Oct
7
The Smallest Solar Cell Goes Flexible
October 7, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Sunday saw the journal Nature Materials prepublish on the website the abstract for John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his team’s results in downsizing silicon solar cells with a new method to cut the chip off of the silicon crystal wafer.
The Rogers team offers a new way to process conventional silicon [...]
Oct
6
Solar Panels for the Rest of Us
October 6, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Here the wind blows, the hail pounds and the insurance quote for $20K of solar panels is 4 times the savings in electricity bought from the grid. Those realities cover a large swath of inhabited land – where the glass encased solar cell isn’t practical.
Durability is key to the widespread adoption of solar collection. It’s [...]
Sep
22
Checking Up On Solar Panels
September 22, 2008 | 1 Comment
Plug in hybrids and an ever-increasing growth in electrical appliances plus the worldwide growth of increased incomes is pushing electrical demand just faster than supply can answer. Solar photovoltaic offers a high capital cost but low operating cost answers. But capital costs are projected to come down with more supply of silicon and the thin [...]
Aug
5
The Hydrogen Economy Might Have Gotten Real Legs
August 5, 2008 | 4 Comments
I have been quite unimpressed by the “hydrogen economy” concept because of the difficulty in storing and transporting the smallest atom. I can live with the other attributes as careful engineering can cope. I still have reservations about regular folks handling such a volatile fuel. This is moderated by the reports out of MIT from [...]
Jul
4
It’s the 4th of July and the celebration is on for freedoms thought through and made real for the American portion of mankind now some 230 years on. There is a list of complaints about federal efforts to cut those freedoms back, but on the whole we’ve slipped but a little. The scary one though, [...]
Jun
9
Get ‘Er ALL! And Then Use It
June 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment
A team of researchers at Boston College and Duke University have developed a highly engineered metamaterial capable of absorbing all of the light that strikes, to the point of a scientific standard of perfection. The metamaterial uses geometric surface features to capture the electric and magnetic properties of light in the shorter spectrum share of [...]
May
30
Catching the Light Fantastic
May 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment
In 2004 when the Los Alamos National Laboratory first measured an unusual effect of a photon impacting a silicon solar cell and releasing more than one electron the effect has been a item of great basic research curiosity. Normally a photon coming into a cell will cut loose an electron, and over a complete [...]
Apr
16
Fruit of an Old Idea
April 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment
In 1991, an idea to just use a sensitive dye as the reactive agent in solar cells was offered by Michael Grätzel and Brian O’Regan at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. A cell using dye sensitized materials are thought to be much cheaper than silicon chip designs. The idea has been 17 [...]
Jan
29
More Efficiency From the Solar Panel to the Grid
January 29, 2008 | 2 Comments
Solar photovoltaic panels that may be in the affordable range and what is expected to be shipping soon are not great efficiency tools for getting the solar energy into electrical potential. As it improves the next step of inverting the panels direct current into the commonly used alternating current has received an upgrade in [...]
Jan
28
Checking the Facts on Competition of the Shipping CIGSSe Solar Panels
January 28, 2008 | 2 Comments
While the U.S. investment community is all stirred up by the photovoltaic solar thin films said to be coming to market, a design out of South Africa by Vivian Alberts working at the University of Johannesburg is “in the box” now in Europe. The solar panel competition is heating up.
The CIGSSe panels are reputed [...]
