I have to confess that the title of this paper, The remarkable influence of M2δ to thienyl π conjugation in oligothiophenes incorporating MM quadruple bonds, is Greek to me, that the abstract was impenetrable, and the paper itself was thoroughly incomprehensible. I’m a biologist, not a chemist or materials engineer! Fortunately, there are a couple of summaries that simplify the explanation enough that I can understand the gist of it, and it’s cool stuff. Researchers have made a new material that promises to greatly increase the efficiency of solar cells. It works by collecting photons over a wider spectrum of wavelengths and by using both fluorescence and phosphorescence to create an electron flow, allowing it to both collect more energy per unit area and facilitating the production of current.
This is promising news, and also illustrates why we need to fund basic research — these are the kinds of discoveries that can’t be simply planned and forced into existence, but require the liberty of the research enterprise to explore new ideas freely.
Don’t get too excited just yet, though. The research has uncovered useful properties of a combination of molecules that have only been tested in minute quantities. It remains to be seen if it can be scaled up efficiently, if it can be made cost-effective, and whether it can be simply made to work at a practical level. It’s still an exciting idea — they’re talking about nearly 100% efficiency.
BAH. I don’t want my tax dollars going towards collecting sun rays! If you want light you can go stand outside yourself.
Tis very exciting indeed. It’s good to see that research and progress is being make on alternative sources for energy, the quicker the better. Hopefully the idea will be commercial viable, or at least practical on a mass scale.
Solar? God made oil for us Americans, like it says in the bible! Drill here, drill now! Praise Jesus! Palin08!
–Seriously though, this is good news. Hopefully it’s a viable and cost-efficient discovery that will help us out in the long run.
There are quite a few very promising developments in solar power lately. One of the most exciting to me is the work that Daniel Nocera is doing on improving catalytic separation of water for fuel:
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/21536/
And also, this rather clever approach to growing algae for biodiesel:
I do look forward to seeing what would happen when the world no longer has a reason to fork over about a trillion dollars a year to the corrupt governments of the Middle East.
-jcr
Could this be yet another death nail for “ole king coal”?
If it is, then it’s about time.Coal has gotten us this far but has well worn out its stay!
Of course anything that helps increase the efficiency of photovoltaic generation is great (and even if it wasn’t, any basic research result such as this is worthwhile anyway)… but I can’t help but think that practically this isn’t necessarily attacking the fundamental problem.
The problem with solar power efficiency is primarily that we don’t use most of it.
A ratio of 10% or 20% efficiency isn’t a problem. In fact, a photovoltaic efficiency of 1% would be just fine if we could manufacture such a generator in large enough volume.
Given incident solar energy in somewhere like New Mexico of perhaps 1kW/m^2, there’s plenty of power to be had if only we were able to manufacture something that could collect it, at an efficiency of at least a few percent, in units of a square mile at a time. Finding sufficient otherwise unoccupied square miles to collect the necessary tens or hundreds of gigawatts wouldn’t be very much of a stretch in that case.
As such, I remain unconvinced that the problem of photovoltaic power generation is one of efficiency. I think it’s a manufacturing problem…
@#6:
If you’re operating at 90% efficiency rather than 10% efficiency, you need to cover 9x less area, which makes manufacturing simpler. Am I missing something?
Also, with the safety and scaling of solar cells, operating at such high efficiency means it would then be cost effective for individual buildings to have their own solar cells to power them. You don’t need massive solar farms (or a large grid) if each building is converting enough energy to sustain itself.
Sorry if I’m misunderstanding your point.
BH, that’s a very odd POV. Sure it’s a manufacturing problem, but a good way to solve such problems is to increase the efficiency of the product you are manufacturing. Frankly, I would prefer that we don’t have to cover hundreds of square miles of virgin territory in solar farms, especially if there are better ways to do it just around the corner.
I remain unconvinced that the problem of photovoltaic power generation is one of efficiency. I think it’s a manufacturing problem…
I would have to say that solar power’s biggest problem is still the storage issue. One friend of mine told me about his idea for an adaptation of the molten salt system for heat storage, where you’d have essentially the same kind of solar thermal collection and molten salt heat exchange system as some existing plants do today, but you’d use a lot more salt.
His idea is that you use enough thermal mass that your system takes days to heat up to working temperature, and days to cool off, and you go ahead and drive steam turbines from the heat whenever you want power. He told me his calculations indicated costs in the neighborhood of $.06/Kwh, which brings it will into the range of economic feasibility.
-jcr
@ #7 & #8:
I’ll try to be more concise:
Currently, we have no way of manufacturing photovoltaic cells in volumes that would result in tens to hundreds of GW of capacity. The fundamental limit is the ~1kW/m^2 ceiling imposed by the incident power.
Increasing efficiency can increase output by less than one order of magnitude.
Increasing efficiency is good, of course, but can’t get us from where we are to making serious inroads into displacing fossil fuels.
#9:
I don’t disagree. Storage is also an outstanding problem. Sounds like an interesting solution…
I predict behind-the-scenes sabotage by Big Oil….
