Major Solar Cell Breakthrough with Scientific American Article link.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Superefficient, Cost-Effective Solar Cell Breaks Conversion Records

Highlights:

  • These are germanium wafer based.
  • 20 and 30 layers of semiconductor material.
  • Tuned to work with concentrated light.
  • Works on a larger percentage of the spectrum.
  • Nearly double the efficiency of standard photovoltaic cells.
  • Photovoltaic are around 22% efficient.
  • These new cells are 40.7% efficient.
  • New cells will require concentrators
  • Should achieve a 45% efficiency eventually.

*I bolded some key portions of the quotes from the article. *

I have mentioned several times that I have installed a large solar panel array on my roof. I really believe in the future of solar power and this is the largest breakthrough in the last 20-30 years. This could mean a really large step forward in reducing global warming.

In 10 years time it is reasonable that Solar will near the same cost as coal electrical generating. Especially as a moderate Republican or Democratic President is likely to force our vast number coal burning plants to begin the cleanup that Bush delayed.

Jim {I placed this in MPSIMS despite this not being mundane or pointless, I welcome its move to GD if a mod decides it is better placed there.}

2

This looks good. Available in about a year, eh? I wonder what they will cost.

3

Put me on the waiting list. Right now I only heat the water. I would like to upgrade and heat the house.

4

These sound like the kind of thing for generating cheaper solar electricity.

Heating your house is more efficiently done by passive-solar techniques. Resistance electric heating is THE most expensive way to heat a house.

5

I found an additional though very similar article on it in ScienceDaily:

There was another promosing breakthrough
Unprecedented Efficiency In Producing Hydrogen From Water

Jim

6

Well, that depends on the cost of electricity. However (and I think this is, at the core of your statement, what you mean) resistance heating is the most inefficient way to heat.

Passive solar is great if you do it (and the fact that it is generally done without noisy fans like central air systems is esthetically pleasing to me), but it does require that the house be built around the concept of solar heating, and, of course, that it gets an appreciable amount of sunlight; homeowners in Seattle need not apply. The standard stick frame home that is stock-and-trade of residental developers is ill-suited to heating by passive solar. (This is, of course, a small quibble relative to the other architectural and esthetic transgressions tract housing has foisted on American society, but that’s a topic for another thread; probably one in The Pit.)

As for the array in the article, if this can be made workable on a production scale and cost-effictive, that would be fantastic. However, you have to realize (and as the owner of an electrovoltaic system, I’m sure Jim does) that there’s much more to running a solar system than just mounting the array on the roof. The battery bank, inverter, maintanence, longevity, et cetera are also considerations when looking at the overall cost of the system. And of course, this has essentially no impact on transportation, where petroleum-based fuels will continue to dominate for years to come, short of some revolutionary new energy storage technology that makes fully-electric vehicles a competitive option. Still, it’s a big incremental advance in the techology.

Stranger

7

I agree 100%. I would dearly love to see a nationwide initiative to more efficient housing. Developers still seem to build whatever they want, wherever they want in terms of efficiency standards.

The battery bank is not only optional, but also rare. I do not have one yet. Most Solar Panel systems going in are going in as part of the grid, not off-grid. Mine is on grid and I will not even have minimal backup batteries until either this summer or next. My install cost roughly $15K without batteries and the state paying 70% of the install cost.

I am close to being two years on my solar panels now. Between Energy Credit buybacks and electrical savings, I have already saved roughly $2900. I will not lose money on the investment. However, my payback on solar is not going to be swift and is not actually going to be better than a good investment. I really believe in solar and put my money where my belief is.

The Solar Cells discussed in the article are envisioned for large installation solar farms to be built instead of new power generating plants or large industrial installation like Google has already begun. Of course some homeowners will choose to install them as long as various state plans stay in place to help with the cost of installation. My WAG from the article is that it will drop the $47,000 cost of installing a 6700-watt system to the $23,000 range. This is still not an investment that a lot of homeowners will make, but it could become a very nice builders options and if a state paid even 50% of the cost, I could see many more people jumping on installing solar for themselves. An $11,500 investment should pay for itself in 7-8 years based on my experiences. This would probably be the price point where far more people considered making the investment.

Stanger, what do you think the longevity will be? My best estimates on my panels from a lot of reading is 20-25 years with the panels still operating at 80% original efficiency. This gives the panels plenty of time to pay for themselves.
The batteries are a bigger issue. My readings have estimated a life of anywhere from 10 to 20 years. They are a large and costly investment with little return, as they are strictly for emergencies or to go off-grid. Going off-grid for most people is not needed or desirable.

My plan on the batteries is to invest in the $4500 range to have enough power and the additional control devices to keep my fridge, some Compaq fluorescent and laptops going during an extended blackout. This is obviously a low priorty with little payback. I may not bother at all if anything comes up.

