Jul
9
A Cheaper Photovoltaic Solar Cell
July 9, 2010 | 2 Comments
If one lives where the wind blows, the hail falls and the home insurance underwriter is up to speed – the savings a residential photovoltaic solar cell system offers is consumed by the risk insurance premium. Spending say $20K to save $2K annually with risk insurance at $6K per year is a nonstarter. Weather risk [...]
Jun
9
A New Kind Of Photovoltaic Solar Cell
June 9, 2010 | 5 Comments
Scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a new solar cell that they hope will cost a tiny fraction of current production. The new cells consist of tiny silicon wires that measure a mere 1-micron in diameter. These wires are embedded lengthwise and perpendicular into plastic plates where they convert light into [...]
Jun
3
Breaking Through The Solar Panel Cost Problem
June 3, 2010 | 13 Comments
Photovoltaic panels are still way too expensive for mass adoption. One major reason is the wiring connecting the individual cells. That plus the glass and the manufactured silicon cell materials pose expenses that limit the purchase economics to major subsidies and areas where weather risk is low or nonexistent. Benjamin Wiley, an assistant professor of [...]
May
5
Building a Much Lower Cost Solar Cell
May 5, 2010 | 9 Comments
Jason Karp an electrical engineering Ph.D. student at the University of California, San Diego and his colleagues at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering are developing an inexpensive optical concentrator and assembly to offset the high cost of very efficient solar cells. The development should lead to solar concentrators that are less expensive [...]
Apr
14
Carbon May Be In Your Solar Cell
April 14, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Carbon is cheap, abundant, and in the form of the nanoparticles graphene, capable of absorbing a wide range of light frequencies. Graphene is essentially the same stuff as a pencil’s graphite, except graphene is formed to a single sheet of carbon, just one atom thick. Graphene shows promise as an effective, cheap-to-produce, and less toxic [...]
Apr
7
A Path to High Voltage Solar Cells
April 7, 2010 | 1 Comment
Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have found a new mechanism for the photovoltaic effect to take place in semiconductor thin-films. The newly developing route to photovoltaic cell production overcomes the “bandgap” voltage limitation that continues to bedevil conventional solid-state solar cell development. Understanding the “bandgap” – in a conventional solid-state solar cell is [...]
Mar
25
Better Light Emitting Diodes and Solar Cells
March 25, 2010 | 4 Comments
Researchers Cun-Zheng Ning and Alian Pan at Arizona State University are developing nanowires could lead to better light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that could replace less energy-efficient incandescent light bulbs and more efficient photovoltaic cells for generating energy from sunlight. The research effort is to improve quaternary alloy semiconductor nanowire materials. Quaternary alloys are made of semiconductors [...]
Feb
15
Solar Powered Hydrogen Production
February 15, 2010 | 12 Comments
The need for free hydrogen in industry and fuels is huge and the potential when a low cost method arrives, staggering. Methane is nothing more than a carbon atom and 4 hydrogen atoms, so any production that comes up with hydrogen at low cost is going to be a breakthrough. Professor Thomas Nann and colleagues [...]