@Brain Hertz
The incident power is the maximum amount of power hitting a square meter right? So, if we’re able to capture 100% of that energy (~1kW/m^2), we’d need about 50,000,000 square meters (10,000 football fields) to match the production of say, a 50GW nuclear reactor. 10,000 football fields sounds like a lot to replace one nuclear reactor. And 50 million solar cells does sound like a lot of cells to produce.
50.000.000 square meters may sound like a lot, but it’s really not that much if you decentralize it.
Don’t think of a single large powerplant, think of every house having solar cells on it’s roof, combined with a kind of peer-to-peer distribution grid. Of course, this presents big problems, because the current powergrids worldwide are basically “dumb”, meaning that there is no regulation at all, just a lot of wire tied together. Things are changing, especially in Europe, but it’s a slow process.
I do agree that there is a massive infrastructural problem in the production of PV-cells, but it’s a cath-22. There won’t be large-scale manufacturing until there is a large demand, and there won’t be a large demand until the prices drop and PV-cells become widely available.
Yes, the incident power is that hitting a given area. 1kW/m^2 is a reasonable ballpark.
I think your nuclear reactor number is a little high, btw: there are just over 100 nuclear plants in the US, with a capacity of about 100GW between them. IIRC, the total US power generating capacity is in the region of 750GW.
The point is this: putting solar cells on roofs and even in open areas of desert (just areas owned by the US military in southern states would do it) would give us more than enough power to seriously dent our current fossil fuel consumption. Except that we can’t, because nobody knows how to manufacture that volume of photovoltaic cells. Several companies are working on it, and there are signs that low GW per year range of thin film photovoltaic manufacturing is imminent.
The reason for my original statement, that the problem is not one of efficiency, but one of manufacturing, is that the gap is several orders of magnitude, and efficiency improvements can only possibly buy us a 5x at most.
One square mile of desert has incident power of about 2.5GW (2 or three nuclear reactors). Taking into account efficiency and the fact that you only get output during the day, one square mile is still significant; but you do need to be talking about units of square miles before the dent in nuclear and fossil fuel generation is significant.
We can find a few square miles of desert. Or rooftops. What doesn’t exist is enough manufacturing capacity in the entire world combined to cover a square mile in one year.
That’s what I get when I try to pull numbers off the top of my head. But yeah, that’s a serious problem. I knew there was a production problem, but I didn’t realize it was that bad. Why is production so costly? (if you don’t mind me asking)
Very exciting stuff!
Like with anything producing energy, efficiency is what makes it the most economically viable. If it is possible to extract close to 100% of the energy from light, all that is needed is daylight. Then even a fairly high production cost of the unit is irrelevant if within reason, because the savings long term will make a ten or twenty year write-down of the energy+producing unit feasible.
A bit like the government in Australia is (was?) subsidising solar hot water systems. If only they had made building codes that were at least going towards the 20th Century as well.
Like demanding some insulation in the brick-and-tile tents they call houses. */rant over
Increasing efficiency will help by reducing the cost of supports, glass cover etc., but only if the cost of the PV material is not too high. In the last couple of years the tendency has been to lower efficiency in the shape of low-cost materials such as CuInSe2, CdTe and amorphous silicon. The efficiency is only about half that of traditional crystalline silicon, but the production costs are much lower.
@#9: storage. This will eventually become an issue, but only when you reach high levels of penetration (>10-20% of total electricity production). And it assumes that PV will be the only energy source. Combine it with wind and solar thermal power stations (as you suggest) and much of the problem goes away.
@#12: A nuclear reactor is max. 1.5GW at the moment, not 50GW. Last year, PV production worldwide was about 3.8GW, rising 40% per year for the last several years. This year, production will be close to your 50000000m2.
The World is awash with stories about advances in clean fuel:
Korean Research Makes Hydrogen Manufacture 30 Times Cheaper
(I only hope Hwang Woo-Suk isn’t involved)
I am no energy expert, and I can only hope that this will be useful in the long run.
But in the meantime, renewable energy simply can’t generate enough power to supply the needs of modern civilisation and economic growth. To cover short-term energy needs, a four-pronged approach is needed:
(1) Drilling for oil wherever it is available, to reduce the West’s dependence on Middle Eastern supplies of oil. Drilling in ANWAR is a damn good idea. I’m sorry, but the interests of a few reindeer have to take second place to the interests of human civilisation.
(2) A massive expansion of the nuclear programme. France has gone the right way (generating 75% of its electricity through nuclear power). We’re not in danger of running out of uranium any time soon, and we need to use the power sources at our disposal.
(3) Hydroelectricity, in those countries where the natural environment is suited to it. Canada has taken the right approach (it generates a very substantial proportion of its electricity from large hydroelectric dams).
(4) Research into new and more efficient forms of power. Should this research be encouraged? Yes. But should we be abandoning our opportunity to use oil and nuclear resources in the vain hope that a fantastic new form of power will become available in the next few years? No.
I’ve been thinking to get one of those solar panels to power up my laptop while I am in camp. Hopefully it will not rain.
I’ve been thinking to get one of those solar panels to power up my laptop while I am in camp. Hopefully it will not rain.
