Carbon Nanotube Solar Cells On the Horizon

MikeChino writes Carbon nanotube news abounds as of late, and the next application for the up and coming material may be hyper-efficient and economical solar cells. Led by professor Paul McEuen, researchers at Cornell recently tested a simple solar cell (called a photodiode) crafted from a single carbon nanotube. Surprisingly, researchers discovered that more light shined on the nanotube created even more electricity, a huge difference from today's silicon solar cells where excess energy is lost in the form of heat rather than used to create more electricity."

Comments

The technology isn't important

[davidwr]

The question is, it it cost-effective?

New title:

More cost-effective Solar Cells On the Horizon

There, fixed that for you.

Re:The technology isn't important

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is, it it cost-effective?

New title:

More cost-effective Solar Cells On the Horizon

There, fixed that for you.

New solar cells that are "more cost-effective" require new technology.
New technology requires research.
Research is an expensive process.

To make new, more cost effective solar cells, we need to fund _some_ technology. Carbon Nanotubes are promising.
Press releases get a college department more funding, which buys new equipment and affords more people working on a subject area.

So, in short, the fact that this technology is related to Carbon Nanotubes is intrinsically important.

Re:The technology isn't important

[Idiomatick]

Yes... that's stupid. Of course it matters what it cost.

Re:The technology isn't important

[jonadab]

> Economic Efficiency is a non-stable and non-quantifiable metric.

There are limits to how precisely it can be pinned down, but some arrangements are obviously more reasonable than others.

> In the real world, such calculations have 'proved' that
> the United States doesn't need high speed cargo rail,

That conclusion is correct. The problem with any railroad is that it's only practical when huge amounts of cargo (or passengers for that matter) need to travel exactly the same route all the time. We do use it for things like taking coal to steel mills, but delivery speed doesn't matter there. A high-speed cargo rail would have VERY limited applicability in the United States. If you're from Europe or southern California, you might really have a sense of this until you drive across the Midwestern US in a car a couple of times. Put simply, only a small percentage of our cargo starts or stops at a major city.

> it just needs to keep subsidising the airlines.

That's a separate issue and not significantly related to the rail question. The airlines mostly handle passenger traffic and mail. Almost all cargo goes on eighteen-wheeled semi trucks, because they can deliver to any destination.

> It's 'proved' that shipping from say, Nice to Tuniz by truck,
> through nations such as Lebanon, in time of war, is 'better'
> than shipping straight across the sea by blimp.

Any kind of reasoning can fail of the person applying it fails to take important factors (such as war, for instance) into account. That's neither here nor there.

> NO consequence is bad enough to make you not take an offer,
> IF the consequence occurs far enough in the future

That's a straw man, and not a particularly clever one. Nobody in the history of the universe has ever seriously argued in favor of doing anything that they knew would destroy their entire race a couple of centuries down the road. Nobody. Ever.

Economic efficiency *does* matter for solar cells, and ones that are cheaper to manufacture (for any given level of energy output) are better, and such research is important, because if the solar panels can pay for themselves in a year and continue producing energy for ten or twenty years, people *will* buy and install and use them; whereas, currently most people are not buying or installing or using them, because they don't produce enough energy to pay for themselves fast enough to cover the opportunity cost of whatever else people could buy with the same money.

I don't know whether these nanotubes will lead to the kind of solar cells that are really needed, or whether it's a blind alley. The researchers don't know that either. But in the absence of any knowledge of a *better* technology, it's worth exploring the possibility.

Ooh, ooh

[russotto]

Another world changing technology that's just around the corner.

Re:Ooh, ooh

[H0p313ss]

Another world changing technology that's just around the corner.

Just for fun, if you're old enough, try to remember what things were like 35 years ago in the mid 70's:

• The internet was essentially a private network that most of us didn't hear about until the late 80s...
• No PCs, a portable computer was a dummy terminal PRINTER with a 300 baud modem
• Cell phones the size of lunch boxes
• Giant floppy disks with less that 1MB capacity.

These days the average (new) cell phone is more powerful than all the computing resources used by the Apollo program. Heck I carry my ENTIRE music collection around with me every day!

Now try to imagine the world in 35 years.... it's just around the corner.

Re:Homer says...

[kheldan]

Carbon nanotubes can't be mass produced economically yet.

There, fixed that for you.

Future speak meets now tech.

[ZWarrior]

I, for one, thought the article was good for giving us a look into the future of the tech. Based on teh way things are rapid prototyped and built these days I would expect to see something like this hit the markets in 5-7 years, and the price become reasonable with 2-3 years after that. 10 years to a cheap and cost efficient power source is not bad.