Slashdot Mirror
Researchers Improve Solar Cell Performance
Vegematic writes "Researchers at MIT have improved solar collectors using dyes. They just increased their performance results by a factor of 4. These paint-on materials can increase the power obtained from existing solar cells by a factor of over 40 without needing to track the sun. 'By collecting light over their full surface and concentrating it at their edges, these devices reduce the required area of solar cells and consequently, the cost of solar power. Stacking multiple concentrators allows the optimization of solar cells at each wavelength, increasing the overall power output.' There is also a shorter FAQ available."
Imagine that Window come crashing down... *cough*
You know, when they post another story about the incredible discoveries in solar power that seem to never actually make it to those of us who would be interested if it was cheaper and more efficient..... Show me a company that is already selling this stuff and then I'll be interested.
RTFG - Read The F#$%ing Google!
They should use this with the new 40% efficient solar cells. Then they'll have 160% efficiency!
Why did LSCs fail in the 1970's? Two reasons: the collected light was absorbed before it reached the edges of the glass or plastic plates, and the dyes were unstable.
What about stability? We tested one of our devices and found that it was stable (to 92 percent of initial performance) for three months. This isn't good enough yet for products but we are confident that the technology developed for organic light emitting devices (OLEDs) in televisions will be portable to this application.
So when and where can I get some of these cells in a user-installable 'shingle' form to re-roof my home's traditional shingle roof? (To be tied them into series/parallel grid cells with power controller and inverter, etc..)
Not needing to track the sun makes them extremely suitable for my pitched roof facets... and possibly cost-effective too!
For a long time Microsoft didn't have a Boston engineering office, so many of the best and brightest from schools like BU, BC, and Harvard were passed over by MS recruiting. But now they have the chance to apply their brains to various research projects in MS. Naturally many would shy away from the company, as it is pretty much antithetical to the mindset of the typical Bostonian student.
But these kids are smart and will no doubt go to where the money is, i.e. Microsoft.
Anyway, the best first use of this new solar cell technology is in the solar racers that run every year. By using these as a proof of concept, they can then branch out into more lucrative MS Research programs. Can they create solar cars that absorb and retain more power using less surface area? Then we'll see how well these things work in real life.
Before the make more energy than it takes to build them.
Then I'll be real interested.
once we reach peak solar in 2015.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
> "...increased their performance results by a factor of 4."
:-b
> "...increase the power obtained from existing solar cells by a factor of over 40"
What a dirty trick to get us to RTFA.
FYI it's 40. Most impressive.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
I have heard about a ton of solar technologies in the last 24 months that are supposed to revolutionize the way we get energy.
However, I don't see a product.
This is an uber product. The ability to generate electricity up to 40 times the amount of existing solar while allowing as low as 10% of the light to enter?
Commercial Buildings? This technology is off the hook. It not only generates electricity, it SAVES electricity being used to cool the building.
I am sure this would be used on new and existing residential buildings as well. The ability to create skylights while providing power?
I hope this one actually makes it to the market within 5 years.
If solar cell efficiency actually increased a mere 1% for each story slashdot has posted regarding solar cell improvement, then panels would be generating electricity in complete darkness by now.
Better known as 318230.
For those that didn't RTFA (aka, almost everyone)
The focus of the article is on how this could work in place of a regular window// not just as something to amplify solar cells. Since it can push the light to the edges, only the rim has to be fitted with collectors.
Pretty cool
FYi, its 40 time better than standard solar cells and 4 times better than their previous results.
The reference from the FAQ
1. Currie, M. J., Mapel, J. K., Heidel, T. D., Goffri, S. & Baldo, M. A. High-efficiency Organic Solar Concentrators for Photovoltaics. Science. In Press.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
In the 1970s, similar solar concentrators were developed by impregnating dyes in plastic.
I'd hate to meet the man who did this to Mr.Plastic's wife. What kinda sicko fscks plastic? ... oh wait ...
I am waiting for the day when the general consumer can buy a bunch these panels and use them efficiently. Also I think that when something like this picks up, it should become a standard for home builders. With the markets the way they are noways, getting a little energy bill break wouldn't be half bad...
Are the /. dice ads fucking up FF3 for anyone else besides me?
These nifty scientists have come up with a filter (which is made out of dye on glass) which concentrates and filters wavelengths of light. By concentrating the specific wavelengths they can increase efficiency two ways:
1) Concentrated light is better for solar cells (as in the mirrors solar plants use today)
2) Photovoltaic cells can apparently be tuned to work better for different wavelengths of light.