Jim

8

My knowledge of EV solar cells is strictly incidental; I don’t really know how long they’ll last, but I’m sure that longevity will be a focus for continuous improvement, so I’d expected progressively longer-lived cells with time.

Going off-grid may not be desireable on the individual level for people living in suburban communities, but the national electrical transmission infrastructure is a major source of inefficiency and due to legacy constraints that limit the implementation of newer technologies (high voltage DC) will continue to be so. It would be good to reconfigure the infrastructure in a cellular manner such that energy generated locally stays local unless needed elsewhere. However, this would require either fine-tune control to meet local demand or the ability to store large amounts of energy on demand, neither of which is plausible right now. Household storage would certainly ease demand on the stretched-thin infrastructure and limit the amount of damage done by a cascade failure like that seen in 2003, but for the average household the cost just isn’t worth it. But if you’re living in the wayback and having to pay thousands for installation and maintanence for a couple miles of wire, a standalone system is a must.

Stranger

9

Heh.

10

Oops.

11

I’m sorry, but no. That quote in the OP contradicts this. In fact it seems to be very cleverly worded to create a false impression:

Generation costs are not even close to consumer costs. Generation costs for a coal plant with full emissions controls of 90% NOx and 95% SO2 removal and 90% mercury removal can be as low as 2 cents per kWh.

Everyone who gets their power from coal (50-55% of the US total) - scale up your electric bill by 8/2, or 4 times. Call it 3 times even to round down for common infrastructure savings. Given how many people on here have to scrape to pay the rent, keep their car running, or even (bafflingly) come up with just over a dollar a month to post on the SDMB - how many people are going to be able to afford an electric bill 3-4 times as much as current?

What delay? I’m unaware that the NOx, particulate, HAP, VOC, and SO2 limits of the CAA were delayed by Bush. The EPA has been proceeding on mercury regulation, as my steady workload of clients attests to (and there are some technical issues, such as CEMs, which are causing some delays, but that’s not for here). And as for CO2, well this isn’t GD but IMO the CAA and its amendments (which I could be the only person on here to have read several times in entirety) really does not seem to have covered it. Not saying it shouldn’t, but then the purpose of separation of powers is so the Executive branch doesn’t create new legislation ad hoc.

Please define exactly what “cleanup” which was fully authorized under legislation was delayed by Bush. You might have wanted to say “Congress” instead of “Bush”.

Global warming is a huge, scary problem. Solar power is great and needs to be massively supported and backed. I think personally research into solar should be increased by more than 20 times. But let’s not kid ourselves about the economic cost at present. Yeah, we can find all sorts of numbers to say how much global warming will cost the world economy (like the UK recently released), and bring that down to a per-capita figure. But it’s an intangible cost, unlike the electric bill. Tell the typical American, with thousands of dollars in credit card debt because they absolutely HAD to have the latest TV set and car, mortgaged to the hilt with home equity loans paying for their sad and drunken vacations to Cabo, that by paying 3 to 4 times as much on their electric bill, they’ll be saving tens of thousands of dollars down the road. Tell that to the probably 50% of the SDMB who always seem to, by their own posts, barely be able to pay the bills.

Sorry to be a downer, but solar’s going to have to get a lot cheaper than what’s quoted in the article to be useful.

12

I get your point, but I assume that a coal or gas-fired generating plant is going to be a large operation serving many customers remotely, as now, where a solar-panel array is a consumer-level device serving just one home.

So let’s think of my home, where I believe I pay about 11 cents/KWH for power delivered to my door. If the 8-10 cent generation cost were a valid number that I could budget for, it would be cost-effective. The difference is I am not paying for transmission and administration costs for solar.

So I guess the question is if the 8-10 cent estimate is all-inclusive; that is, does it include infrastructure and amortization, etc. the way the electric company bill is.

13

I doubt very, very highly that the 8-10 cent value includes the amortization costs, because 1) in “gee whiz” tech briefs they almost never do unless specifically stated, and 2) it’s very hard to calculate an average value when you deal with individual homes over a variety of locations.

In that case, you’re going to have to include the cost of variable and fixed O&M for the homeowner as well, including replacement of dead/broken/failing parts, maintenance of the cells, battery replacement, etc. I think the net cost to the homeowner will end up being even more than the 8-10 cent range (which is a pretty iffy range, given the generalities of the article). Whereas my 2 cent or less figure includes variable and fixed O&M. Also one will have to include the capital cost, reduced to a per-kWh value. Whereas the utility already has its bond payoffs (if any) for its capital costs included in its consumer prices.

I hope that they can keep bumping the power conversion up and get more and more cells installed and do what they can for advancing the state of solar. Wind is actually getting somewhat competitive with even a high-end coal plant in some key places, and I think that’s great. I would love to see many things such as street lights and parking lot lights nationwide running off of solar as a large-scale controlled testbed of new technologies (since a bad streetlight or three isn’t tragic for anyone), and those suckers eat up a lot of power. An energy consumption expert like YWalker could probably address that better.

