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The Best Of What's New 2007
BlaineZilla pointed us to one of the earliest annual 'best of' roundups: Popular Science's Best of What's New awards. The winner this year is a nanosolar powersheet that may someday change the way we think about renewable energy. Other winners include the corot satellite, a project aimed at searching out habitable planets in other solar systems, and the world's most advanced bionic hand.
Although I was pretty skeptical about the buzzword-laden NanoSolar, after reading TFA, I've gotta say that their technology is absolutely incredible, and unlike most of PopSci's outlandish predictions looks like it very well break into the mainstream. Although it's not going to singlehandedly solve the energy crisis, if they can ramp up production quickly enough (and maybe cut costs even further), we'll soon begin to see a more widespread adoption of solar power.
As long as the cells are cheap enough, the applications for it are impressively extensive. The cells themselves are incredibly light and thin, and looks like it can be applied to just about any flat surface. It won't power your car, but it might make your hybrid/electric go a few extra miles before the next charge. Flat-roofed buildings can cover themselves in the stuff, and greatly reduce their energy usage. (Alternatively, a facility such as a warehouse could possibly even break even on its energy usage by keeping itself lit during the day with skylights, and selling the energy from the roof back to the grid. During the night, power for artificial light is taken from the grid)
You might even be able to apply the film directly to the body of a car or to roofing materials, given that the underlying backing doesn't need to be anything terribly special.
The fact that they're doing the majority of their research and production in the US and Germany also suggest that the manufacturing process will be relatively clean, and that their workers will be paid decent wages.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
As of the end of 2006, the total worldwide installed PV capacity was 5.7 gigawatt at peak. Norway, a country with a population bellow 5 million, consumes more electricity than that. Single nuclear power stations can produce more electricity. Seriously, solar will NOT solve the energy crisis in any near future. Even with an exponential growth of solar power, doubling installed capacity every 5 years, it would still be more than 50 years until you get to the same order of magnitude as PRESSENT energy consumption, and this is at peak power.
Proponents of solar power usually talk about how its efficiency is about to jump several times in the near future, but even if you improved the efficicency tenfold ( which would put you above 100% efficiency) you would still not even be within 1% of pressent energy consumption. Seriously, maybe in a century, but photovoltaics just isn't going to replace Oil before it runs out.
To get a slight idea about what will be required to phase out fossil fuels, have a look at this diagram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:World_energy_usage_width_chart.svg
Solar and Wind just ins't going to solve that issue alone. Neither is nuclear, biofuels, or clean coal. It should be damn obvious from that diagram alone that we are going to need every piece of clean energy we can get our hands on. Expanding the use of nuclear and biomass 5 times, would take care of the first 50%. Carbon capture and storage with coal sticks you up at 75%, and expanding wind power 100 times can provide the remainder. All of this assumes strict energy conservation measures to keep the overall energy use at pressent levels. Of course, with the developing world industrialising this appears unlikely, so you will need some more energy, but ff we go for the optimistic goal of preventing overall energy consumption from increasing by more than 50%, then it is doable, PROVIDED we use all energy sources we can get. To reject carbon capture and storage, nuclear or other energy sources, based on some delusional pipe-dream of solar power coming to the rescue is however just wishful thinking.