Optical Furnace Bakes Better Solar Cells 93
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory just announced that they have found a way to create more efficient photovoltaic cells using 50% less energy. The technique hinges upon a new optical furnace that uses intense light instead of a conventional furnace to heat silicon to make solar cells. The new furnace utilizes 'highly reflective and heat-resistant ceramics to ensure that the light is absorbed only by a silicon wafer, not by the walls inside the furnace.'"
So, what? A month, six months, a year? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So, what? A month, six months, a year? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So, what? A month, six months, a year? (Score:4, Insightful)
To our detriment; Rome wasn't built in a day - but it took about a day to fall.
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Bullocks. Rome took centuries to fall.
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I hardly see how Saundra Bullock caused the fall of Rome.
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Re:So, what? A month, six months, a year? (Score:5, Informative)
About as long as "flood-up/trickle-down" economics has been dictating policy in the U.S., in fact.
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Well the decay in the united states started in the 1980's so I'm guess we are right on track.
it was about that time when Corporations stopped caring about product quality and innovation and decided that the right thing is to maximize profits at all costs.
Re:So, what? A month, six months, a year? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem has been a predictable result of Corporations railing against restriction and regulation. We put powerful rods in the reactor of capitalism when at the turn of the twentieth century a succession of economic disasters was precipitated by wholesale greed and financial practices that made a tiny few rich, but impoverished the masses.
We find ourselves learning the hard way, that we haven't changed in any significant way in 100 years, that greed is ultimately destructive and that our economic engines need exactly the same kind of checks and balances that our political engines require, because in the end, its all about the best and worst in being human. If you don't ensure stability, diversity and fair competition, you get boom-bust, profound disparity and a system which us ultimately unsustainable.
Corporations must be separated from government, for the benefit of both. Both must have a strong set of checks and balances (for example, corporations must not have the rights of human beings.) Both must have strong external guidance based on the greater good of society including environmental necessity, social responsibility and human dignity. A system of rewards and punishment must be implemented that moves these great forces in a direction that serves the needs of humanity and not the other way around.
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If I had mod points, I'd give them all to you.
That's a wonderful summary of cause and effect and possible solutions.
Thank you.
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But its not like the conditions of Rome in 380 AD were the conditions of Rome for all the years prior. It took a lot going wrong to get there.
IMHO the "decline" really starts with the death of Hadrian or Marcus Aurelius, depending on your perspective. Some people even think it starts earlier, with the end of the Republic and the start of the empire.
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Hence my comment that "Rome wasn't built in a day - but it took about a day to fall.". The moral of the story, of course, is that you allow greed to weaken your nation and disillusion your populace at your own peri
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Rome has been sacked several times. Attributing the fall of Rome to one of these events is poppycock.
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Rome has been sacked several times. Attributing the fall of Rome to one of these events is poppycock.
Interesting....to rephrase your statement in more immediate terms "The house has burned down several times; attributing the house burning down to a failure to prevent the house from burning down is poppycock."
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but we are determined to do it faster stronger better
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Bullocks. Rome took centuries to fall.
It took millennia (billenia?) to fall, if you count the time involved gathering matter together, exploding it to make heavier elements (twice), then gathering it together again and having two planets collide to form our moon, the basis of life on this planet. So, you're also off by several orders of magnitude, if you wish to be adequately pedantic. Or, you could say it fell in a microsecond, that being the last decision the ruler made to doom it.
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Large scale solar power of any type is going to be the result of a lot of innovation over an extended period of time, and it is going to have a long and expensive road to large scale deployment. That's true for large civic engineering projects in general.
Your comment show
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So since you think that this kind of post is meaningless and a waste of time, why don't you skip reading it and posting about it? You could spend your time marveling about how smart you are, and spare the rest of us having to read or reply to your drivel. You are wrong and we don't really care what you think, so STFU.
In case it's not perfectly clear at this point, this is a personal attack. You're welcome.
I rather hate to have to explain it to you as the very need attenuates your "personal attack" into nothingness, but my point is we develop the technology and then lose the opportunity to profit from it because the greed at the top will seek the higher profit margins available through utilizing the cheaper labor of the PRC instead of seeking to ensure the safety and security - the long term survival - of the United States of America.