There are a lot of different numbers thrown around in the article, the simplest is that placing this filters on existing solar panels could increase their efficiency by 50%. By building specialized solar panels, using multiple filters, a much greater (4x? 40x?) efficiency gain can be achieved.
Roughly half my comments are never submitted. You may be reading the better half...
So close to Type II, yet so far. - Kardashev
No mention of a factor of 4.
Claims that /the panel itself will generate 40X/ because the light collecting window is 40X the size of the solar panel.
Basically they have invented a window that can divert a certain section of the spectrum 90 degrees to the the edge of the glass, which is the only place they need to put solar cells.
Sounds like a great idea. Not quite what the headline claimed.
The solar cells currently on my roof have an efficiency of 15% (manufacturer claim). So if these are 40 times better, then I'll be able to get 600% efficiency. Perhaps my neighbours will complain that I'm sucking away the light that should have fallen onto their houses leaving them in darkness?
Here is a link to the actual paper published by the MIT team:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/321/5886/226
Let's see... Cheap residential roof-top PV panels are about 12% efficient. 12*40 would give us... 500% efficient solar panels!
High-end solar panels used by satellites are nearly 40% efficient. I'm sure NASA would love to get their hands on 1,600% efficient solar panels, too.
Next time, wait until there's a REAL article on the tech, not a completely information-free and bullshit press release.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
And at least hit break even in, say, 5 years (with the interest on the loan factored in)?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This article says the window treatment for the dye alone would run around $300-$400 per square meter of glass. The solar cells would cost extra. The process requires vapor deposition which adds to the cost and it alters the light color passing through the window which may or may not be acceptable to the end user. And then there's this:
Oddly enough, a number of reports appearing today (for example, in the Associated Press) suggested that Covalent's concentrators would be of use in actual windows, but cofounder John Mapel made no mention of that possibility when we talked last week. That's no great surprise -- it would be difficult to get high-intensity light into vertically-positioned windows, much less windows placed on the wrong side of a building.
As a number of other posters have pointed out - wait for an actual product to see what it actually is and what it's capable of.
I love these types of breakthroughs, but when is something actually going to happen in the real world with this stuff?!
Off oil as quick as possible!
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
I mean, come, on, if some schmoo has a vapo solar panel and can get himself slashdotted, maybe I ought to start selling fusion reactors, ready for delivery, "real soon now", just to get the clicks!
This is my sig.
Why not use mirrors, or lenses, to focus the light? Simple, but effective.
Don't spread the word, or GM/Exxon/etc will buy all the patents again like how flywheel cars keep disappearing.
stuff |
The method collects sunlight from a larger area and concentrates it on solar cells in a smaller area, meaning you can get more power with fewer solar cells. So the way to get "500% efficient" solar panels would be to extract, say, 20% of the sun's energy hitting an area, with only 4% of that area covered by actual solar cells, with concentrators to collect the sunlight from a larger area and directing it to the cells.
This won't work for the same reason that interior paint won't last on the outside of your house. Interior paints use organic dyes, just like this MIT concentrator. To the great frustration of the paint industry, organic dyes just do not last in sunlight: the molecules breakdown.
Similar solar concentrator concepts have been looked for three decades (look up, for example, Prof. Reisfeld's work at Hebrew University) and have not yet made it out of the lab.
The researchers didn't do a thing to improve solar cells; they designed what will eventually be a better solar concentrator. The problem with concentrators is that the photovoltaics degrade faster when exposed to more intense light... this is not the "breakthrough" we've been waiting for folks.
He graduated from MIT too!
We should just have gigantic floating platforms with solar cells spread over them at sit just above clouds. They could be tethered in place by huge power cables and run by automated systems. It would block out some Sun, but wouldn't that cut down on the solar rays heating up the atmosphere?
With all the solar cell breakthroughs since 2005, we should be up to 10,000% efficiency by now.
So when photovoltaics say they're 35% efficient, does that mean power conversion efficiency? Or is it this quantum efficiency, which seems somehow less relevant than, you know, the amount of power that the cell can produce?
That sure would be a downer if these solar concentrators were destroyed by solar radiation. Watch out if the warranty is only 90 days!
is bound to be some combination that is going to go into production. People are looking at this from all angles and improving on previous research, like this dye concentrator effect from 20(+) years ago. I for one am not tried of reading about new solar innovations, we have got to free ourselves from oil.
