Towards a 50% Efficient Solar Cell

necro81 writes "IEEE Spectrum magazine has a feature article describing DARPA-funded work towards developing a solar cell that's 50% efficient, for a finished module that's 40% efficient — suitable for charging a soldier's gadgets in the field. Conventional silicon and thin-film PV tech can hit cell efficiencies of upwards of 20%, with finished modules hovering in the teens. Triple-junction cells can top 40%, but are expensive to produce and not practical in most applications. Current work by the Very High Efficiency Solar Cell program uses optics (dichroic films) to concentrate incoming sunlight by 20-200x, and split it into constituent spectra, which fall on many small solar cells of different chemistries, each tuned to maximize the conversion of different wavelengths."

Comments

No problem with this

[Dyinobal]

Republicans would have no issue with this. It's military spending and that is fine, but if we ever want to invest in solar in the USA for purely clean energy purposes they'd call it wasteful spending and all sorts of crap.

Re:No problem with this

[Firehed]

Know your audience. As long as DARPA's research comes to the public eventually (we got the internet, after all) it's still beneficial. Quite possibly delayed and almost certainly more expensive than it should be, but slow and expensive progress is still progress.

Re:No problem with this

[ShanghaiBill]

Direct costs of the war in Iraq were $800B, by the time all direct and indirect costs are accounted for (interest, injured and wounded, veteran care and pay), it could hit $4T. The Loan Program cost $34B.

This is a logical fallacy. You can't prove that something makes sense just by pointing out that something else is even stupider.

Re:No problem with this

[RobbieCrash]

Are you suggesting that we shouldn't be looking into alternative energy sources?

Private industry hasn't exactly done a whole lot to do anything other than prolong our dependence on fossil fuels. The oil, and oil related, industries are bigger than ever, more money than ever is spent on refining more and more difficult sources of crude. Oil sources that 15 years ago were thought would never be cost effective are now major suppliers in the whole chain.

Solar power has made slight inroads, but only on a personal level. There's no significant widespread power generation through solar. We're NIMBYing wind turbines. Everyone is reluctant to invest in tidal power.

Everyone just keeps pouring more and more money into oil. Spending money thinking about how to stop doing that is sensible, even if 90% of it goes nowhere. Only spending money on things that are proven to work is what got us here, if private companies aren't willing to risk failing, then fucking A rights the government should help out.

The end justifies the means

[deatypoo]

When the US starts paying what other countries pay for fossil fuel (as any European could say), then maybe solar power research will skyrocket. Until then, as it's not even currently appealing profit-wise, it's quite sad to say but only military applications and some rare initiatives (often subsidized) remain and that's just because soldiers can't be carrying their weight in oil to fuel the devices they use and batteries are still inconvenient. Let's give it a few more years, but recent events in the middle east should help a few make up their minds.