect to follow the cost curve down.
Their existing generation of solar panel fab is derived from their flat panel display fab equipment, but they expect that, over time, those technologies will diverge. They'd like a roll-to-roll solar cell process, and bought a company with one that sort of works, but if it doesn't, they think they can do OK with something that works like a huge wafer fab, with each wafer covering five square meters.
unfortunately, 1 square foot of sunlight contains no where near that kind of energy even at 100% efficency
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Most single storey houses have enough roof space to allow current silicon panels to both power the house (under net metering) and charge a plug-in hybrid. It does not take acres. If you have a taller house, you might need some yard space since you've got more floor per unit roof to power. Polymer panels may hit 10% efficiency befor to long. The current record is 6.5%http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19044/, so there is not all that far to go to catch up with
16-20% efficient silicon.s -selling-solar.html
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Sprout silicon leaves: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user