Slashdot Mirror
Solar Breakthrough Could Provide Power Without Solar Cells
An anonymous reader tips a University of Michigan news release about the creation of what's being called an "optical battery" that could lead to the use of solar power without traditional solar cells (abstract). Quoting:
"Light has electric and magnetic components. Until now, scientists thought the effects of the magnetic field were so weak that they could be ignored. What Rand and his colleagues found is that at the right intensity, when light is traveling through a material that does not conduct electricity, the light field can generate magnetic effects that are 100 million times stronger than previously expected. Under these circumstances, the magnetic effects develop strength equivalent to a strong electric effect. 'This could lead to a new kind of solar cell without semiconductors and without absorption to produce charge separation,' Rand said. 'In solar cells, the light goes into a material, gets absorbed and creates heat. Here, we expect to have a very low heat load. Instead of the light being absorbed, energy is stored in the magnetic moment. Intense magnetization can be induced by intense light and then it is ultimately capable of providing a capacitive power source.'"
So how long until this becomes practical on a personal scale? I really want to see someone's ipod solar edition get stuck to a metal guardrail until the sun goes down.
In a bit of shameless internet panhandling, I accept Litecoin Donations at Lbd2oH9QsthD1GfuUXPyka12YxvWJYnBVf
I gotta wear shades!
The press office at U. Michigan has gone a long way from what they actually did to what they are speculating might be theoretically be possible. What they actually did was to predict a theoretical effect which has not yet been demonstrated. The press office then suggests that if you concentrate sunlight by a factor of a hundred million-- about seven hundred times higher than the theoretical concentration limit-- that this as-yet-unidentified material might be able to convert the light into electricity.
This is a bit speculative. They've predicted an interesting theoretical effect. Let's keep it at that, which is a nice piece of work, and leave the speculation to science fiction writers (like me).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The trouble is that it's still cheap to get fossil fuels.
It's awesome that they are (apparently) directly generating electricity. Much better than the quaint method of boiling water to turn turbines.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Electromagnetism consists of equal parts electricity and magnetism?
You mean... That fool Maxwell was right?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
If you have 10 million watts per square centimetre of light focussed on something there are far more efficient ways to convert it into useful power.
I'm really surprised that the article didn't mention "5 years" as a time scale for when this will be viable, since that's the typical duration mentioned in these sort of articles --- far enough in the future that most will have forgotten about it by the time we get there, but near enough to still feel like it's worth anticipating (in other words, the perfect length of time for a project that needs funding to continue, but may never actually produce desired results).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Sure it's all great now, but what happens when we run out of sunlight?
Bingo. Virtually everything we have and use on a daily basis has started in this manner where someone finds some phenomena which can be honed, researched, and turned into a viable product used daily.
Solar is important. Since nuclear power is essentially set back at least a decade, anything that gets us free from coal and oil is a must have, not just for global warming, but to prevent countries having to go to war for their dino juice stakes.
What will be the key breakthrough that will change everything will be the ability to have room temperature superconductors on a large scale, like Niven's Ringworld. This would mean that a solar array in Mexico could power a brewery in Alaska on one set of wires without worrying about significant current loss.
Could this be placed in marijuana grow houses to harness some of the wasted energy to power a small meth lab?
Meth labs power themselves... with fire...
I agree with the general idea that there are lots of exaggerated claims and promises. I view that as most likely coming from people looking for grants or venture capitalists to fund their projects.
However I would not keep an eye to the shipping products to judge feasibility, I would keep an eye on satellites. Break throughs like the one in this story might first appear in the environment of much higher solar intensity found in space.
Yeah, it's amusing that nuclear power reactors can use the same method as a 1800's steam engine.
Yes, what would be great is if fossil fuels were really expensive and we actually had an energy crisis. We won't get efficient panels until all the factories are shut down.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
The focus fusion guys aren't. They believe they can use high energy helium nuclei can be used to create net-positive electricity induction. It would be cool to go off of steam.
Might be for Dow, but looking for a couple of minutes on Google shows several companies that sell them.
i.e.: a blog from 2005/2006 and he had solar shingles back then.
And it must be focused to an intensity of 10 million watts per square centimeter.
That ought to be enough to melt the glass, don't you think?
Well it won't get hot if there is no absorption of the photons. Of course I don't see how it produces energy without absorbing the photons.
Basically the science writer was scrawling gibberish. There's probably something really interesting here but getting it from this article requires advanced degrees in Kremlinolgy and Tea Leaf reading to determine what the scientist really wanted to say.
