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Next-Gen Glitter-Sized Photovoltaic Cells Unveiled
MikeChino writes "Sandia National Laboratories recently announced a new breed of glitter-sized solar cells made from crystalline silicon that use 100 times less material to generate the same amount of electricity as standard solar cells made from 6-inch square solar wafers. Perfect for soaking up the sun’s rays on unusual shapes and surfaces, the tiny solar cells are expected to be less expensive, more efficient, and have promising new applications in textiles, clothing, and building facade installations."
OK, we have a new standard of measurement... "glitter"
I can handle that. After all I understood volkswagon-sized meteors, a station wagon full of backup tapes, a library of congress -sized disk farm, and of course the old favorite, a football field sized nuclear storage facility.
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
... I congratulate you and wish your success to get to the consumer market so I may browser /. longer!
And I thought glitter went out most of a decade ago. Time to dig into the closent!
Up until now we have all known that trench-coat ninjas > glitter vampires > eye-liner pirates.
Does this invention change this? Will glitter vampires now be able to overpower both eye-liner pirates and trench-coat ninjas?
Or does the "solar" aspect of these tiny solar cells make them useless, even deadly, to glitter vampires?
Also, can someone please explain where heroin-chic werewolves fit into the hierarchy? I'm having trouble placing them.
These are the questions that wake me in the middle of the night, sweating and with racing heart.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Where the hell is my Nanosolar panel? They promised they would have them for sale to residential customers way back in 2009. It's almost 2010 now, and only one panel has been sold to an individual, on eBay. It has many of the same advantages, plus it's not crystalline. But they won't sell them to the public...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This technology will be mass produced in only 20 years.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
I guess that must be good for the size, but Boeing announced 41.6 percent efficient cells this year and I wonder how the ex NASA employee & inventor of the super soaker is getting on with his work he claims could hit up to 60%
Like most sensational announcements of breakthroughs in engineering on Slashdot; If I can't buy products that use it at my local hardware store or via Amazon for my iphone/laptop/electronic device, it might as well not exist.
So what that it was invented. The REAL story would be an announcement of a product that will be SOLD. This story is just a teaser.
Over the past 5-10 years so many new efficient solar panels have been designed but you can't buy any of them.
The best solar panel I can reasonably get my hands on is a a 15% efficient overpriced 100W monocrystalline panel off ebay for about $300 so it will take about 10 years even in Florida to break even.
The strange thing is I distinctly remember reading a magazine article that mentioned the breakthrough that got solar panels from 10% efficiency to 15% and that was in 1999. So that means we should have the ones mentioned in this article by about 2017 if we are lucky. By that time of course we will be reading about 125% efficient solar panels that not only convert 100% of the energy from the sun but also suck up a substantial amount of ambient heat and convert that to electricity as well
Does anyone else notice every few months an amazing breakthrough in solar cells that will increase solar efficiency by 10^x power or lower the cost to nearly free? Meanwhile, the solar panels for useful applications are still expensive and space consuming?
I'm kind of getting tired of it.
Hmm, I guess it is good news for China, since hundreds of millions of girls will need to be employed to wire these things up.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Huh? 100 times more efficient? How does that work when current cells are more than 1% efficient to begin with. You can't pull out energy that isn't there? What am I missing?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
"or lower the cost to nearly free?"
I think the term you are looking for is 'too cheap to meter' :-\
--- Mercutio was right.
plus fucking one. THIS revolution is going to be televised and there's nothing we can do about it.
Only a big company would bother to start mass-buying and installing these, and be able to feed its employees.
And what about the end-of-the-food-chain-customers? In my case (france), you also have to convice the other landowners/condo owners that it "will not make their roof ugly". It's a seven-story building... -_-;
That's in France, by the way. Last time I went to germany, most individual houses had solar roofs. I found them beautiful.
There is a reason for this. Up until about the past 5 years there has been minimal manufacturing capacity globally. Everything was limited to laboratory experiments at universities or venture capital companies that like press releases. Now that we actually have companies making cells in volume the $/Watt has been driven down immensely. Take a look at first solar currently running somewhere near $0.90/Watt (solar cell production not end cost to consumer)
One hundred times less material? More efficient? Glitter?