Storage isn’t a problem. PVs are inherently low-voltage, high-current DC devices (pessimists would say low-voltage, low-current). DC, and plenty of amps of it, is exactly what you need to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Here comes the sun…
Here comes the sun…
It’s all right…
*air guitar*
Walton,
Well, civilization isn’t at risk here. If it were, you’d have a leg to stand on, as it is, not so much.
While that field has great potential, it’s not ultimately going to make much of a difference on the worlds energy situation.
We set up that area to be a place we would never drill or touch in any way. We promised that. Why must we, as Americans, go back on our word every time things get a little difficult?
This mentality is how we end up doing things like when we interned Japanese Americans during WWII. Sure, we said everyone has the same rights, but, well, this is different!
No. It’s not.
It’s not about oil. There’s a principle to be upheld here.
Walton@19
There’s a lot of energy tied up in the infrastructure for such a scheme (less than needed to produce, install and maintain the PV cells to generate the equivalent amount of energy, but I digest…). We can still make huge energy savings by improving energy efficiency, upgrading power-grids (the US grid is particularly archaic and inefficient) and basically just consuming less. That should be the first option, not more drilling. If we are serious about weaning ourselves off oil, the answer is not ‘lets dig up some more oil’.
Before I become accused of being some sort of Luddite, consider that the the global economy has taken all of recorded human history to become the size it is today (well, duh) but it will double in size in the next 20 years. The constant obsession with economic growth and increasing GDP year on year is wrecking our ecosphere and widening the gap between the rich and the poor.
Walton,
why do Americans need such big energy inefficent cars ? Why can’t they do like everybody else on the planet ?
Want to reduce dependency on oil in the USA and create jobs in the USA, impose much stricter emission standards and high taxes on cars that consume above a certain amount and dramatically raise taxes at the pump.
You’ll see how quickly people start consuming less. You’ll see how 100,000s of jobs will be created because smaller neighboorhood shops and commerces will start resurfacing everywhere.
All due respect to you chaps in sunny climes, but please don’t forget that the really civilised parts of the planet are often frightfully gloomy.
Just keep working on those fusion reactors, now…
CD
The constant obsession with economic growth and increasing GDP year on year is wrecking our ecosphere and widening the gap between the rich and the poor.
You have got to be kidding. Please tell me you’re kidding.
Yes, it is in a literal sense true that economic growth can often operate to widen income disparity, because a few entrepreneurs manage to make massive fortunes. But this does not mean that the poor are getting poorer, or that the rich are taking money from the poor. This is the kind of muddled, sloppy thinking which characterises the left: for instance, people sometimes assert that during the Reagan-Thatcher era “the rich got richer and the poor got poorer”. Empirically, this is simply wrong: the real incomes of the poorest people in society grew throughout that era in both the US and UK, albeit by a smaller rate than the incomes of the wealthy. Wealth is not a zero-sum game.
“Relative poverty” and income disparity are unimportant statistics. What is important is the number of people in absolute poverty – i.e. those whose living standards are insufficient to buy basic necessities. There are still millions of people in the world living below that line. Obviously, we want to give them the chance to get out of poverty; I shouldn’t think anyone would question that. And that requires economic opportunity – which is provided by economic growth.
Are you seriously asserting that equality is more important than prosperity? Consider this hypothetical situation. A and B are both earning $50,000 per annum, but due to economic growth and new opportunities B then gets a job paying $100,000 per annum, while A continues to earn $50,000. Are you asserting that this is a bad thing and that it would be better if both A and B continued to earn the same amount? A has lost nothing, while B has gained. Economic growth is good for everyone.
(If I’ve misunderstood your argument – which I sincerely hope – then I apologise.)
The other part of your argument – that economic growth is bad for the environment – is, of course, perfectly arguable and much more sensible. But I’m inclined to be somewhat sceptical, and I’m certainly not willing to deny people the opportunities that come with economic growth – and to deny millions the opportunity to get out of poverty – simply on the basis of some eco-scaremongering.
I wrote a paper about Malcom Chisholm’s work when I was an undergrad.
I still have it on the shelf.
OT – but you might find this interesting –
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7681914.stm
Walton,
there are far more people living in absolute poverty today in the USA than before Reagan.
With respect to energy storage, one approach is to use excess power from solar cells to extract hydrogen from sea water and burn the hydrogen to generate electricity during nighttime and on rainy/snowy days. Burning pure hydrogen produces no carbon!
@ #19:
Drilling for oil is fine but please don’t burn it! Nearly everything in a modern world (plastics, pharmaceuticals, fertilizer etc.) is based on oil. We need the oil to produce things. How about producing significant parts of solar cells (plastic enclosing of thin film cells, organig PV ceels) with the oil we still have left. The energy gain would be significant.
Burning oil is stupid it burns.
How many of you use photovoltaic power? What are the policies/laws where you live regarding net-metering? What would the circumstances have to be for you to consider installing solar at your residence?