While it's great that we have an improved solar cell film, the reality is that, for the most part, the most efficient method used on a practical worldwide scale involves passive solar heating, especially for providing heating and hot water.
Part of the problem is that the manufacturing process - such as that used by Sony in cranking out OLEDs (which they build at the same plant as their photovoltaic solar cells) - causes a fair bit of pollution, both thru film extrusion, bonding, and the doping process.
By 2020 we may see some useful scaled implementation of photovoltaics, but it's still projected that the vast and overwhelming majority of growth in solar will be it's use in passive solar heating (and cooling, using heat exchangers) and in passive solar water heaters, as both such uses have little in the way of pollution in the manufacturing process and have an easier permitting process for factories, installation, and residential and commercial use, and easier to develop tax incentives for on the local and national scales worldwide.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
This reminds me of those plastic, colored transparent clipboards you used to see - they would trap the light internally and it looked like they were glowing around the edges. Sounds like the same technology, ramped up. So if it never pans out for solar cells, these guys could still be positioned to make a killing in the novelty clipboard market! Where do I invest?
Solar cells undergo degradation with light exposure. The degradation is usually proportional to the number of photons incident on the cell. Does this method *shorten* the effective lifetimes of existing solar cells by a factor of 40? Are there cells that exist that this solution is practical for? Do the gains outweigh the costs if I use this system to "upgrade" my solar cell array and end up slashing the array's lifetime by a factor of 40?
So let me see, current cells have 15% efficiency or so , the best stuff ( I.e GaAs ) can reach 30% - 40% , and this tech will increase output power by more than an order of magnitude, meaning they should output at least 150% of the energy they receive?
If the numbers are to add up then what they are doing is a concentrating solar power plant and it should be compared to the values for such instalations. Heck, using their way to do the counting I could design a power plant which outputs 100 times the power of existing state of the art solar cells, by using a 100m array of mirrors and a stirling engine. In fact, this has been done.
For proper comparison they should compare their technology with other concentrating solar technologies, in which case I'm suspecting they get their ass kicked by solar thermal installations that have superior conversion efficiencies.
This is an uber product. The ability to generate electricity up to 40 times the amount of existing solar while allowing as low as 10% of the light to enter?
It's uber bullshit, given that commercially available panels are anywhere from 10-20% efficient; that efficiency calculation is based upon the maximum amount of solar radiation hitting a certain area of the earth, and you can't change it. The maximum improvement would therefore be 5-10x.
Also- as other posters have pointed out, there have been several advancements in solar panel technology ranging from efficiency improvements to cheaper production methods (aka the whole "printable" segment.) Not a single bit of it has yet to enter the market.
It's probably some combination of patent acquisitions (oil companies own a large number of solar technology companies. BP Solar is one good example) and outright greed on the part of inventors (ie, asking for royalties so expensive commercialization is impossible.)
It'd be really nice if one of these scientists recognized how desperately we need their work, and released it publicly. The fame it would generate would assure fortune alone...
Please help metamoderate.
Well no, the angle doesn't change the amount of energy hitting the panel. What it changes is how well the semiconductor solar cells can convert that energy. You don't have to track with these panels because the organic film absorbs, then re-emits the light, and due to the nature of the molecules, it always re-emits the light in the same direction, regardless of the incoming angle. The classic semiconductor solar cells themselves, attached all the way around the edges, are the devices that are sensitive about angle. They receive light at their optimal angle always, emitted from the organic film on the plates, rather than directly from the sunlight.
You lose efficiency in the absorption and re-emission process, but that loss is apparently worth the cost of admission, if these guys have done their math right. Being from MIT, we can hope they can do math.
This technique has a whole host of advantages over classic off-the-shelf panels you can buy today, which the article didn't go into.
The panels you can buy today are very sensitive to shadows. Each cell produces only so much voltage. To get a useful voltage out of them, you have to wire them up in series. If some percentage (50%) of a row is shadowed, the panel will actually effectively shut itself down, and produce no power at all, because of the non-participating cells. (The shutdown is accomplished with passive circuitry, not some sort of machine or processor.) This means that in a typical residential situation, you can't have so much as a chimney on your roof, or your panels could become very expensive powerless decorations. You certainly can't have any trees that could even partially shade your roof. This concept eliminates that problem. The organic molecules in question are very egalitarian about how they re-emit what they absorb. It gets spread out evenly, all the way around. This means that if any portion of the panel is shaded, all of the semiconductor cells still get a lot of (concentrated) light, and it takes a lot more shadow to shut them down.