But to retrieve something of value to you from your "personal attack", you
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The idea of removing impurities is cool... (Score:4, Informative)
The idea of removing impurities using light is cool if it increases the efficiency of the completed pannel.
The premise of saving energy in the manufacture of the panels isn't really relevant. Currently producing silicon uses lots of energy, but it needen't really. The process really only involves heating and cooling of relatively small volumes of silicon, and if you were to design a machine to do it continuously, you could do it with nearly no energy. The raw materials are cold, the output is cold, and the processing in the middle is hot - use the energy from the finished product cooling down to heat new raw materials in a continuous process, as already done in a water Heat Exchanger.
The reason this currently isn't done is because energy is a tiny cost in the production of silicon, and other things are far more important than recapturing a tiny amount of energy while the silicon cools down.
Re:The idea of removing impurities is cool... (Score:4, Interesting)
The idea of removing impurities using light is cool if it increases the efficiency of the completed pannel.
>
Probably not. Getting very pure silicon is relatively easy. Even if it did, solar panel efficiency is so abysmal a few percentage points more isn't going to help.
What they need to focus on is producing inverters more efficiently. Those things are *expensive*, and required if you want to rig solar panels into your existing household AC lines (and sell energy back to the grid.)
Re:The idea of removing impurities is cool... (Score:4, Interesting)
IGBT's are cheap. Capacitors are cheap. PWBs are cheap. Microcontrollers are cheap. You don't need big and expensive magnetics (transformers/inductors) if you are not doing voltage level up shifting. Inverters can be made very inexpensively if development costs are spread over enough units, but the material and production costs are relatively low compared to what companies charge for them, so the prices for these could fall significantly given enough competition in the market.
Re:The idea of removing impurities is cool... (Score:4, Interesting)
Solar panel efficiency is nearly good enough to make a lot of applications viable. If they can make the jump they claim from 16% to 20%, that would be huge. Needing 20% less roofspace/panels for the same power, and with the panels themselves cheaper to boot? It could bring the price of rooftop solar into the reach of millions more American households.
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Re:The idea of removing impurities is cool... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the point is 20% and cheap. Panels at the high end of efficiency are expensive.
Now, if they could only figure out how to get the installation costs down.
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solar panel efficiency is so abysmal a few percentage points more isn't going to help.
Utter nonsense. Photovoltaic efficiency is higher than every other end-to-end solar to electricity conversion process. It's higher than the dominant process (photosynthesis) by an order of magnitude.
The problem with photovoltaics isn't efficiency. It's cost.
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solar panel efficiency is so abysmal a few percentage points more isn't going to help.
Utter nonsense. Photovoltaic efficiency is higher than every other end-to-end solar to electricity conversion process. It's higher than the dominant process (photosynthesis) by an order of magnitude.
The problem with photovoltaics isn't efficiency. It's cost.
Exactly. My parent's recently put about 9 kW of PV on their roof. This used up all the immediately available space, but it is far from the maximum one could actually fit into that area (which would be straight forward - instead of a conventional roof with an apex, you build a single pitched roof and blanket them onto that).
But that 9kW cost $70,000 (with rebates). It's about the upper limit you can do on your own if you really want to make the most of it.
Now if you could get the cost of the panels down enou
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The problem with photovoltaics isn't efficiency. It's cost.
Exactly. My parent's recently put about 9 kW of PV on their roof. ...
But that 9kW cost $70,000 (with rebates).
Ouch - that's really expensive - must have done it at least 3-4 years ago if not more. Current costs are as low as $4.50 / watt and up to $6 / watt for a residential install - that would be $54k maximum and as low as $40k. And that's before rebates. At a minimum you'll get 30% off as a federal tax credit so that would put the price under $40k or nearly half the cost of what your parents paid.
Now if you could get the cost of the panels down enough, that the option in my first paragraph were now viable - then I would bet that 90% of residential households out there could easily power all their electricity requirements from PV.