Another bit of good news was the invention of ‘nantennas’:
http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1357/
http://www.chem.umass.edu/Department/NewsArticles/barnesAPS.htm
http://www.ecogeek.org/component/option,com_tag/tag,solar/
The idea is simple: create a bank of antennas small enough to absorb infrared light as if it were radio waves. Direct light-to-electricity conversion with no chemical intermediary.
Sheets of this stuff are cheap to create, and over 90% efficient.
The only part that is not already working is the rectifier circuitry.
In time, it should be possible to make nantennas tuned to visible light as well.
Cool, yes?
Very intersting paper. I could understand the synthesis, but the spectroscopy was much harder to understand (not the fault of the authors, buy me trying to dredge up P-Chem from the memory vaults). Polythiophenes have been used to make organic conductors, so its use here makes sense. I would suspect that the material is very sensitive to oxygen, so there is still a ways to go with this material.
I think there are some slabs of solar cells on top of the appartmentblock I live in, but I’m not sure.
If efficient PV are made in a reasonable price, people could cover their roofs, and reap the benefits of generating (a portion of) the electricity they use..
Reasonable could be in the thousands of dollars for this application. After a number of years the PV would pay for itself.
Once enough people do this, the country’s dependance on fossil fuels would decrease, and with it the influence of oil countries like Saudi Arabia. I, for one, wouldn’t mind seeing Dubai returning to the desert.
Covering your roof with PV is only really going to work well if you have your own house. Those living in a highrise would still have to buy all their electricity.
Using excess solar power to create hydrogen is a cool idea. Some European countries are experimenting with hydrogen powered vehicles. The Netherlands has (or had?) some hydrogen-powered busses for public transport in one of their cities.
Yeah, efficiency has long taken a back seat to status quo. I’m more and more convinced that our current system of corporate capitalism mirrors long-term species development. The more stable an environment, the larger a corporation gets, and the less able it is to adjust to a changing environment. It is in a corporation’s interests of growth and profitability to not change technologies; I wish they understood it is in their long term survivability interests to curb some of that growth and redirect it towards technological flexibility and product diversity.
Imagine some farcical far-away world where Big Oil and Big Auto hadn’t been in a gigantic incestuous relationship and instead some of these impossible oil profits had gone into other energy technologies. Imagine using drilling and undersea drilling technologies to exploit geothermal energy, perhaps by creating our own “black smokers” in the deep sea and pushing seawater heated by geothermal energy through turbines while providing yet another oasis for unusual life-forms.
As it is, I’m interested in Big Sugar and Big Soda who are currently in a dance of doom over their market getting more and more unhealthy due to the apparent long-term effects of sugar consumption. Why does it take a pandemic, global collapse, or other such Noachian order catastrophe to finally have an effect?
We’re smarter than the dinosaurs. Really, we are. We should see these meteors coming and recognize them for what they are.
Walton @28
That may be true for the US and UK economies both then and now, but globally:
Trickle-down economics is fine if the available resources are unlimited, but last time I checked we only have the one planet to live on – not the 3-5 required to sustain everyone alive today in a western lifestyle. The widening gap between the rich and poor globally means that the dwindling resources we have left are being shared even more unequally. My point is that because resources are limited, and this inequality is getting worse, the poor are getting poorer both relatively and absolutely.
You can characterise me as a muddled, sloppy-thinker but I really don’t see how relative and absolute wealth can be divided if we only have a limited amount of resources and a growing global population – unless you think that access to those resources should only be restricted to a chosen few.
I don’t have any political ideologies to sell, I wish I had an answer. Am I being overly fatalistic? I fear not.
[1] Andrew Simms, Policy Direct, New Economics Foundation. New Scientist 18/10/08 pp 49
Kent Hovind insists that the photons are slowing down – what if they never get here?!!!
And why are they keeping us in the dark about these tardy photons?!
I’m curious about the technology of solar collection to heat molten salt mentioned by John C. Randolph in #9. That to me seems to be off-the-shelf technology that can be made to work now. Maybe it can be made even more efficient down the line, but the basic parts seem to be available today, and would certainly be usable in places like Phoenix or Tucson or Perth or Dubai. Is it still uneconomical?
One big advantage of a distributed grid of high-efficiency solar cells compared to a nuclear plant: control.
The power company can’t raise the rates on power I produce myself. Evil-people-with-bombs (I refuse to use the “T” word) are unlikely to attack my solar cells. My solar cells won’t melt down and make uninhabitable Chernobyl-sized chunks of American soil.
Note: These solar cells of mine are purely theoretical, and are likely to remain so due to cost, UNLESS we get some breakthroughs of the type described in this article. So yes, this is a good thing.
@negentropyeater
I came across this graph on wikipedia, if you don’t believe the graph, I’ll see if I can dig up the hard numbers (don’t know which way they’ll point).
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Poverty_59_to_05.png
This graph at least suggests that poverty fell under Reagan, and today, there are more absolute people in poverty, but it is less (or about the same) percentage wise today than under Reagan.
@Walton
This is simply false. The per-capita energy consumption of the united states in a year is a mere 100 megawatt hours per year. Assuming that there is one house per 12 people in the United States, a single 3 foot by 3 foot, 50% efficient solar panel on every house in the US would cover our energy needs.
