PV "breakthroughts" are a dime dozen. Usually things quickly break apart due to these reasons:<p>1) The solar cell has to stable for 20 years in the field, not the 5 minutes it requires to collect the data for your publication.<p>2) You have to make 200 million cells per year with a yield >98%. Can you really do that?<p>3) Manufacturing cost on paper and in reality are two
completely different things. Reducing material consumption is good, but it is not the only cost driver. Again: YIELD.<p>The first point is something that can be partially answered with a lot of additional research. Doable by a university, but often much more frustrating than the research they'd really want to do.<p>The only answer to the last two points is to try it on a large scale. And people did that for many technologies, see Nanosolar, Solyndra and many more. The problem is that so many failed, that currently nobody is willing to invest in new PV technologies.<p>Right now there is only silicon, CIGS thing film and CdTe thin film on the market. I doubt that a new technology is going to become relevant anytime soon as all of these technologies still have some room to breathe.<p>The article mentions, that 15 years passed without a new efficiency record in Si based solar cells. This is completely meaningless until that number is approached by mass manufactured cells.
> But that manufacturing innovation hasn't been matched on the basic research side; it's been over a decade since the last time anyone set a new efficiency record for silicon cells.<p>> The material in question is gallium arsenide, which can be fashioned into solar cells with efficiencies twice those of silicon<p>What about this breakthrough doubling the typical solar panel efficiency to 44.7%? Isn't it based on silicon solar panels, too?<p><a href="http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-and-media/press-releases/presseinformationen-2013/world-record-solar-cell-with-44.7-efficiency" rel="nofollow">http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-and-media/press-releas...</a>
The material used in silicon solar cells Galium Arsenide isn't an environmental friendly material. For us to have large quantity of solar power the materials used in the solar cells can't be dirty in themselves or the environmental advantage are lost.<p>Here are some alternative links<p>Organic solar cell
<a href="http://www.heliatek.com/newscenter/latest_news/neuer-weltrekord-fur-organische-solarzellen-heliatek-behauptet-sich-mit-12-zelleffizienz-als-technologiefuhrer/?lang=en" rel="nofollow">http://www.heliatek.com/newscenter/latest_news/neuer-weltrek...</a><p>A question in my mind is if plants is the ultimate solar cell, cheap to produce, naturally converting solar energy into biomass, sugar and potentially diesel. There are also ecoli based solar conversion.<p>Boing Green diesel breakthrough
<a href="http://www.energypost.eu/exclusive-report-boeing-reveals-biggest-breakthrough-biofuels-ever/" rel="nofollow">http://www.energypost.eu/exclusive-report-boeing-reveals-big...</a><p>Ecoli biogasoline
<a href="http://cleantechnica.com/2013/09/30/kaist-researchers-produce-gasoline-from-escherichia-coli/" rel="nofollow">http://cleantechnica.com/2013/09/30/kaist-researchers-produc...</a>
As an active user of silicon-based solar in self sustained home I would say that we need a more efficient and cheap battery technology. By cheap I mean cost/cycles, current lead acid batteries offer less than 1000 cycles considering 30% usage, improving number of cycles 10 fold and usage to 100% would be great.
Is he trying to violate the laws of thermodynamics?<p><pre><code> The front has to let sunlight in, but then keep photons from
escaping. ..... This takes photons from a broad area and
funnels them into the PV chip. The other end of the U acts
like a reflective cap, making it very hard for a photon to
escape from the chip without being reflected back into it.
</code></pre>
So basically a funnel with a wide part and a narrow part? And since it's narrow it's less likely for a photon to enter?<p>That actually doesn't work - the intensity at the narrow end is higher, and the total number of photons going in each direction is exactly the same.<p>One way mirrors do not, and can not, exist.<p>(One thing that does work is having slanted walls and lots of reflections giving many opportunities for the photon to be absorbed. But if it doesn't it will inevitably escape again.)
Alta Devices has been in the thin-film GaAs space for years. They've attracted nine-figure investments and posted really spectacular efficiency of ~28% in GaAs thin films. It's all very exciting, but these discoveries are not untrodden ground.<p><a href="http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PVeff(rev131204)a.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PVeff(rev131204)a.jpg</a><p><a href="http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Sources-Alta-Devices-GaAs-Solar-Startup-Purchased-by-Chinas-Hanergy" rel="nofollow">http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Sources-Alta-Dev...</a>
There's nothing wrong with silicon PV arrays, they're easy to manufacture in high volumes and low cost, they have reasonable efficiency levels and high durability. The problem facing greater adoption of solar power continues to be the storage problem. If people want to improve deployment of solar power then they should work on that problem first and foremost.
I'd think the greater natural abundance of silicon, coupled with the lower toxicity vs an arsenic compound, would make such a move unlikely in deployments that don't require maximum power output for a given area (satellites, for example).
there are nascent technologies for refining silicon into solar grade that are like 30-50% cheaper than what is currently used, they just need to be brought up to production scale. So, to answer the title- no