Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Governments do not "invest", Governments move money from one place to another... VERY inefficiently.
How are Obama's solar investments doing? Oh, that's right, they taxed you... took your money, then gave it to some businessmen that promptly filed bankruptcy and drove off in their BMWs. Congrats.
In this list of recipients of the DOE's 1705 Loan program, 5 of out 26 are listed as being in serious financial difficulty, the majority of the projects on the list are on-track.
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 (and that's only if all $34B loans are defaulted on).
So, for somewhere between 5% and 0.8% of the cost of war that we shouldn't have started, the US Government can help to move us toward alternative energy sources, and off of foreign oil (I know we have domestic sources for much of the oil we use, but since it's a global commodity, any oil we consume means more that volatile middle eastern states will sell)
I'm not sure that the vetting process for all companies is fair and balanced, but I do think it's a useful program.