Now, 50% solar panels (although they exist) are probably much more expensive than say 5 10% efficient or 10 5% efficient panels. But to claim that renewable energy CAN’T generate the amount of energy necessary is patently ridiculous.
archgoon: I’d like to believe you, but those numbers just sound wrong to me. Can you fill in some of the math that led you to those numbers?
Walton, your thinking exemplifies the muddled, sloppy thinking of the right. Let consider your hypothetical a little more closely, though I will extend it is mean there are two classes of people: A and B. Members of class A and B are both earning $50,000 per annum, but due to economic growth and new opportunities class B’s now make $100,000 per annum, while A’s continues to earn $50,000. Consider the world of limited resource before and after: Before, the consumption of resources was also evenly split. After, owing to their greater income, class B now soaks up 2/3rd of the resources, leaving 1/3 of the resources to class A. Now maybe the entire pool of resources has increased by 50% (assume A and B are equally sized), allowing class A the same absolute amount of resources, maybe not. But clearly, both classes expect their standard of living to continually increase (as roughly measured by the resources they consume), but that is not assured. Maybe Class B was solely responsible (doubtful) for the growth and as a society was want to incentivize this behavior be rewarding class B with most or all the gain. Perhaps we want to reward class A even though they did not contribute, if only to foster equality or social stability (especially in the A’s dramatically outnumber the B’s). Regardless, it is a hell of a lot more complicated than you suggest.
@xebces
That’s because I screwed up quite badly.
The number of people in the US is 300 million. The US consumes 105 exajoules per year. This is about 100 megawatt hours per capita.
Now, sunlight energy is roughly 1000 watts per meter squared for about 6.5 hours a day. (this is where I messed up by the way, I stupidly messed up some unit conversions). In any case over a year (365 days), this gives you 2.5 megawatts (per square meter of solar panel).
Thus you need 50 square meters per person.
So, thank you xebces. I screwed up royally. :(
Further addendum:
And that’s assuming the tech that PZ is talking about. It goes up by a factor of 20 with current market tech. This is still doable, but it’s industrial scale at this point.
Archgoon at #44: Thanks for pointing out the error in negentropyeater’s poverty statistics (I did think they sounded implausible). As I said, absolute poverty actually shrunk, and the real incomes (adjusted for inflation) of the poor grew, during the Reagan-Thatcher era. The real incomes of the rich advanced at a faster rate; but that isn’t a problem.
As to your energy stats, yes, you are obviously correct that it might be physically possible (though as your revised statistics show, not easy) to meet all our energy needs using existing renewable energy methods. But I should have thought it was obvious that I was discussing practical infeasibility. The cost per kilowatt hour would be astronomically higher than using fossil fuels or nuclear energy. The cost to our economy would therefore be significant, and people would be forced to cut back drastically on energy use – causing a declining standard of living and hampering economic growth. And who would be hurt the most by the much higher cost of energy? The poor.
MLE at #46: But you are assuming that wealth is finite, because you are assuming that it is defined only by a “pool of resources”. This isn’t necessarily the case. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that B has doubled his salary because the company he manages has pioneered a new, more efficient method of car manufacture, which has cornered the market. As a result of this more efficient method, he can manufacture the same number of cars in less time and using less power, thereby increasing his profits. He has not taken anything away from a “pool of resources”. He is still using the same material resources to build his cars; and, in fact, he has reduced his resource consumption by using less electricity per car. He has not made anyone else poorer by enriching himself. Rather, he has increased the overall amount of wealth in the world. Therein lies the root of the leftist fallacy; they see that B has made profit for himself, and they presume that he has done so by taking something from another. But that is not the case, as we have seen.
Or what if B’s additional profits come from an intangible good? For instance, what if B has written a song, or designed a new machine, and is receiving royalties from his creativity? He has used a negligible quantity of “resources”. The added wealth stems from his own intellectual and creative abilities.
Rather, I think your real motivation, and that of most leftists, lies in the throwaway comment you made at the end of your post: Perhaps we want to reward class A even though they did not contribute, if only to foster equality or social stability. In other words, leftists believe that “fostering equality” is something that the state ought to do, even if it necessitates (1) robbing a person of the legitimate proceeds of the economic productivity of themselves, their ideas and their property, and (2) making society as a whole poorer by reducing economic efficiency. And this is why I reject leftist economic thinking.
“Thus you need 50 square meters per person. So, thank you xebces. I screwed up royally. :( ” – archgoon
I wouldn’t sweat it. The great thing about this site is that any mistake you make will be corrected within minutes of making it. If not seconds.
50 square meters per person doesn’t sound like alot. But here’s a troubling thing…
World Population: approx. 6,602,224,175
Earth’s Land Surface: approx. 150,000,000,000 m2
Square meters per person: approx. 23.0
Now THAT’S a disturbing figure. I’m going to lay down now and hope I’ve somehow gotten it terribly wrong.
@Jams
Good news! Earth’s land surface (wikipedia) 150,000,000 km^2
1 km^2 = 1000*1000 m^2 (not 1000 m^2).