Another issue with modern panels is the fact that a classic semiconductor solar cell is useful only through a very narrow band of wavelengths. Sunlight is very broad band light. (No jokes about bitrates, thank you.) It shows up at your roof in all kinds of frequencies. The panels you can buy today ignore a large fraction of those frequencies, since they only work at what they're tuned for. However, in the process of ignoring the other frequencies, your standard cell also blocks them entirely. So even though you can manufacture semiconductor cells with different bandgaps that will absorb different sunlight frequencies, you can't stack them directly on top of each other and gain anything. The uppermost in the stack shadows all those beneath, so they're pointless. An older slashdot story about how to manufacture a multi-bandgap semiconductor cell was posted a while ago, but that's still in early research stages too, and it apparently involves fairly difficult semiconductor manufacturing techniques. These panels do an end-run around that problem. Different dye coatings absorb different frequencies of sunlight and DON'T block the remaining frequencies. They pass through. So you can stack concentrator panels, up to some limit, and each one has semiconductor solar cells around the edges specially tuned to utilize the light frequency the dye emits. This is the big win, and the cause for the whopping efficiency claims. The transmissiveness of these concentrators for frequencies they're not tuned for means you can make a sandwich out of them and the resulting panel can use many more frequencies out of the same square meter. There's probably still some limit to how many layers you can stack before you're wasting your efforts, but it's enough to be worth the trouble.
Lastly, classic semiconductor cells can be manufactured specifically to operate efficiently in concentrated light vs standard out-of-the-sky sunlight. That's the reason for the Fresnel lens panels that have
Concentrated Solar
So which is it? Four, ten or forty times?
Quite an idiotic article.
A. Goetzberger et al., "Solar Energy Conversion with Fluorescent Collectors", Applied Physics 14, 1977, pp. 123-139.
Yes 1977!!!
I was also playing with this using plastic from TAP plastics (in the SF Bay Area) http://www.tapplastics.com/ in the late 80's.
Works ok.
See:
Patent 4149902
Patent 5227773
Patent 5816238
Patent 7316497
Mobay Chemical Corporation make a fluorescent called LISA. "fluorescent dye-doped edge-illuminating emitter panels" Technically.
There were some articles.
"A Little Light Goes a Long Way with Lisa", Mobay Corp. Marketing Document.
"Light-Collecting Plastics-A Brilliant Idea", Provisional Information Sheet, Mobay Corp.
Steven Ashley, "Razzle-Dazzle Plastic", Popular Science, pp. 100-101. Sorry can't find the year, (any one can you help here)
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
California has struggled with an unregulated power supply industry.
CA didn't really deregulate electricity, power, they shifted the regulations. Before, the same company could own both power generation and power transmission. but when the so called deregulation came it split generation and transmission, a company wasn't allowed to do both. Then transmitters were barred from raising rates but generators weren't.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
A massive country wide nuclear power plant building spree would need to take place. Right now we have over 100 nuke plants that supply 20% of our electricity
Nuclear power isn't needed. By 2050 solar power could provide 69% of the US's electrical needs. Wind can also supply a lot, I read where the Rocky Mountains alone contain enough potential wind power to supply the lower 48 states but I didn't find a reference. Then a lot of waste heat goes up smokestacks daily. Here's a quote from TFA: "Here's a Maxwell House coffee roaster in Duval County. They're roasting beans, so all that heat has to go somewhere. About twelve megawatts' worth of potential electricity is going up the stack." In Hawaii about 30% of the big Island's, Puna, is from geothermal power. Geothermal sources produced about 13,000 gigawatt hours in California in 2007, with more available.
Add all these together and every coal fired plant should be able to be closed without any more nuclear power plants being built and still have plenty of electricity.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
if you go right back to when domestic electricity supply was the breakthrough, you will find the architect of that breakthrough (Edison) had enormous legal and public relations problems with the entrenched gaslight industry who were hell bent on stopping his electric light company.
Edison did the same himself. His electric company transmitted DC power and when Tesla came out with AC power Edison tried to make it look dangerous. Edison even electrocuted an elephant to prove his point.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
"Solar market grew 62% in 2007".
