Slashdot Mirror
Solar Cells — Made In a Pizza Oven
stylemessiah writes "The winner of several Eureka Science Awards in Australia is a crafty chick who devised a way to create solar cells cheaply using a pizza oven, nail polish and an inkjet printer. This was developed to address the high cost of cells and in particular for the world's poorest regions. She wanted to give the ~2 billion people around the world who don't have electricity the gift of light and cheap energy. This could have profound (and a good profound) implications for education and health in those in the poorest regions in the world. And it all started with her parents giving her a solar energy kit when she was 10..."
Last time I checked, they had already figured out how to produce low-cost solar cells. They're already shipping. The tech mentioned in the article may take 5 years to fully commercialize.
Heaven forbid anyone seek financial benefit for their innovations...
She wants to help the poor people of the world.
So, she found a process that uses cheap, easily accessible parts that would allow people in poor countries to help themselves.
And she patented it. So she can commercialize it.
Fuck off and die, bitch.
Just because you patent it that doesn't mean you have to charge an arm and a leg for it. Some people simply get a patent so others can't steal their idea. Say some gready corp who says hey this is cheap and effective and we can make a fortune even if we up the cost 5000% or more.
She's a PhD student -- she probably didn't have any choice in the matter, as the patent is probably held by the university.
Aaaaaughhhhhh!
Condescend much?
That's perfectly fine, actually, just as long as you don't claim to be doing everything for the sake of the poorest people on the planet. That's a contradiction.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Why use a lame term like that? Women are just as smart as men and when they do something brilliant they are recognized as something special because they happen to be a woman. So we have to do something like call them "Chick" to degrade them.... Well, that's how I feel anyway. Flame away! And yes, I'm male.
Just so nobody gets the idea that this woman could be a scientist with an important breakthrough, let's refer to her as a "chick" from now on. Or maybe a "babe." In fact, why not emulate Don Imus and call her a "goggle-eyed ho"?
C'mon, Taco. Join the fucking twenty-first century.
I piss off bigots.
Well, fair enough, but she can stop playing the "For the good of all mankind" card, which is probably what caused her to win at least one of the awards.
-- All your booze are belong to us.
It's not so much the number of cells you'd need to power the oven, that's important. It's whether or not one oven load of cells could produce more energy over the entire lifetime of the cells than the energy it took to bake them.
I have no idea oft he numbers involved myself, but put like that, it doesn't seem nearly so ridiculous. Hell, the cells might still be worth making, even if you loose power on the deal; just think of them as very long life batteries.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
That's impressive. Though there seem to be scant details on efficiency and cost comparisons (I'm assuming this is more environmentally friendly to make as well as much cheaper).
Of course, it would of been more impressive if full details were diclosed online for people to take advantage of.
Is it possible to have your patent cake and eat it? The woman is clearly a brilliant engineer and deserves full credit for her work, she also states a worthwhile desire to help people across the world. So is it possible for her to obtain full commercial protection for her invention and then release all the details free for non-commercial use and reduced license fees for the third world? This would be ideal.
After all, no technology is going to change the lifestyles of poor people if they cannot afford to buy/license it.
On the other hand it would be unfair if she learned the Trevor Bayliss lesson the hard way - really clever little gadget swamped by low cost clones from asia from which he gained not a penny. As always I guess the big winners were the lawyers.
How many solar cells do you need to power a pizza oven, anyway?
How about two sticks and some kindling?
You call a girl that developed a new process to manufacture colar cells "A crafty chick"? Higly respectful.
To respond to your other point.. do you mean functional lifetime or projected lifetime? I can easily see them in their projected lifetime compensating for the energy used to bake them. However, their functional lifetime may be significantly lower than projected, either due to natural disasters or the onset of Armageddon.
I'm being serious. Funny mods will not be appreciated. -Eric
headline:
female: "crafty chick turns out clever "invention", wants to "help people" - awwww!"
hypothetical:
male: "a thrifty, socially motivated boy genius has turned industry on its head with an astounding demonstration of scientific innovation and prowess beyond his years."
I wish I could spend mod points to send an electric shock to especially bad posters.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
First quote:
"I love working with passionate people who want to help address climate change and poverty"
Second quote:
"it could take five years to commercialise the patented technology"
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
for a lot cheaper. All I need is a bunch of guys with shovels, and a boat, and we can give the world's poor good old coal. It's our environmental priorities, which we choose, that make energy more expensive. If we all could tolerate soot filled cities, like London in 1880, we could have dirt cheap heat and light and electricity just by burning coal and sometimes making steam with it for power.