We just installed a 6K solar PV system at our house. It was $37,000 out of pocket, $3K is coming back in tax rebates plus a little more for a home office deduction. $8000 was for extending our patio to give us the space necessary to install the panels – 38 panels total.
It should give us almost 100% of our electricity, if it works as projected. We’re still waiting for the power co. to do their final inspection and turn it on. So far we’re the only ones in our subdivision to go solar.
Despite a state law saying that HOAs can’t prohibit solar installations, we still ran afoul of ours. They want to charge us $25 for each month we are in non-compliance. They can go suck eggs; obviously their legal dept hasn’t done their research.
Actually, I believe if you take the 50 meter^2/person figure as a upper limit of power available from sunlight, you get roughly 20,000 people/km^2 as the max you can support from terrestrial sunlight (more if energy is consumed less). (Granted, this would assume that they would be living under a gigantic solar shelled building if you actually filled up everywhere with people.).
Currently, total land per person is 25,000 m^2 (assuming 6 billion people, and exactly 150 million square kilometers)
@Heather
May I ask what your monthly megawatt consumption is? Or, at least, what the efficiency of your solar cells are?
You’re right! Man, I almost had a claustrophobia induced heart attack.
So, that 23,000m^2 per person. Well that’s completely different. Even hopeful.
archgoon #53:
That max density you derived would of course mean zero solar energy for any plants, algae, or cyanobacteria, no solar energy for evaporating water to drive the hydrological cycle or power the winds, and no solar energy “wasted” for providing non-artifical light through windows.
Well heck. Now I have to start all over on my Dyson sphere. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
Brain Hertz:
Depends on the application. I used to work on this stuff for NASA. For that application, launch costs dominate the economics, and it makes sense to build very expensive, high-efficiency multi-bandgap cells simply because you can get away with fewer of them (meaning a lighter payload) for a given power output. Granted, the space station uses silicon cells, but mission planners are rightly pretty conservative about what flies.
But there really isn’t a dichotomy between efficiency and manufacturing costs. There’s undoubtedly a sweet spot on the manufacturing cost versus efficiency curve, and, given how fast the technology is changing, I’m not sure anybody knows where it is. Organic PV could be a game-changer, or it could be a laboratory curiosity.
Some ANWR data:
Recent assessments indicate that the 1002 area of ANWR probably holds
roughly 3.2 billion barrels of economically recoverable oil (at ~$22/barrel)
(USGS, 1998).
By contrast, the United States uses more than 19 million barrels per day
(DOE, 2000a),
which is about 7 billion barrels per year. Spread over many years of production,
ANWR oil would not significantly increase available oil resources, nor would it
greatly reduce the need for imported oil.
Congressional approval
(DOE, 2000b),
so it would have no effect on current supplies and prices of oil and gasoline.
9% of the world’s oil
(DOE, 1999)
and holds less than 3% of the world’s oil reserves
(DOE, 2000c).
A small increase in domestic production would not significantly affect the
price of oil on the global market, nor would it decrease the price of gasoline
or heating oil in the U.S.
Instead, it is mostly transported to the West Coast or exported to Asia
(GAO, 1999).
ANWR oil would have no effect on the supply and price of home heating oil in
Northeast states like Vermont.
(DOE, 2000d).
The corresponding number for the Unites States is only 3%
(DOE, 2000a).
ANWR oil would have no effect on California’s ongoing electricity crisis, nor
would it significantly affect electricity supplies elsewhere in the U.S.
transportation, primarily in motor vehicles
(DOE, 2000a).
In the long term, a modest increase in vehicle fuel efficiency could save far
more oil than ANWR could ever produce (NRDC, 2001).
Don’t let any right wingers read that paper! They will see the term HOMO and will be dead set against it. I’m sure that LUMO will bother them in a vague undefined way since it is associated with HOMO.
I never really thought about it before, but solar power is a close cousin of spectrometry.
@55
I referenced part of your point with the reference to a gigantic solar celled building. However, 1000 watts is what we see on the ground. Not the amount from the sun. Some of that is already absorbed by the atmosphere. But yes, clearly, tiling the world with solar cells would have a significant enviromental impact.
Now that the ANWR red herring’s been disposed of, consider another breakthrough in solar technology: 3D solar. With this, and with the broader-spectrum energy-gathering materials PZ cites, we could conceivably be looking at solar panels the size of a screen door that could power your whole house with a bit left over to charge the car.
Georgia Tech researchers, using exquisitely tiny carbon “nanotowers” to expand the usable photovoltaic surface (the towers trap light instead of reflecting it back into the sky) as well as the usable sun angles for light harvesting, have made some nice progress.
As solar becomes more cost effective you will see more disputes between neighbors with tall trees and those with solar panels. Case in point: http://news.cnet.com/Trees-block-solar-panels,-and-a-feud-ends-in-court/2100-13840_3-6236807.html
Arrgh — ScienceBlogs ate my ANWR-myths-debunking post. Anyway, most of the data is here:
http://leahy.senate.gov/issues/environment/anwr.html
Synopsis: ANWR oil is tough to get at, messy to extract, won’t hit the market for several years (years that could be spent working on developments like 3D solar and broad-spectrum solar tech as described in PZ’s post), and much if not most of it will never see a US gas tank anyway as it will be sent to Asia to power their cars and factories.