Should be easily done today. But prices still aren't cheap enough. In most cases it's still not worth rebuilding
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They did put in fairly high-cost panels. They'll pay for themselves since the NSW government had an absurdly generous rebate scheme, so we aimed to maximize the wattage (which requires high efficiency).
That's the problem though - residential properties have fairly limited surface area available, so cost per watt is high since you also have to deal with square-meters.
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They did put in fairly high-cost panels. They'll pay for themselves since the NSW government had an absurdly generous rebate scheme, so we aimed to maximize the wattage (which requires high efficiency).
Sure - if you want to maximize production you need the highest efficiency possible - but for most people, that's not the issue - the issue is the cost - and as I stated at least now in the US, costs are close to half the price that you quoted, though I suspect that prices are higher in NSW as things down under tend to cost more in general.
That's the problem though - residential properties have fairly limited surface area available, so cost per watt is high since you also have to deal with square-meters.
Perhaps in NSW they do, but I doubt that an extra 20-30% production (comparing "typical" panels at ~15% overall efficiency with high efficiency panels at ~20% overall effi
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Already done. (Score:4, Informative)
Virtually all caravan and recreational vehicle/motor home devices are 12v.
The problem is the amperage with a 12v supply.
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Your computer contains a switchmode regulator to convert AC to DC. Or to be more correct it contains probably around 15 of them. They are the same type of regulator that is used to convert DC to DC. You can't simply do away with the conversion.
If you feed your computer 12VDC (and there are motherboards out there which already accept a 12VDC powerfeed), then you still need 5V, 3.3V, -5V -12V and that's just the voltages supplied by your ATX powersupply in your computer. Your motherboard additionally has regu
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Efficiency is hugely important though. I did the calculations recently to try and figure out if it would be economical to do peak-shaving of my household electricity usage with Lead-Acid. The answer was that, adding up all the costs (lifetime cost of PbA, electricity, efficiency etc.) I would just barely break even.
Now, there would be some advantages to that, but the hassle and parasitic costs would mean it wasn't worth it.
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If you ran a business out of your home that was even somewhat energy intensive, say an Internet cafe or restaurant, that would easily be worth it.
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ANd you wonder why America is losing out to China?
Arghh... (Score:1)
not another we'll-never-see-it solar breakthrough. I suppose highly-efficient batteries, flying cars, and fusion power will be the next stories.
Re:Arghh... (Score:4, Informative)
Still, one can always hope that Big Carbon's throttling grip may one day be broken...or even act upon that desire: http://cleanenergy.harvard.edu/ [harvard.edu]
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Solar *IS* affordable fusion - free from that big fusion reactor in the sky.
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Not really, nearly all power that we use comes from the Sun ultimately. Whether it be coal, oil or wind, where precisely do you think that energy comes from?
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You got a source on those stats? Germany's PV alone has produced more than Fukushima on several occasions. The total energy flux from the sun is 3.8 YJ/yr, dwarfing all non-renewable resources.
And I have research facilities run purely upon solar. I think you simply don't have a clue what you're talking about. In fact, your comment history throughout this thread pretty much confirms that you have no clue.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany [wikipedia.org]
12TWh/600TWh = 2%
Your example only goes to prove that you haven't got the slightest clue about what words like energy and power mean. The PEAK power production that solar propaganda keeps citing bears no relationship with either the total energy thus provided nor the actual usefulness of this energy. Since you are trolling this forum in ignorance of the former, I won't even discuss the latter.
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"The PEAK power production that solar propaganda keeps citing bears no relationship with either the total energy thus provided nor the actual usefulness of this energy"
No, and it doesn't because such a measurement is FUCKING USELESS. We're constantly improving solar materials (my research labs are covered with 40% efficient PV, and that's from TWO YEARS AGO) and PV is only getting better. Pretty soon, we'll be tossing these into space with modifications to capture more than UV-IR range.
But you're not someon
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Why, yes it does, and Peak Power is bullshit, because we're going to harvest more OUTSIDE of the atmosphere and beam it down.
Oh, didn't hear about that space-bound solar plant from Japan?