The point is, when people make announcements like this, its not to give poor people the most energy, it is rather to give them energy that is fundamentally more expensive, but to lower that window as much as possible.
So let's not say that we are giving the poor the "cheapest energy possible", because, that's not what we're doing.
This is my sig.
Link us up, bro'! Or are you just poo-pooing any progress in reducing the cost of solar cells yet again? Yeah, I did a little digging. ;-)
-- Boycott Shell
Why? Let's say she didn't patent it, just released it to public domain. At the moment, the cells she has can be made inexpensively, out of cheap components. What happens when GreedyDeepPockets Corp decides to get into the business? It drives the cost UP, for everyone (for the raw materials at least). Now, let's say she does have a patent. She can decide who can produce it. Maybe she makes license terms that say for the first 5 years it can only be used to provide electricity for people who don't currently have it. Try not to get your panties in a knot every time you see the word 'patent'.
"She wanted to give the @2 billion people around the world who dont have electricity the gift of light and cheap energy."
What does "@2 billion" mean? "At two billion?" Maybe "~2 billion?"
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Why? Let's say she didn't patent it, just released it to public domain. At the moment, the cells she has can be made inexpensively, out of cheap components. What happens when GreedyDeepPockets Corp decides to get into the business? It drives the cost UP, for everyone (for the raw materials at least).
Right. The big evil corporation is going to make these things at 10 times the price. Hmm... how will they get people to buy when the people could just make their own. I know... they're going to corner the market on pizza ovens and nail polish.
Now, let's say she does have a patent. She can decide who can produce it. Maybe she makes license terms that say for the first 5 years it can only be used to provide electricity for people who don't currently have it.
Right. That's going to get those big businesses to make the things and sell them for dirt, to people who have nothing but dirt.
Try not to get your panties in a knot every time you see the word 'patent'.
There are three utilities for a patent.
Using it to set up a monopolistic business and pricing the device higher than Cost+ReasonableProfit.
Selling it to an existing business so they can do so.
Patent trolling, supporting a leisurely lifestyle by placing a perpetual tax on those who would like to bring these devices to the citizenry of the world without continuing to productively participate in society.
This is an assault on the worlds poor. Plain and simple. The sort of thing you see in a world that is based on the rule of law, rather than the willing co-operation of free men and women. It's scummy, all the more so because it's being presented as the antithesis of what it actually is.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Actually, if you take into account the social, human, and environmental costs of coal production, you really can't call coal cheap.
the coal industry has taken a toll on Appalachia and its people.
There are three utilities for a patent.
Using it to set up a monopolistic business and pricing the device higher than Cost+ReasonableProfit.
Selling it to an existing business so they can do so.
Patent trolling, supporting a leisurely lifestyle by placing a perpetual tax on those who would like to bring these devices to the citizenry of the world without continuing to productively participate in society.
Four: Keeping a big, greedy, monopolistic company (or patent troll) from patenting the design first, thus forcing everyone to pay.
Not every patent-holder is evil, and not every company that sells something is trying to rob you. Only most of them.
Do you realise that pizza oven does not need to use electricity, but wood? Using this process you basicaly can turn non-electricity house into happy solar energy house. That's why this is targeted towards the developing countries.
As thePig said, patents are a good way to prevent a large company from putting your small company out of business. Most people interested in doing good for their community (or the world) can't make enough money from their product to out-produce a massive corporation; if they want to keep making money, they have to have a tool to prevent big businesses from immediately competing.
Sure... if you release it for free they can't patent it, but they can sure offer your widget at a lower price... right up until you've gone under, at which point they can -- and will -- raise the price again. Show me some proof that things can't work as I say, and I'll accept your argument. Until then, just keep telling me it's bullshit, and I'll keep thinking you're wrong.
Female is also sexist, as it is a term applied to a single sex. As it dude, man, woman, lady.
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
Right, but this is a case of that energy cost not being wasted cost - if you're doing this in a building that needs heating, there's your heat source. It's a furnace for the building, and it makes solar panels. Two uses for that same energy. As long as you don't remove the panels from the building while they're still hot, you haven't wasted _any_ energy in making them.
Co-generation has been around for a while - another example would be running the radiator for your generator into the house, blow air through it. What would have been waste heat, now gets dumped into the space where it's useful.
A lot of these "studies" that claim to look at how much something costs, consider just how much fuel it takes to run the oven or whatever, and don't consider the possibility of uses of "waste heat" like this. So yes, more piggybacking on your post than disagreeing with it - the payback time you mention might be even sooner, if they were gonna burn that fuel to heat the place anyway.
