On the Bottom Half

The next step in Solar Cells.

Just found this on BBC News:

The new wave of Silicon Valley start-ups

But, the important part, which I've excerpted from that article, is this:

Green machines

It is not just computer technology that folks in the valley are working on. Green technology is winning investors too, said Drew Clark from IBM Capital Ventures.

"I think [one of] the major drivers in today's buzz in Silicon valley is clean tech or energy tech or energy 2.0, whatever we are calling it these days," said Mr Clark.

"If you look at venture capital statistics it is now the third highest place that money is going into.

One of the green innovations dreamed up is a highly efficient solar panel.

The curved panels use 1/1000th of the area needed by traditional ones

The panels produced by SolFocus reflect sunlight to a central point to harness the energy.

Unlike flat panels it means the expensive materials used to convert the energy to electricity are concentrated in one place. SolFocus claims to use 1/1000th of the area needed by flat panels, which keeps the manufacturing costs low.

Gary Conley, SolFocus explained: "These cells have efficiency over double that of the best silicon today. We concentrate the sun 500 times on that small amount of cell, hence the 1000th of the amount of material used, or the expensive part.

"When there is no sun, or you can't see the solar disc, our panels produce zero power. They only produce power in bright sunny locations or when the sun is out."

Contracts have already been signed with the Spanish government for a large scale solar farm in Southern Spain.

From discussions with some of the engineers on the solar car trip, I found out that the way to get close to the maximum theoretical efficiency of monocrystalline silicon solar cells (which is >70%) is to increase the magnitude or brightness of the light hitting them.

This is it people! This is the next stepping stone to high-power, high-volume solar energy generation. Granted you need bright sunshine, but that's the case with all solar cells. Put a field of these in outback Australia or the Mohave Desert and you've got a hell of the lot of power generating capacity. Solar radiation is about 600-700 watts / square metre at Red Deer latitude and even higher in places like Australia and the U.S. The SolFocus people say their panels are more than double the efficiency of the best silicon available today, which means their getting about 300+ watts per square metre of panel, which is a lot. Invest in this idea...

posted by Kyle @ 21:04