Sounds suspiciously like sound bites designed by a PR office for pickup by the press. I thought that Slashdot editors saw through that sort of malarky.
I'm going to go out on a limb: does anyone know if the limiting factor in determining the costs of a solar cell is the amount of material used? I had thought it was the intensive processing required to create a solar cell, rather than the cost of the silicon, which, thanks to the gargantuan and heroic efforts of integrated circuit manufacturers, is vanishingly small for incredibly high quality (what other industry delivers seven 9s purity?). If the amount of material isn't relevant, then reducing it by a factor of 100 isn't that interesting, is it?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I'd like to know how one would go about wiring these tiny solar cells up. It probably wouldn't be too bad on a flat surface but It doesn't seem like it would be very easy on flexible surfaces like textiles.
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
A "Glitter" (si Unit, "gL") is a measure of conversion from Lumens/cm^2/s to kW/Hr. Get your facts straight!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
A couple of mirrors, a tube with water or oil, some turbines and some HVDC lines. Very simple, cheap, easy to fix, known technology. Every African desert country can build them and have more energy than they can use.
Sure, photovoltaic cells are useful and cool to have. But my bets and my money are on this. :)
Anyway, all we need now, is a energy storage system that is just as nice and simple. :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Efficiency alone is useless. You also must consider durability and cost. If something is 99.99% efficient, costs $ 1,000,000,000.00 per kW/Hr to produce and has a lifespan of 10 years, then, it's useless. If, on the other hand, it is 25% efficient, costs $ 5.00 per kW/Hr to produce, and has a life-span of 1 year, then "IT IS WICKED USEFUL!"
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
I'd imagine that in the same warehouse with the Ark of the Covenant, the process for Cold Fusion, the Cure for Cancer, and a thousand other sources of cheap energy....a spot for this gem is being cleared.
is a 6 inch square wafer around .2 millimeters thick per cell too much material usage from the most abundant element on the earths crust?
Where is my flying car promised to me in the 1960s'?
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
It would be interesting if these "glitter cells" could be suspended in some kind of "paint" or perhaps embedded in a capacitative tile. The paint especially would have a lot of interesting uses -- cover your car, for example.
http://www.tenjou.net/
what about those of us that have an irrational fear of glitter?
The glitter... It's everywhere! IT"S IN MY EYES!
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
"...that will increase solar efficiency by 10^x power or lower the cost to nearly free?"
In a word: no.
Exaggeration gets you nowhere.
In the mean time nanosolar is mass producing at $1 per Watt.
And the chemicals used in its production are probably so toxic, they kill everything in a five mile radius when they decompose. How much do you want to bet that in the race for clean, free energy they felt free to irrevocably contaminate a different sector of the world? Worse, they'll probably market it as green energy.
I'm awfully tired of these articles predicting something will be better, cheaper to make and therefore much cheaper to buy.
Nothing in the history of the world that is better than an existing product has been sold for less.
Things end up being sold at a price very near what they're worth to the end user, which often has no relation to their cost of manufacture. Think of perfume, diamonds, or celebrity-diet plans.
Also for something exposed to the elements that has to last many years, there are so many ways to fail. Temperature cycles, moisture, UV, hail, corrosion-- all of these have to protected against,
and the cost of these goes up as you make the cells smaller and more fragile.
It's swell to have better (in some sense) cells, but that's just a small part of the overall picture.
... that are as early as only ten years away
The reduction in material use is very important for silicon. Nanosolar is at the point where its solar cells are a smaller cost component in solar panels than the glass in the panels. http://www.nanosolar.com/sites/default/files/NanosolarCellWhitePaper.pdf To compete, silicon needs to do the same. In some ways, thin film amorphous silicon does this, but the low efficiency means that you need more glass to generate the same amount of power. Crystalline silicon with low material requirements and higher efficiency than Nanosolar's material will likely deliver a lower price point than Nanosolar or First Solar's thin film technology because the cost driver will be MW/ton of glass rather than the cost of the PV material, the cost region that the thin film producers are exploring already.