Step 2 still isn't "free" energy. In fact, go price out those renewable energy sources. I seem to recall California residents have the option of paying for the energy sources they choose. Funny how they can't seem to get excited about 10x to 15x the cost of base load power sources.
Step 3 cracks me up. How are they being deployed? Trucks, or ships? What do trucks and ships use as power? What? Diesel? No wait, stick it on an aircraft carrier, which is nuclear. Oh, you can't win. Ha ha ha. Oh, sure, like they're going to dust off the ships at the maritime museum and sail them to Africa, then carry it by oxcart to the center of a remote village.
This is an interesting article because it is do-it-yourself. I respect the engineering here. But please don't be fooled into thinking this is some holy grail. It is a lot like that peanut sheller idea: give folks the tools to take care of themselves and they will live better lives.
Last point: why is it these billions of hungry people, stumbling around in the dark are not taking care of themselves? I mean, we are talking about entire provinces and even nations at some point, right? Some of these countries don't even have banking systems in place. No real estate agents, no loan specialists, no financial planners... Let's just take a page from Sim City and recognize that there are entire nations and provinces full of illiterate, primitive settlers. Back in the "Age of Sail" this was grounds for empire building. Honestly, if China said the following, I wouldn't mind: "hey, this random pathetically poor country in Africa has lots of arable land, and well, they are starving. We're gonna go conquer them, feed them, and build there. Anyone got a problem with that?" The sovereignty of these struggling countries really is begging for conquest. For the good of the people. Look what England did to India. A model colony, really. Even Hong Kong was a colony. These ideas are over the top, and I'm asking the question, not making a suggestion.
I suppose calling males 'guys' or 'dudes' is also sexist, then?
Seriously, some people are way over-fucking-sensitive. Probably not yourself.. but the people that decide on what's "politically correct" should be sent to mental asylums, or perhaps become antagonists in a Jane Austen theatre production.
which is totally what she said
I know this is humor, but...
You heat hot water to get hotter water, or better yet, steam. In fact one of the limiting factors in steam power isn't the hot side, but the cold side, assuming you want to have your water in a closed cycle. Once the steam has done its work, lost its energy, and condensed back into water, it's not cold water. The most visible feature of a nuclear power plant is usually the cooling tower, not the containment vessel. That tower and the energy to run it is a testimony to how important it is to efficiency to cool the outgoing water - and we still wouldn't call it "cold" with all of that.
It didn't go "whoosh", I simply chose to respond seriously, for some odd reason.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
No real estate agents
I probably agree with most of what you wrote there, so you meant this as a good thing right?
If you're using the pizza oven to make pizza anyway, why not let the solar panel production process leech off some of the heat? Even if the process is expending energy overall, it'll be less energy than previous because you've gotten some back from solar power.
I'll bite.
Your idea is essentially the old "white man's burden" concept from a century ago: justifying colonization based on the idea that the subject peoples get better infrastructure, better culture, and a better religion out of the deal. If you overlook the racist implications, it sounds good in theory, but in practice the results are a mixed bag. This is because what really drives colonialism isn't some sense of altruism, but solely the material benefits of the colonizing power; any benefits derived by the colonies from the process is accidental.
A good example of this is the Belgian colonization of the Congo. Yes, the Congo got railroads out of the deal (set up not for the Congolese, mind you, but for the exploitation of ivory), but the costs were horrific. Millions of natives were murdered, millions more killed through disease, starvation, and over-work in forced labor camps; hostage-taking and rape became institutionalized forms of "persuation"; severed hands became a sort of currency. The area's natural resources were plundered to exhaustion, all in order to make one man in Europe very wealthy.
I'm not suggesting that China would descend to the same depths if it were in control of Africa, but make no mistake: colonialism is by its nature a fundamentally unequal relationship, and colonizers expect very large returns on investment. (Look up "Boston Tea Party" if you're curious why America is no longer Britian's colony, despite all the supposed benefits of colonization). Far better for these countries to run their own affairs, and concentrate on the things that will make a real difference: better government, better education, stable finances. That way the profits of whatever investments they make will go towards improving their own country, instead of some rich colonizer.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
Maybe not being an a-hole, but history shows that if something is truly DIY, the patent system doesn't impose a barrier to doing it yourself, just to doing it and selling it. See the history of the cotton gin for what I'm talking about.
I suspect that they see the business as making the varnish/dye/ink being used, and kits, which does make sense if selling that is economical, and in a few decades the original patent expires, though I'm sure there will be updates.
-Peter
== Just my opinion(s)