My guess about what they are trying to say is that the energy is not being stored by promoting electrons from a valence band to a conduction band. It is some how being stored in a magnetic polarization of the media. I think it hints that this polarization can have an EMF to push mobile electrons.
I think the trick is this. Normally the magnetic fields from an E&M wave are not important but if you concentrate them enough you can extract energy. As long as you are also not doing electron-hole absorption to deplete it then this concentration can eventually become significant and the energy can be extracted in other ways.
Beyond that I have no guesses what the article might have wanted to say.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
That's because they don't pay their due externalities.
Dilbert RSS feed
30 years ago, it took more energy to produce a solar panel then what it would produce in it's lifetime. Today that is not the case. That achievement alone is monumental. Your problem is that you can't see the connection between the announcement and the release of these products.
We've been over the energy- and cost-payback thresholds for solar power for quite some time. Even PV, which isn't quite as cost-effective as the solar thermal setups, has energy payback time in the 1-3 year range (depending on tech) and financial payback time well within warranty (with wide variation due to local insolation and electric rates).
Which is why we went ahead and stuck some on our roof. We're two years in, and four years from financial payback, and the system has a 25-year warranty. We're in a nearly best-case situation in Arizona, mind you-- our insolation is nearly double what it is in the midwest, and our primary load (air conditioning) tracks quite nicely with how sunny it is. But you can make your money back even in the pacific northwest.
The tipping point has come and gone, and it's only going to get gradually cheaper from this point on.
30 years ago, photovoltaic panels cost almost $40 per watt.
Today, the cheap ones are about $2 per watt.
Mods, how is ignorance insightful?
He may be bullet-proof, have the ability to fly, be a great baseball player, and/or Santa Claus.
To paraphrase Ballmer: "Externalities! Externalities! Externalities!"
It's turtles all the way down, no one is paying all their due externalities.
Comparitively to what? What better method do you have to turn heat into electricity?
I wasn't aware there was a theoretical concentration limit. Where did you get that from and what's the rationale for it?
The theoretical concentration limit is straightforward-- it comes from the fact that the sun has a non-zero solid angle. Basically, a concentrator works by increasing the fraction of the sky that's filled by the sun, and the best you can do is to make the light come from the whole sky. (Well, there's also a factor of n, the refractive index).
The book Solar Electricity by T. Markvart gives a calculation (page 237-- it's available on googlebooks)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
He's hoping so hard for "breakthroughs" he's entirely missed four decades of gradual progress.
You do realize that you're reading a forum where there are people posting comments from the middle of nowhere across the planet using a cell phone a fraction the size of a TI-85 which can get data connection rates out in the middle of the woods that blow away the modem speeds most people connected with in the 1990s, right?
Of course, it all depends on what your definition of a revolution is. Today's batteries store 4-5 times as much energy as those of two decades ago. Today's solar cells are a tenth the cost of those two decades ago. The cheapest ones are CdTe thin-films -- non-silicon. But thin-film silicon cells are now on the market. So are silicon cells with far higher efficiency than used to be available. A couple decades ago, a waterproof backpacking fabric meant polyurethane. Today, silnylon is passe at 1.1oz/m^3, when you've got cuben at 0.35oz/m^3. Two decades ago, digital cameras... wait, what digital cameras? Oh yeah, ones that cost $13,000 and were barely over 1 megapixel. I have a $750 digital camcorder which records 1080p 60fps at 24mbps H264 onto 32GB memory cards barely larger than my thumbnail. You know how many fields of technology had to advance to make that happen? And hey, how is that power getting to your house? In many areas, they're starting to rely on HVDC links, which are only affordable now because of recent huge advancements in thyristors. They're also allowing for ultra-compact high-power AC motors. What about medical tech? We now have prescription drugs on the market which can change your eye color. AIDS is no longer a deadly pandemic for people with health coverage, but a controllable syndrome. Remember how long it took to sequence the first human's DNA? Today's systems are 250,000 times faster. You can have your pets cloned and your children screened as embryos for genetic diseases. In pretty much every field, there have been massive advancements in technology. But some people are just completely blind to it because their *preferred* technologies don't exist, be they flying cars, space elevators (which are probably impossible on Earth anyway), etc.
He may be bullet-proof, have the ability to fly, be a great baseball player, and/or Santa Claus.
Yeah, it's amusing that nuclear power reactors can use the same method as a 1800's steam engine.
Amusing more that HydroElectric Dams can use the same method as a 200 B.C.E. Water Wheel.
