Placing tiny spheres of silicon in reflective trays could be the key to cheap, efficient solar cells.
A company in Japan has developed a novel way of making solar cells that cuts production costs by as much as 50 percent. The photovoltaic (PV) cells are made up of arrays of thousands of tiny silicon spheres surrounded by hexagonal reflectors.
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An international consortium established by an Australian scientist is developing a clean source of energy that could see some of our future fuel and possibly water needs being generated by solar-powered bio-reactors and micro-algae while absorbing CO2.
Associate Professor Ben Hankamer, from the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB) at The University of Queensland, has established the Solar Bio-fuels Consortium which is engineering green algal cells and advanced bio-reactor systems to produce bio-fuels such as hydrogen in a CO2-neutral process.
On October 10, 2007, leading space advocacy organizations and Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin will announce the formation of a new alliance to “ensure that the benefits of renewable clean energy from space solar power are understood and supported by business, governments and the general public,” according to an alliance statement.
The inaugural event of the new alliance, to be held at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. at 9:00 am, will highlight a study underway by the National Security Space Office (NSSO) on the viability of space-based solar power, presented by Lt. Col. Paul Damphousse, National Security Space Office. John Mankins, President, SUNSAT Energy Council, a leading expert on space solar power, will also speak.
Thermal-power plants could solve some of the problems with solar power by turning sunlight into steam and storing heat for cloudy days.
Solar proponents love to boast that just a few hundred square kilometers’ worth of photovoltaic solar panels installed in Southwestern deserts could power the United States. Their schemes come with a caveat, of course: without backup power plants or expensive investments in giant batteries, flywheels, or other energy-storage systems, this solar-power supply would fluctuate wildly with each passing cloud (not to mention with the sun’s daily rise and fall and seasonal ebbs and flows). Solar-power startup Ausra, based in Palo Alto, thinks it has the solution: solar-thermal-power plants that turn sunlight into steam and efficiently store heat for cloudy days.
“Fossil-fuel proponents often say that solar can’t do the job, that solar can’t run at night, solar can’t run the economy,” says David Mills, Ausra’s founder and chairman. “That’s true if you don’t have storage.” He says that solar-thermal plants are the solution because storing heat is much easier than storing electricity. Mills estimates that, thanks to that advantage, solar-thermal plants capable of storing 16 hours’ worth of heat could provide more than 90 percent of current U.S. power demand at prices competitive with coal and natural gas. “There’s almost no limit to how much you can put into the grid,” he says.
Solar power has long been the Mercedes-Benz of the renewable energy industry: sleek, quiet, low-maintenance.
Yet like a Mercedes, solar energy is universally adored but prohibitively expensive for most people. A 4-kilowatt solar photovoltaic system costs about $34,000 without government rebates or tax breaks.
As a result, solar power accounts for well under 1% of U.S. electricity generation. Other alternative energy sources, such as wind, biomass and geothermal, are far more widely deployed.
The outlook for solar, though, is getting much brighter. A few dozen companies say advances in technology will let them halve the price of solar-panel installations in as little as three years. By 2014, solar-system prices will be competitive with conventional electricity when energy savings are figured in, Deutsche Bank (DB) says. And that’s without government incentives.
If that happens, solar panels would become common home and business appliances, says Brandon Owens of Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
Research shows that silicon can wring two electrons from each photon of incoming light.
A typical solar cell generates only one electron per photon of incoming sunlight. Some exotic materials are thought to produce multiple electrons per photon, but for the first time, the same effect has been seen in silicon. Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in Golden, CO, showed that silicon nanocrystals can produce two or three electrons per photon of high-energy sunlight. The effect, they say, could lead to a new type of solar cell that is both cheap and more than twice as efficient as today’s typical photovoltaics.
Plextronics, Inc. announced yesterday that its organic photovoltaic technology achieved a world record in the conversion of solar light to power efficiency. The company’s result of 5.4 percent establishes a new world record for single layer organic solar cells as certified by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in Golden, Colorado.
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I am adding new tags for everything notice the fancy “Organic Solar Cell” tag…
University of Delaware-led team sets solar cell record, joins DuPont on $100 million project.
Using a novel technology that adds multiple innovations to a very high-performance crystalline silicon solar cell platform, a consortium led by the University of Delaware (UD) has achieved a record-breaking combined solar cell efficiency of 42.8 percent. The current record of 40.7 percent was attained in December 2006 by Boeing’s Spectrolab, Inc.
Researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology have developed an inexpensive solar cell that can be painted or printed on flexible plastic sheets.
“The process is simple,” said lead researcher and author Somenath Mitra, PhD, professor and acting chair of NJIT’s Department of Chemistry and Environmental Sciences. “Someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers. Consumers can then slap the finished product on a wall, roof or billboard to create their own power stations.”
“Fullerene single wall carbon nanotube complex for polymer bulk heterojunction photovoltaic cells,” featured as the June 21, 2007 cover story of the Journal of Materials Chemistry published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, details the process.
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