And in a good high orbit, there's 24-hour sun. No weather to affect it.
So ill-informed it's sad.
So ignorant of current endeavors and tech as to be laughably under-educated.
Which school did you attend? It needs to go on my scholarship blacklist.
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not another we'll-never-see-it solar breakthrough. I suppose highly-efficient batteries, flying cars, and fusion power will be the next stories.
Yes, you will probably see more technology articles on Slashdot. If you don't like technology articles, there are other sites [perezhilton.com]. that don't have them.
ps you forgot to mention the space elevator stories ;^)
Re:Arghh... (Score:4, Informative)
A much more creditable provenance regardless of the lack of information at NREL's website.
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Sour grapes here. I submitted the story to /. back then but it didn't make it.
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LOL No, I probably just submitted it at the wrong time of day and it got passed over because of all the spam that was being submitted.
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Oh, well...all the venture capitalists would ignore it now, anyway, since the the Wall Street Journal has officially announced the death of solar energy [wsj.com]:
Global demand for solar power is still growing—about 8% more solar panels will be installed this year compared with 2010, according to Jefferies Group analysis—but it is expected to flat-line next year.
lollll....
Is this really new? (Score:3)
Unfortunately the article is dumbed down a lot, so it is not easy to understand what technology is actually supposed to be used. But this sound a lot like a Rapid Thermal Anneal [wikipedia.org] (RTA/RTP), which has been used for decades in semiconductor manufacturing. It has also been used a lot in lab environment to manufacture solar cells. It is possible that the energy consumption can be reduced, but the tool throughput and maintenance costs are quite a bit higher than that of a conventional furnace. I suppose that is why it did not catch on so far.
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Came here to say exactly this. Not much new here.
Question (Score:1)
Yes! (Score:1)
There prob. were some steps involving fossilization of
the solar-grown material in between though.
bjd
misread headline (Score:2)
"Optimal furnace bakes solar cells better" sounded more impressive.
Lithium-ion batteries (Score:3)
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As pointed out earlier in the thread, a continuous process which uses outgoing product to pre-heat incoming materials can cut energy usage dramatically. This is the way it's done in many other industrial processes. The difficulty, of course, is how to recover heat from liquid materials as they cool into solids, while still producing a suitable end-product.
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Personally, I have been thinking that GA's high temp thorium reactor would make good sense to use for li and other ingredient processing. Use the secondary heat for other processes, including electrical generation.
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Lithium ion requires over 1300C, not the nice low temps of glass [ngk.co.jp]. A high temp reactor is not overkill for mass production of lithium. In fact, it has the advantage of not converting from heat to steam to mechanical to electricity back to heat. Instead, is makes DIRECT use of the heat, thereby jumping the efficiency rate way up (and
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I have seen a few manufacturing kilns before. But there is always the question of what to do with waste heat (and there is ALWAYS waste heat, except for microwaves and light).
it would be nice to see more effort put into actually using genuine waste heat. for example, nobody should ever have to actually expend energy to bake a batch of powder coating, or composites like carbon fiber with a heat-cure epoxy. There's tons of waste heat, well, going to waste, and if we could come up with ways to use it cross-industry we could probably save a lot of power.
Funny (Score:2)
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My only problem with that, is that solar PV is now much cheaper than solar thermal.
If you compare a toaster oven running on a solar system to a Sun Oven you'll change your mind about that real quick.
If you had a nice slope down from your home or a drive you could position mirrors on it and then at the top put a solar oven and get something that would come up to temp quickly, but even the cute little plastic box sun oven (the cooking box is painted aluminum) will cook most foods if you have about half a day's strong sunlight. It would be nice to have a double-glazed door for cooking on coo
A huge advance... (Score:2)
With this breakthrough, it will now be possible to create high performance solar furnaces for the production of solar cells. literally taking petrochemicals out of the equation and using sunlight to capture sunlight for power. This is a groundbreaking shift towards a solar economy. The implications are revolutionary.
To date, the true cost of solar collection had to include the high cost in petroleum products to create the cells in the first place. This marks a new age of solar manufacture and will be most e