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
But accidents happen, as occurred this week in Tricastin, France. Burning coal mightn't be greenhouse friendly but don't kid yourself nuclear power is ecologically safe.
Then there's the sensitive issue of selling uranium to countries like Iran.
For some, the risks are too great and would wish others would just leave the stuff in the ground.
I know we will all nit pick this to death so here is mine...
From the FAQ:
"The sun is an inexhaustible source of clean power."
Well, not quite. I know that we cannot exhaust it just by using it's normal emissions as we would place no additional drain on the sun's resources by using solar power than if we didn't exist, however, the suns normal processes will eventual exhaust even it's vast resources of Hydrogen and then start "burning" (there you go, nit pick me now) hydrogen which will drastically change its characteristics. I do however agree that we (everyone alive today and probably the human race in general) won't really care by that time because, hopefully, everyone alive today will be long dead by then and, again hopefully, the human race will have moved on to the rest of the galaxy (galaxies?) by then and look back at "the birth place of mankind" with fond memories but the loss of the Earth due to the sun running out of Hydrogen will be a fairly minor news item.
"Computer Scientists can count to 1024 on their fingers" (non-mutant, non-mutilatated, human computer scientists)
I can just see it now as large buildings in cities are being built / retrofitted with these solar panels there will be a huge legal battle as the next piece of land to the south (north for those in the upside down hemisphere) is built upon and the sun is blocked... time to go buy up all the south (north) coast land while it is still cheap. Oh wait... too late.
"Computer Scientists can count to 1024 on their fingers" (non-mutant, non-mutilatated, human computer scientists)
I have been under the impression that a grad student at Oregon State University had used the same structure used to eliminate sound in music studios (yes, the pyramids on the walls) has been applied in solar, in the effect that all light hitting their modified panels reflects around the surface until it is absorbed, thus increasing efficiency. A simple topography tweak coupled with their new transparent transistor material leads to a highly efficient and cheaply produced material. Having trouble finding the link, as it's been a while, any help?
I would really would love to be able to power my house by solar cells but it's still to expensive. Damn
The efficiency gains are not maintaining parity with the worsening economy,near as I can tell remembering prices and looking at it now. Solar PV was a better deal several years ago (I got mine right before peak "good deal" level), because they are built out of tangibles, expensive metals and silicon, and all that money being used has been inflated beyond all reasonableness. The cost rise in the raw materials and getting the fabs to put out silicon and using the aluminum and steel needed for construction and so on, the energy used in the plants and moving them around, the expense of supporting layers upon layers of middlemen to get panels from factory to end users after filtering it through wall street, etc are making the whole watts per dollar go up, not down. The panels themselves have gotten better, we get more watts per square meter now, but it is lost with the other aspects of modern business and manufacturing and how there is no rationality to the "money" system any longer. Another of the larger problems is our global society decided they wanted throw away "iWhatever-touch-yer-pods of the month club" gadgets by the billions as some place to use up expensive fabbed silicon. You want to know where the cheaper solar PV is, it is sitting in hugemongous dumps across the planet in the form of e-waste and tied up with speculator profits/axis of maximum greed and stupidity central banks economy borking. That is where it is at now. Back a decade or so ago, all the stuff needed to make the things and the energy required was loads cheaper, now it is not. People who looked ahead and could run simple sums and thought it might be a good idea to get some solar then bought it, people who didn't bought two dozen cellphones and two dozen different gaming computers and all sorts of other crap like endless streams of giant ass televisions and so on, for which most of them are now sitting in the junk drawer or at some landfill. Now it is going to *require* some amazing Tesla level breakthroughs to get cheaper, whereas with a little economic rationality in the past decade it could have been way more affordable with the normal way of getting incremental improvements. 99.999% of humans *didn't give a crap* back when it was affordable enough to start to do some energy switching around in a big way, along with the transportation mess now of being stuck with giant ass automobiles that the majors put out based on the assumption that oil was near free and would stay that way like forever. It was the mass cult like brainwashing belief system of the "cheap energy forever just because we sayso and refuse to believe it would ever get bad" that has been the largest impediment.
