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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..."
Nominee video of Nicole Kuepper
Vodcast of People's Choice awards ceremony (Look for ep 26, 2008)
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
If you do a little digging, you find there is far less to this story than you might think.
All the lady did is develop a simple way of printing electrical contacts onto the silicon surface.
That's a mighty small part of the overall cell's cost. It's not going to bring cell prices down so the "2 billion" can afford them. heck, the top 2 billion can't afford them.
Oh wait thats still Solar power. Trees need sun too.
No, 'chick' is a normal Australian usage with no sexist connotations.
It's normal to hear Australian women refer to each other as 'chick'.
Why would you let your oven radiate energy? This is not a data center, use insulation.
...Like solar panels? The point was that by the time you produce 15 new solar panels, maybe 20 of your solar panels have reached their endlife.
All nice words, but they don't combine into something coherent.
This is why they are dangerous. Kids might grow up and invent something.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Oh look! A girl did something cute with science!
Never mind that it isn't useful.
It's a cute trick to manufacture low quality solar cells with improvised materials and tools, but it's not a new trick.
If it was a guy, they'd be treating this like the tinkertoy computer, or any other show-off joke project.
It's like what happened with James Washington Carver, the Man Who Invented Peanut Butter. He didn't invent peanut butter (that was around before him). He claimed to have invented hundreds of peanut products, but didn't actually document any manufacturing process for them. He promoted peanut oil as a quack remedy. He wrote some decent pamphlets on the known fertilizing properties of legumes (such as peanut plants), and some questionable ones on the industrial value of the peanut.
Dude wasn't a real inventor of anything useful or a productive research scientist. The only things he got right were the things he simply heard from other people and repeated, and he mixed those together with his own bad ideas, so he spread misinformation as well as information.
But he was black, so a myth grew around him. All of the progressives of the day, and of the following days, liked to have a "black Edison" to talk about. So they imagined themselves one, and to hell with the facts!
Let's look at the keywords here: female, student, renewable, sustainable, cottage industry, clean energy, developing country, global warming.
It's a feel-good fluff story. People are believing in it because they want to, and that's how a science project (in the gradeschool sense) gets treated as a breakthrough.
She deserves her pat on the head, but no, she doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.
In addition to that, the oven could be modified to either be fully heated or at least preheated by a solar concentrator.
Solar thermal is a LOT cheaper and easier than solar photovoltaic. The problem is that concentrator-based designs can't work in clouds, while PV and nonconcentrated can. Nonconcentrated thermal doesn't work well for electrical energy generation. (Great for hot water heating though.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
I actually agree. It reminds me of the OLPC project. WHY do ONLY the poor kids(people) of the world deserve cheap things? On what planet does this make sense? Shouldn't an innovation like this be made available to everyone as equally as possible?
My own kids can only be considered 'poor' if I quit my job. This does not mean that they automagically get solar cells and laptops at birth. What, exactly, is the source of the disconnect?
I guess this is what I'd like someone to explain: Why do the poor somehow deserve better than the non-poor? Whatever happened to the notion of 'same'?
I know, don't feed the trolls. Sorry.
What she invented was a way to create the contacts of the solar cells - basically by coating EXISTING SILICON SOLAR CELLS with aluminium and blocking the deposition or etch process with a polymer, partially removed by an organic solvent. She used cheap machinery to do that - which does not mean that it is the cheapest process. Printing a book on an offset press is cheaper than printing it with an inkjet printer (and this is a fairly good analogy).
Which does not mean it is a small feat, since it reduces the cost of that part of the fab. Unfortunately, the big cost is the silicon itself. Most labs try to go to thin-film cells, or non-silicon based cells, to reduce the basic material cost.
Got Paranoia?
A patent helps her to be able to control her vision.
What if she was to license some big corporation and use the proceeds to fund her own humanitarian projects?
You have no clue what she will do with that patent. Also, you should also consider that most places bind employees, students, and professors to allow the company/university to patent discoveries. It could very easily be that for her to not cooperate in the patent process could make her legally liable for damages to the university where she is a student.
I know that everywhere I have either been a graduate student or been employed, there have been contracts regarding patentable ideas and how they are handled, what cooperation is required, and how royalties (if any) will be divided.
You need to give this gal a break until you actually see her do something evil. The fact that she has a patent probably only means she fulfilled her legal obligation to the university.
