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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."
It will take a drop in price before solar panels finally hit the big time. But boy, when they do drop expect an explosion of uses.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I knew that they would come up with cheap paintable solar cells. I'll pick them up in my flying car.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I suppose. It's so strange these days. You see people doing research, then posing for a photo and making a press release. Then.. nothing. The promises and predictions don't amount to actual products that people can buy. But I suppose they do get you more grant money.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Hopefully this will make our tanks, planes and kill-bots better by reducing the mass/volume required for energy storage, thus increasing the space available for bullets, nukes and sharp sticks.
"Someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers."
"The team combined carbon nanotubes with tiny carbon buckyballs (fullerenes)
Whooboy! I wonder what that print cartridge is going to cost!
What is conspicuously missing from that article is any kind of a figure for the conversion efficiency of the devices they're making. Lots of researchers have been working on fullerines. What efficiency are they achieving? 5 percent? 1 percent? A tenth of a percent? Lacking any kind of number for efficiency-- preferably an efficiency measurement verified by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory-- tends to make me think that this is theory with no actual devices manufactured at all.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Make their way into an actual product people can buy?
Maybe not
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
The problem with the article is that it uses the words "have developed" as in "have developed an inexpensive solar cell that can be painted or printed on flexible plastic sheets" when in reality it sounds more like "have an idea for" or "have developed a concept for" pending the advancement of material science. I seems they haven't built or tested..I mean painted a prototype, so the article is getting ahead of itself a bit maybe.
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.
One thing I've always been curious about (and it may seem obvious, though I don't know), is whether or not we could subsist off solar energy, if we could use it efficiently. Answer: oh yeah! (easily)
From wikipedia
4.26×10^20 J, the yearly energy consumption of the world as of 2001
5.5×10^ 24 J, the total energy from the Sun that strikes the face of the Earth each year
We only use about 1/10000 of the total solar energy (as of 2001).
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Electric lighting is much more efficient in terms of lumens per BTU than a candle or kerosene lamp, so one would think that people who get electricity and electric lighting to replace their candles and lamps reduce their energy usage. In fact, what happens is that their usage goes up by an order of magnitude. When folks in third world countries use candles and oil lamps, they maximize their use of sunlight, only use light sources when necessary and often for task lighting, take advantage of full moons, and watch consumption closely. With electricity, they use bright area lights for task work, leave lights on in adjacent (or even unoccupied) rooms, and other things unimaginable to them just months before.
The reverse case, living on a battery bank and solar panel, follows a similar pattern. When living on battery, tracking your power levels becomes second nature. You become much more aware of what you are using and start to make trade-offs in your mind: do I really want to watch that movie and draw down the battery bank when I could just as easily read a book (or go to bed at dark and get up earlier, or actually talk to my wife, or...) It is not a matter of suffering or 'making do', but just finding you don't need as much as you thought you did. In the summer when the battery banks are overflowing, you splurge, like running the ice cream maker.
Having gone back and forth between these worlds a few times, I am very aware of the power I expend. Right now, my wife and I have one light bulb (a CFL) on in the entire house. There have been times and places that even burning a single light this long after dark would have been unusual.
So, yes, solar panels can provide enough power to run your life, particularly if you make the logical adjustments to living with a variable and finite source of power. We get so used to flipping a switch and not thinking about where the power comes from, that we expect the exact same out of renewable power sources. It also means that we are horrible at dealing with emergencies or changes of fortune. But we don't have to live that way.
What would be really elegant is painting roads to collect solar power for cars. There is a whole lot of road out there!
When they do, please make sure to post and complain about the Slashvertisement.
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....
What are the specs for this material? How many W per m^2 can the paint generate under the 1KW:m^2 of "solar noon"? How many joules does it take to manufacture the coatings, how many joules to apply them from, say, a big "inkjet" printer? How long do they last?
Therefore, what is the total energy budget of this material?
If they have to be replaced frequently, produce low wattage, and cost a lot of energy to produce and deploy, then silicon PV cells that last 35+ years at 15-25% efficiency might still be better, even though the silicon cells cost a lot of energy to produce, deploy, maintain and recycle. Or maybe this tech is better.
I wish every journalist covering the accelerating solar power industry would always answer those basic questions. Otherwise, it's just science fiction dressed up as propaganda.
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make install -not war
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
While this sounds cool, this seems to be yet another technology that we'll eventually be able to print with our inexpensive inkjet printers.
hopefully they'll release the "nanotube buckyball solar panel" cartridge to fit in the same printer as the OLED display cartridge... etc.
Can't wait to read some word documents written using solar panel nanotube ink, too.