Anywho, to get to a polite mild criticism at society in general, if "anyone you" don't own solar now it is because you just refused to buy it in the past, you made a decision, based on a gamble, an assumption, that you were going to hold out on the miracle breakthroughs. A million people around the planet though, decided differently, they had a different assumption based at looking at markets and organizing their personal priorities differently, and bought into solar when it was cheaper, and are enjoying it and especially in the last two years are seeing their "investments" in practical home improvements go up in economic value because of price increases for conventional power and metals for manufacturing and so on. It's all in choices, what do you really want, what is more important to you.. Millions of people in the past decade have bought very expensive toys like home theater systems and "personal watercraft" and way overly expensive automobiles with heated rotating cupholders nonsense , all with a negative ROI, where that cash could have gone to some solar panels and gear, that at least had *some* ROI plus insuring some electricity supply completely outside the still manipulated markets and prone to crash and burn when you *least* want or need it to happen centralized electricity delivery system. *Choices* Wait for some tech to be some theoretically "perfect" in your mind, you'll never buy into it.
What seems to be so interesting about this development is that it's not just some crazy new technology that needs a better implementation. Rather, they've developed a new implementation of the old technology, a way that could simply say, "Oh, we can just use the old solar cells - we just route light to them differently." That makes it a much more interesting development than the constant minutiae of small advances in the technology and gives quite a bit more hope that the stuff could actually see the market.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
If these dyes can be made to block and collect only non-visible wavelengths (and there's no reason to think they can't), they could be applied to the huge vertical glass surfaces of buildings without affecting the occupants' ability to look out. Even if they collect only a small portion of the possible energy, they would make up for it by virtue of reclaiming a huge collection area that would otherwise be going unused.
Even better, this energy would be produced exactly when it is the most useful -- for obvious reasons, peak production would correlate pretty closely with peak demand. We could finally have buildings that air condition themselves from their own generated power. That alone would take a huge load off the grid.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
So let me see, current cells have 15% efficiency or so , the best stuff ( I.e GaAs ) can reach 30% - 40% , and this tech will increase output power by more than an order of magnitude, meaning they should output at least 150% of the energy they receive?
TFA says 40 X power not 40 X efficiency.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Okay, just being contrarian, but in a free-market society, what bureaucracy is responsible for implementing solutions? I thought the market would demand, and businesses would respond?
Granted, government can do a lot to encourage the growth of a new industry, but is it really government's job to produce industries?
Consider the health industry. Do they do what is best for people? No, they do what makes a profit: treating sick people. We all know that a little prevention is a worth a pound of cure. It's more than just a saying, it was the conclusion of a Harvard university study of other health care systems that focus on prevention. Why do tyhey focus on prevention? Because the government socialized medicine. Prevention is not profitable in our market system. Either are cures that you can pick in your garden.
Now consider energy. What we need (the best solutions) and what is profitable are not likely to be the same thing. We will only get what is profitable in a market system. For now it is oil. The big corporate politicians are in the pockets of big oil. So you get oil. It's very clear that the system will not work for out best interests. It needs to be overhauled.
On a similar note, I am for high oil prices because it forces a shift to alternatives. However, they should have come in the form of a tax that goes to alternative energy research at our national labs and universities. Instead, we waited for the "market" to screw us. Very poor decision making, unless your in the pocket of big oil.
Although we may not have control over world prices of oil, we fail to consider that ~35% of our oil comes from the US. Most of that oil comes from our land (we the people own it). Little has changed in the dynamics of this oil over the last two years. We sell it to big oil for pennies on the dollar. They turn around and sell it refined to us at the going rate. We should not allow the price of our own oil to float freely with the market. We have been hood winked. They are simply picking our pockets.
The same goes for many other resources. Folks, we need an overhaul, and quick.
They make their "solar cell windows" from amorphous silicon.
So their PV cells can handle shade then? Unlike single crystal PV cells for which the power output drops fast when not fully exposed to sun, as little as 5% of a cell shaded can cut power 50% if not turn it off, amorphous silicon cells can handle some shade.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
PV production will never by high enough for Middle America to bid on them, they will never provide Energy Independence
So you are more qualified than the researchers than came up with "A Solar Grand Plan"? Their plan says solar power can generate 69% of the US's electricity by 2050. You also know more than the billionaire Texas oil man T. Boone Pickens, Jr? He's announced a plan to eliminate the need for imported oil. His plan is to erect wind turbines through middle America from Canada to Mexico. The electricity that can be produced is enough to close all the LNG, liquefied natural gas power plants in the US. The Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States published by the National Renewable Energy Labs details the wind resources in the US. Picken's plan is to use all the LNG as fuel for vehicles thus replacing imported oil.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?