Populated areas only make the problem worse. People go out to work at about the same time, go home about the same time, it gets dark at the same time. It is nice that you can power the filled offices from the empty homes, but where does your energy comes from when you switch on the light bulb when it gets dark? From storage, that's what. Only, with that many people doing about the same things, the individual problem just adds up.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Here is the real sandia labs press release with more detail
http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/glitter-sized-solar-photovoltaics-produce-competitive-results/
They suggest using an industrial "pick and place" machine to assemble the tiny cells onto a substrate for making the panel, at a cost of 1/10th a penny a "glitter", and you can also add a concentrator above each cell
So I don't know with government work like this, do they license patents, is it automatically open (it should be) or what? Seems like a nice breakthrough, but it still just adds to the list of other incredible breakthroughs that have lead to not much at all for reducing watts per dollar at the retail level with solar PV in general. If some one company gets it and it is locked up in a for profit patent for years and years, they will just reduce their own costs then charge the normal global prices we have seen for the past long time, around ~ five bucks per watt. None of these dozens of breakthroughs we have seen are going to be all that useful until that situation changes.
Energy independence is a national security and economic recovery issue, (along with all this climate change jazz they keep going on about) so maybe this tech will be freely licensed to drop prices and actually get this stuff to the end consumer in mass quantities.
Can we PLEASE stop saying "100 times less"? If I have 10 grams of something, 100 times less is 1000 grams less -- I now have -990 grams!!
The correct phrase is "1%" or "1/100th". Or, conversely: "The current usage is 100 times greater than the new usage".
Flame me if you wish, but why would a scientifically-oriented blog cater to idiot-speak?
Now, sell the rights to an American company and require that the work be done in America. It is frustrating that America does all this RD, and then sends it to places that will not even respect the patents.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why is it that every innovation has to mention clothing as a potential market to sound real?
Where is my aluminum suit again?
And will this actually get something useful to market like a 50W 0.1m solar panel?
Oil companies are losing access to much of the raw materials due to nationalization. They are (or will soon be) highly motivated to deliver synthetic portable power.
Full conversion to electric is never going to happen in the US. We appear to be opposed to the construction of the additional transmission capability that it would require.
2000% Efficiency.
These guys should get the Nobel in Physics and the Fields Medal in Maths.
Does anyone notice how the trolls will not give up there meme that solar isn't getting cheaper? Because these f*cking idiots do have the skills necessary to demonstrate their own ignorance. I just don't get it. Pure Laziness I guess. Utterly blind to the SOLAR REVOLUTION of 2007 - 2009. where 1) chine sealed the deal on becoming the greatest solar super power for all time 2) reduced manufacturing costs below that of coal power plants. 3) neglect the fact I run a lucrative business on 7 yr payback for solar in MN and as of 2008 i'm not longer dependent on subsidies, which ironically kept getting better increasing my profit. 4) prices are absolutely crashing such that parity with existing grid costs may occur in 2010 for just about everywhere in the US except PNW. The cost parity target is 2012 to 2015 and these idiots have the audacity to maintain their complaints. Some people should be shot. I wonder how many customers I lose to misinformed trolls who still use numbers from 1999.... I'll pay back my customers systems at PPP +1. Its in my contract. I have made payments on 17 out of 163 systems, and will probably owe about 6 more payments on those 163 systems to complete payback. 11 were due to broken panel/inverter that they failed to report. new contracts 2006+ don't allow this =)
The most frustrating thing about that, is that he is working on the solar side of this. In my mind that is just foolish to focus his efforts there. Instead, he should be making that work with Natural Gas, Gas, or Diesel. The reason is that if takes that, combines it with a battery that will drive a vehicle say 5 miles, and obviously an electric drive system, he will FAR FAR outstrip the ICE. The motor operates at 95+% and the battery at least as high as 90%. If his JTEC will do just 50%, then his total is around 40% efficiency, which is MUCH higher than ICE's total efficincy of under 25%. I suspect that his unit would also be much cleaner to burning. In time, batteries/Ultracaps would get cheaper and replace the JTEC. But by then, he would have it tuned for SOlar, geo-thermal, and maybe nukes.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Don't forget the two standards of measurement from the world of geography: Texas and Rhode Island.