These are the people who don't realise that the IP agreement they're signing means that the University now owns their thoughts, dreams and lives.
I'm a postgrad student at an Australian university. One uni pressured me to assign my IP rights to them for spurious reasons involving the fact that my research was partly sponsored by an industry partner. This included granting the uni the right to withhold my research from publication! The only guarantee for me was that my PhD thesis would be "published" - even if that meant it would remain "behind the counter" at the library and hence not publicly available for (I think) two years. WTF!?
I tried to re-negotiate the terms so that the uni granted me a non-exclusive perpetual licence to my own research so that I could, for instance, work on it as a postdoc or maybe write a book down the track. No dice.
Then they tried to make it a condition of my scholarship. Fortunately, I'd already started so there was little they could do when I just refused to sign.
For other reasons, I left that uni and went to another one in the same city. Not a problem there.
Unbelievable. Still, at some level you have to admire the pure gall of it.
In the case of the OLPC project, the poor get the computer first because for them, it allows them first time access to a software platform and the internet. For you, on the other hand, an OLPC laptop would just sit in your bathroom and display pr0n.
How the hell does that work?
You're assuming that poor people would not likewise consume porn, were it available? Based on WHAT, exactly?
Likewise, you're assuming that non-poor would get NO educational value from such a device?
Beyond a weird sense of reverse-prejudice, what on earth is backing this assumption up?
Could this process be adapted for home printing of semiconductors? Cheap open source electronics any one...? I'd love to be able to download new toys from sourceforge and then just print them out.
Sorry dude, the feminine form of the word to "chick" is "dude".
Okay.
The famine form of the word "guy" is "gal", which is rarely used because "gal" sounds akward.
"famine"? "akward"? As for the awkwardness of gal, speak for yourself. I like it just fine, and none of my gal friends complain about it.
The feminine form of the word "bitch" is "asshole".
Bitch is a feminine noun. It means female dog. However, I would offer "prick" as the term for opposite gender if we mean to stick to insulting humans. An asshole can be any gender, as both have them.
The feminine form of the word "beefcake" is "cheesecake", and the feminine form of the word "stud" is "slut" or "ho".
Slut or whore ("ho") would most likely be the feminine counterpart to "gigolo". A feminine counterpart to "stud"? "Bitch" for dogs, "mare" for horses. Humans? I don't know... I'd probably go with "babe".
It would be nice if people would learn a language before whining about it.
Words to live by; too bad you don't.
"Ayn Rand is a bloody socialist compared to me." - Robert A. Heinlein
True. There are many areas where solar isn't a good option, and solar probably won't be used for base load for several decades in the future.
True. More people die from pollution than have ever died from radiation poisoning, and both plants and animals are flourishing in the Chernobyl fall-out area.
Almost true. I'd love to see Stirling Radioisotope Generators (SRG) installed every few city blocks large enough to handle base load. Alpha emitters aren't the "dangerous" type of radiation like the Gamma emitters everyone is familiar with, and doesn't even require any special radiation shielding. They're maintenance-free for decades at a time, so you install them in an ultra-massive concrete casing if you like, or perhaps just bury them a hundred feet down, and let them do their thing.
In fact, what I'd really like is an SRG in my electric motor home, so that I never need any gasoline or grid electricity for my lifetime, and could drive endlessly, and just decide to park and live absolutely anywhere I feel like. Honestly, how expensive is food? If you didn't have to pay for rent, electricity, gasoline, etc., how many years would you have to work to save up enough money to feed yourself for the rest of your life?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
And it is odd that we make special note of achievement when a 'minority' does something. For some reason we care that [person] is the first [label] to do something. If a white guy does something, so what? If it is novel that someone of x group did something, like say, a child composing a concerto, then sure... mention away. Otherwise i think by now we as a culture should be over it. Never underestimate the power of guilt. Tell that to:
Justin Timberlake (R&B)
Jeremy Wariner (400m Sprinter)
Eminem (Rap)
All of those are white men who are doing things that would be considered ordinary for a black man but is considered amazing due to the fact that they are white.
People in general are fascinated by things that appear to be out of the ordinary even when they are not.
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
Sounds like GP's running on the euphemism treadmill
to give the ~2 billion people around the world who don't have electricity the gift of light and cheap energy."...while "it could take five years to commercialise the patented technology"
I failed to see how the two words patented and cheap could come together nicely.