Besides, we could save the equivalent of at least an ANWR simply by keep our damned tires properly inflated.
Re Brain Hertz:
What doesn’t exist is enough manufacturing capacity in the entire world combined to cover a square mile in one year.
Hey, these things have to be incremental, and the real solution is a multi-pronged approach using wind, hydroelectric/tidal, biofuels (ideally algae-based)… no magic bullet, but a lot of magic shotgun pellets.
Ahh, Walton:
MLE at #46: But you are assuming that wealth is finite, because you are assuming that it is defined only by a “pool of resources”. This isn’t necessarily the case.
Of course wealth is not finite… credit swaps, mortgage derivatives, and the like can combine to form infinite wealth. I predict the Dow will hit 20,000 soon! MILTON FRIEDMAN RAWKS!!!
Also, read up on ANWR before you advocate drilling, see how much significance that oil would really have before you spout Gingrich/Palin talking points.
Just think how much R&D that $700 billion could have funded… I suspect that Burdzinski, Chisolm, et al. would not have blown half a million on a pheasant hunting junket.
John C. Randolph:
We looked at a more elegant version of this about fifteen years ago. For long-duration deep-space missions, NASA uses radioisotope thermal generators, which are blocks of radioactive material large enough to generate heat, but not large enough to go critical. Stick in some thermoelectric material, and you have a generator, albeit one that’s only a few percent efficient.
But I’ve never read anything in a solar cell EULA that requires you to actually point it at the sun. You can point a cell at any hot object, though you don’t get much out until the object gets pretty hot. But if you match the bandgap of the cell material to the blackbody temperature of whatever you’re pointing it at, you can get serious power out. We estimated engineers could build such a thermophotovoltaic system that could double or triple the efficiency of existing thermolectric systems.
Alas, the agency had other funding priorities. But we did talk to some people about commercialization, and did a back-of-the-envelope design of a commercial TPV power system that would run 24 hours a day. During the day, when the weather was clear, solar radiation would be focussed on a reservoir of some kind of phase-change material, heating it up to the point that it would generate electricity via the TPV cells pointed at it. During the night, or during bad weather, the material would gradually solidify while dumping radiation onto the TPV cells, and if you sized the reservoir correctly, you could keep the system running overnight, or even for several days. So–no moving parts, most of the advantages of a PV system, but runs 24/7. Interest from the power industry was somewhere between underwhelming and nonexistent. But maybe if fossil fuels get expensive enough the technology will become attractive enough to develop.
If there’s 25,000 m^2 of land surface per person, and each person needs 50m^2 for solar cells, wouldn’t that mean that covering 2% of the earth’s land surface would provide everyone on earth an amount of power equal to the average consumption per person in the U.S.? How much land surface is already covered by buildings?
If anyone cares, My wife and I have a small 2 bedroom home and have lived 7 years “off-grid” with:
730 W Photovoltaic
180 W Micro-Hydro Turbine (Oct-June+)
2x Parrallel 2.5kW Inverters
MX60 Charge Controller
1kW Diversion Load controller
1kW Diversion Load in the form of a water pre-heater
8x 530A-h 6V batteries
Gas fridge, wood and propane heat, propane stove/oven.
24V 8ft^3 freezer (super efficient)
LCD TV, Satellite service
2.4Ghz point to point (24 miles) internet service
Energy star washing machine
oh yeah, 7kW backup generator
Has anyone suggested that?
Light? Hell, install them in every oven, stove, dryer, furnace, water heater, around the heat dumps of air conditioners and refrigerators…
Epikt:
I found this interesting
(I was going to buy one for my Bro’s boat, but $$$$ is an issue.)
The manufacturing problem can be solved here:
http://www.nanosolar.com/
Each “tool” (solar panel printer) can print 1 GW of panels a year.
“In wheel” electric motors (very powerful):
http://www.pmlflightlink.com/
1)Economic growth is not a zero-sum-game only if the wealth-increase of the top does not outstrip the growth of the GDP as a whole. this is currently not a problem nationally, because we still have some “distribution of wealth” and limits on how quick and far the top can grow. but if we suddenly decided to institute a true free marked (i.e. completely free of government interference), we’d have unequal starting points, and mega-corporations would soon become those who make the rules; it would become possible for them to take all the wealth for themselves. power-controlling-money-flow is already a reality internationally, and in dictatorships.
2) The global economy only becomes a non-zero-sum-game if it is sustainable. Seeing as this is not the case, current economic growth in one part of the world results in loss of resources and economic potential in other parts of the world. most of the current conflicts in the undeveloped/developing countries is based on resource scarcity, and as someone already stated: for everyone to live anywhere close to the American standard of living, we’d need the total resources of several planet earths.
3)follows from 2): economies must switch to industries that promote sustainability. there’s a lot of money to be made in increasing efficiency of things, providing services (rather than things) to increase standard-of-living, developing new, sustainable technologies and infrastructure, etc.