Not so fast, cowboy. Alaska has been a bigger US possession since the 1860s. I am sure Texans would love to sell it back to Russia. Not only would they regain status as the biggest US state or territory, Sarah Palin might be available as governor.
Infuriate left and right
Not quite. Google on "first solar, grid parity". Also, news.google.com : nanosolar.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
The packaging, housing, installation, and connective materials are the major costs of a solar cell. For a long time, the cost of the photovoltaic material has not been the major economic factor inhibiting commercial use. Until someone figures out how to increase the photovoltaic output per cm2, such as in semiconductors transistors per cm2, solar cells will not achieve commercial acceptance. The new process may use less material, but a 6 inch photocell will still create about the same amount of electricity.
1. Don't make the coward part true. If it's worth arguing it's worth using your name.
2. I don't care what manufacturing costs are. I have a small sailboat and would love to use solar when not docked, but the prices for such applications still are prohibitively high (yes, I own a boat and am not wealthy. Weird, I know.). If manufacturing costs have indeed become immensely cheaper, then the "revolution" is only benefiting manufacturers wallets, because it's not benefiting me.
3. Giant paragraphs are hard to read, line breaks are your friend. If English is not your native language I apologize, but your rant is borderline incomprehensible.
Nanosolar looks great! I'd love to purchase some for my house and boat. Except it's not available yet. Call me when it's ready.
The grid parity is indeed news worthy, and I would not refer to that as vaporwear.
I'm just saying articles like this one, or the human hair to solar power etc. etc. etc. are nothing but PR crap that will most likely never see the light of day (no pun intended). I like the idea of solar power and agree that it has a fantastic future. Just better moderation of obvious vaporwear PR would make my slashdot viewing a little better.
Suddenly everyone who has invested in solar energy panel (now old tech) for their homes feels they got ripped off...
http://www.originenergy.com.au/1234/About-SLIVER
Briefly they cut thick wafers from the boule (typically 1mm to 2mm) then mill vertically into the the wafer. They turn the cut sliver side-on and process it into a conventional solar cell then glue multiple slivers into panels. Each sliver is only 20 to 50 microns thick.
Does anyone else notice every few months an amazing breakthrough in solar cells that will increase solar efficiency by 10^x power or lower the cost to nearly free? Meanwhile, the solar panels for useful applications are still expensive and space consuming?
There are two kinds of breakthroughs - ones that can be used to go to manufacturing and ones that can be used to go to venture capital.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Hint - solar cells are different and the bulk properties are what matters since you are not interested in semiconducting properties of doped regions at all. The exceptions are the ones where a thin film coating on a substrate does all the work - but this article was about multi-crystalline lumps of silicon and not thin films. The most delicate parts end up being copper tracks.
Einstein didn't have silicon diodes to play with a hundred years ago, it's the bulk material that matters.
Solar cells are doped. They're basically LED diodes run in reverse. Look at the crystalline silicon diagram on Wikipedia for example. It has lots of delicate thin layers on the top. It wouldn't work without the n-doped and p-doped areas. Dicing it into glitter doesn't change the physics.
Yes, some coatings to improve the optical properties and then a single really big junction on a really hard material. Scratches make the junction a bit smaller, compare say a 50 micron wide scratch to a junction 50mm wide and you'll see why I'm not taking you seriously. Take an angle grinder with a silicon carbide wheel or sandpaper to it and you can do a lot of damage - but that's not really what I would call delicate.
Your CPU comparison is somewhat misleading.
Ok, now that you finally admit that a solar cell is more than just a simple mineral crystal, you can begin to understand that they have a limited lifetime (this all started when you asserted that "durability" has no meaning for solar cells), typically due to UV damage over the long term.
A bit longer than a year or ten isn't it.
...and I quote MikeChino, "glitter-sized solar cells made from crystalline silicon that use 100 times less material to generate the same amount of electricity as standard solar cells made from 6-inch square solar wafers". What this indicates is that a snowflake sized cell will produce as much electricity as a 6-inch square solar wafer. Go to the Sandia site and look at the original article and see that they said it will operate at roughly the same efficiency as a 6-inch solar wafer, NOT produce the same amount of electricity. MikeChino, you've led us down the Just Plain Wrong path.
Bring on the electric strippers!