A new method of making electricity from sunlight

Link to original paper: <a href="http://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/schools/cas_sites/physics/pdf/Ren/237%20Nature%20Materials%2010%20532-538%202011.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/schools/cas_sites/physic...</a>

I find it interesting that everyone ignores the obvious, and most common, method of making electricity from sunlight: fossil fuels. It strikes me as odd that there's such a disconnect between what we say and what we mean that the oldest and most prevalent form of solar-generated electricity gets ignored.

Cute. Even the current photovoltaic cells do not make economic sense. Why should a five times more inefficient method be better?<p>If anything, they should look whether there are other temperature gradients they could use for this, but I suspect that the conversion still is not great.

&#62;<i>liberating electrons from a semiconducting material such as silicon. Or you can concentrate the sun’s rays using mirrors</i><p>// Or you can concentrate the suns rays in organic material growing bio-diesel crops. Bit more lag but it's still essentially solar energy capture.

The question they don't address is what the relative cost of these thermoelectric cells is. I'll grant that they're still in prototype phase, but some mention of the estimates of cost would be nice. I, for one, have no idea how much bismuth telluride costs.

Bismuth telluride is a compound of bismuth and tellurium. This would seem pedantic were it not for the fact that tellurium is <i>rare as gold</i>.<p>There's another tellurium-based pipe dream in the form of cadmium telluride solar cells, which have the lucky coincidence of being highly efficient and very cheap to manufacture. Unfortunately... <i>rare as gold</i>.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%...</a> -- tellurium variously at 0.005, 0.001, and 0.001 ppm, and gold at 0.0011, 0.0031, and 0.004 ppm. So "similarly rare."<p>Friends don't let friends try to save the world with tellurium.