Not enough is done for renewables in this country by a long shot, and as I said, I don’t like being a downer but I think the article is unrealistic. And I may be known as the Coal Goddess by those few who still remember me, but at least 25% of my income is from renewables work now, and about 50% from environmental work. I have no vested interest in keeping coal plants running unnecessarily.

14

Una Persson: Help me out, did not Bush sign presidential orders to delay the requirements for Coal generating plants to start undergoing additional filtering of their stacks? I might be misremembering this from way back in 2001.

How does Solar at 8-10 cents compare to Nuclear and Oil? (Yes, I know Oil is a very small piece of the electrical generating infrastructure.)

If we begin to really attempt to get cleaner generating then the price of Coal plants will start rising rapidly. Clean Coal will require technologies like capturing CO[sub]2[/sub] & Sulfur emissions and storing them deep underground. There is the additional technology to gasify coal with water and oxygen in a high pressure system to create syngas which allows for simpler CO[sub]2[/sub] recovery and sequestion.

Jim

15

Power delivered to my door is 16.067 cents/Kw.

Time for the Mr. Fusion home energy source

I need a Shipstone.

16

Let’s be careful here: resistance heating is, actually, 100% efficient for heating your house. All of the energy that goes into that little resistor gets turned into heat, and there is no loss at all. In the bigger scheme of things, the cost (both monetary and intangible) is what we need to look at in order to make a determination about how to heat our houses (and electricity is not particularly cost effective, depending where you live and how that electricity is produced).

-Tofer

17

There’s essentially no loss across the heating element, true, but there are large losses in energy conversion and transmission across a regional or national grid. I’m not at work so I don’t have the numbers offhand but compound energy conversion efficiency from coal to the breaker box in your house is going to be <10%. Thermodynamic efficiency of a coal fired plant alone is in the 30%-40% range (some “supercritical” turbines running above the triple point of water can achieve thermodynamic efficiencies around 45%, but few existing plants use these at this point) and nuclear plants are even more inefficient, generally around 28%-33%. Dynamo efficiency is going to bring this down further. (I’m not sure what the dynamo efficiency of a large, powerplant sized generator is and my Mark’s, where I’d start to look, is in the office, but I’m going to WAG that it’s around 85%-90%.)

The efficiency of a modern high efficiency natural gas or propane furnace is in the 88%-96% range. It’s just inherently more efficient to extract heat from the fuel than to burn it, use it to heat steam to drive a turbine, turn it into electricity via a dynamo. In order to make electrical resistance heating competitive to gas, you’d have to have a cost ratio of 10:1 or higher.

You can save a lot more on costs (gas or electric) by insulating your house well and buying energy efficient appliances than by mounting a PV array. (To Jim’s credit, he does note that PV is more of an ethical “put your money where you mouth is” impetus than a sound investment.) A house designed to make use of the ambient and radiant thermal environment can cut energy use for heating and cooling to a fraction of what it would cost to maintain the standard stick-frame fiberglass-insulated house, but such houses are more laborious to build and few contractors are familiar with the construction methods, so it’s usually a do-it-yourself affair.

The increasing in PV solar efficiency is a nice step, but it’s a small one, and in no way indicates abandonment (or even significant reduction) in the use of fossil fuels in the foreseeable future.

Stranger

18

Damnit, that should be *some “supercritical” turbines running above the critical point of water can achieve thermodynamic efficiencies around 45%…*not the triple point. I caught that just after I hit submit.

Another point: what’s worse than heating is cooling; air conditioning takes a massive amount of energy during peak summer months, and there’s very little that can be done with modern existing tract houses to make it more efficient. Most houses just aren’t designed to stay cool. Ditto (and perhaps even more so) with modern, glass-front office buildings which are essentially radiant heat-boxes in sunlight. What we need more than a revolution in energy production–and is more plausible with existing technology–is energy-efficient materials and architecture in both residential and commercial construction.

Stranger

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Absolutely, and I apologize if I sounded like I was insulting your intelligence. Thanks for elaborating on your point. Cheers.

-Tofer

20

I don’t quite understand what the 8-10 cent estimate means if it doesn’t include infratstructure and amortization. There is no fuel, no moving parts to repair, the thing just pumps out juice when you shine light on it. What would be costing 8-10 cents?

Also, shouldn’t distribution costs remain fairly constant, regardless of how much it costs to generate? If coal costs 2 cents and solar 8 cents the difference is 6 cents per Kwh, not 4x your current electric bill. 6 cents per Kwh isn’t a small increase, but there’s no reason to think your bill will go from $50/mo to $200/mo just by changing the type of generator.