I8-D
Okay, so the millions don't have much to worry about. It was the billionaires that I was really concerned about.
Through what other means (the artificial scarcity of energy has worked really well for a long time) can the planet's billionaires maintain the L-curve distribution of income in the economy? This is the only question which must be answered before revolutionary energy technology can be allowed into the market.
As I've said before, remember that JP Morgan only financed Nikola Tesla's research until he realized that Tesla wanted to give electricity away to everyone for free.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
WOOOOOOOSH
Yes, you're right, sometimes the steam lines leak.
You cannot store electricity at 100% efficiency... you can certainly store it, whether that's chemically or not. Hydrogen electrolosized out of water is an adequate form of long-ish term electricity storage, and decent medium term storage can be achieved using flywheels weighing several dozen tons.
The fact that these systems are not in place does not mean they don't exist or can't be implemented.
FanFictionRecs.net
There are many ways to apparently inefficiently directly generate electricity that have nothing to do with boiling water...
You can run turbines in several ways w/o boiling water (e.g., wind, water).
You can generate electricity w/o turbines through chemistry (e.g., lemon battery) or quantum mechanically (e.g., photoelectric effect in solar).
You never know, this whole thing may turn out to be more like the Casmir effect or similar effect. Interesting, but not quite practical for anything yet. The danger is that this gets morphed into something like the sub-zero ground state and hydrino energy peddlers out there...
FWIW, this "magnetic" effect is not something new or unheard of, and it also not just something "magnetic" as it is also present in the "electrical" version. The primary difference is that in the photo-cell, the first order effect of optical excitation is that an electron absorbs a photon changes energy state (the photo-electric effect), since there aren't any magnetic mono-poles (that we know of), there isn't an analgous photo-magnetic effect. There is, however, in both magnetic and electric a second order effect optical rectification of the wave due to the non-linear properties of the medium (e.g., crystal structure, resonnances, or other non-homogenous properties). Almost nobody cares about this second order effect in photo-electric systems (except when it opposes the charge transport and reduces the photo-electric efficiency). Since there isn't a first-order effect of optical excitation in the magnetic version, we only get the second order effect. When people measure a second order effect, they get excited, but that doesn't mean it will turn out to be very practical...
I keep trying to go off of steam, but those $10 deals keep suckering me back in.
zosxavius photography
* Look at the housing market. How do we determine the value of a house? Look at who wants it, how much they are willing to pay. Those are the only two variables that matter.
Very few people pay cash for a house. The variable that matters more than any other is how much a "home buyer" can afford to borrow (from JP Morgan).
If electricity were free, then people would have more money to spend on ... *finite resources.* Consequently, the price of those resources would increase
If electricity were free, all resources would be essentially limitless. We could afford to desalinate water and pump it into the desert to make an artificial oasis, etc. Surplus has been a 'problem' for quite a while now (due mechanization & automation reducing the amount of labor required for many of the products humans need)...
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
It's already happened, when electric refrigeration replaced the tremendous worldwide industry that harvested, stored, transported, and delivered ice. It was not necessary to break the laws of physics. We got more fresh food, and people found other jobs.
The problem with infinite cheap direct energy is entropy. Energy inevitably becomes heat pollution. But good solar isn't infinite energy, and the heat is already getting here.
There isn't anything more sure than the laws of thermodynamics. As long as you live, you will never see them broken.
A coupling between light and magnetic moment would have corrolaries like light from magnetic moment - perhaps synchrotron radiation. When you see both of these things explained at the same time, then it's time to start to take this seriously. The time hasn't arrived yet.
Bruce Perens.
...a reasonable cost - say, $0.50/watt.
I'd gladly pay $0.50/watt, if I'm guaranteed to have my watts delivered as long as I live. ...for $1500.
I'll take 3000.
That'd be 3kW*30yrs*365days/yr*24hr/day (assuming I live another 30 years) = 788,400 kW*h
$0.0019 / kW*h.
That's a real bargain!
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Even with 100% efficiency and 100% efficient storage and cloudless skies, a reasonable family car couldn't run more than 3 hours a day. No "new understanding of the physics of light" is going to get around the fact that sunlight isn't high intensity energy.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Yes, there was a story about faith, but a stupid story. People who believe in science believe in the scientific method. This does not mean that your two choices are faith or to understand all of physics from first principles.
Do you understand how meaningless a statement like "The physical universe is not a closed system" is? Obviously not. Don't bother answering, you can't compose meaningful statements about the world.
Bruce Perens.