4)Drilling for new oil is the absolutely wrong way to go. the new infrastructure required, the cost of operation, the increase of C02 in the atmosphere, the fact that it won’t start having an effect until 10-15 years from now… all that energy, money and manpower would probably be better invested in developing sustainable energies.
generally i’m not a big fan of nuclear (creating radioactive compounds that will be a matter-of-fact and an issue for most if not all of humanity’s existence on earth is far reaching consequence; even if we can store that stuff safely away for now… we cannot say it will be safely away forever.), but it strikes me as a better interim than oil.
5)no matter what else we do, we won’t get around becoming less wasteful. either that, or we’ll deplete our available resources in no time.
oh and I forgot one more thing:
aah, finally a use for the State of Utah… :-p
Conversion efficiency is important for any applications that are area constrained. A good example would be an electric vehicle with a PV roof and hood. The few solar Prius’s that have been made ($20K for the upgrade kit) can absorb enough solar energy per day for 5-7miles. Now increase that figure by say 3-5 times (assuming you also have a bigger battery to store it), and the all solar capacity starts to get interesting.
The real issue, is not the overall scale needed for solar, total earth irradiation over human energy use is something like 10,000. The issue is reaching a price point where for purely economic reasons people and businesses start buying it to cut their power bills. We are not there yet, but we are getting reasonably close.
The way ANWR could make a substantial help in our energy situation is if we heavily tax the oil, and use the revenues to fund conservation and renewables (and yes 4th generation fission). Consider a best case, 10.e9 barrels at $100/barrel, is worth $1T. That would fund quite a lot of R&D. If we just let Exxon pump it for their own profit, then all the objections about the oil market impact being miniscule are valid.
#42. There are a few (2-3) GW of solar thermal generation capacity on order for utilities in California, Arizona, and Nevada. The current plans are not to provide much energy storage. The airconditioning demand in these areas peaks on hot sunny days, so the variability can easily be accommodated. The cheapest way to “store” time varying power today is to use it to displace natural gas generation, and use the saved natural gas for backup power, i.e. we change natural gas from baseline to backup, by the use of solar (or wind).
#53 – we should be able to make just under 10,000 kWh with our system.
Our annual consumption was between 14-15,000kWh/year. We made some changes – CFC bulbs, programmable thermostats, solar shades on the windows – and were able to get it just above 10,000kWh projected for this year. If we have an abnormally hot year, we’ll have less than 100% power provided by solar. But in regular years, we should come fairly close.
dNorrisM:
Ah. JX Crystals. The principal of that company is an ex-Boeing PV guy, and he knows what he’s doing technically. They’re aiming at a very small niche market with those things, but IIR the goal is to use that to generate funding to build more mainstream devices. I believe they also partnered with a university (U of Washington?) and built a TPV-powered car.
Speaking of increasing efficiencies, I’ve seen an interesting proposal for an internal combustion engine for use in power generation for hybrid electric vehicles. The idea is to dispense with the crankshaft, and make an engine that is simply a piston with combustion chambers on each end.
This piston would have permanent magnets attached to it, and be surrounded by coils to draw power from the motion of the piston. It wouldn’t give you the nice sinusoidal waveform that you’d get from a typical rotary dynamo, but since you’d be rectifying it and using it to charge batteries anyway, that doesn’t really matter.
-jcr
Interest from the power industry was somewhere between underwhelming and nonexistent.
It all comes down to where the price curves intersect. If driving photovoltaic cells from a heated mass can beat driving a steam turbine cycle from that same heated mass, then it’s worth doing.
-jcr
Space Solar Power video:
John C Randolph #9- the idea of using salt to keep turbines going overnight has been around for decades, and is certainly not exclusive to your friend. Indeed, it so so mainstream that Spain starts up a plant in the next few weeks:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/oct08/6851
So Chisholm finally found something useful to do with his quadruple-bonds? Bully for him.
Robert Heinlein wrote a short story about photoelectric power back in the 50s. I bring it up because he discusses the economics of solar energy in the story Let there be Light. We can’t solar-power our way out of our dependence on hydrocarbon fuels, even with 2w per square meter.
But, you can alleviate much of the need to burn hydrocarbons for fuel, and chemically the hydrocarbon is much too useful a molecule to waste by combustion.
Some other avenues for energy production we haven’t really looked into are simply replacing the turbo-alternators in our hydroelectric dams. We could gain perhaps as much as 25% efficiency simply by replacing the old equipment with new, modern sets.
Another route I like is using photovoltaic cells to produce electricity to split water into it’s constituent hydrogen and oxygen and use the resulting hydrogen as a portable fuel source, replacing gasoline and diesel fuels.
Oh, and spending a few hundred billions on high-speed mass transit would help too.
Guthrie,
That system in Spain looks like a good start, but according to the article it can only generate power for seven and a half hours after sunset. The system my friend had in mind would have several days’ worth of storage capacity. He was thinking in terms of very large salt reservoirs (like 50 to 100M diameters), so that you wouldn’t even need to worry much about insulating the tank to retain energy in the thermal mass. You could just let the outer ten meters or so soldify.
-jcr