Posted on 02/03/2008 10:54:24 PM PST by PeaceBeWithYou
Solar's had a pretty rough time breaking the ~40% efficiency level over the years, but Idaho National Laboratory researchers have apparently developed a nano-antenna array capable of collecting power not from photonic energy as is done today, but from infrared energy that could be harvested in any weather (or even at night).
The cell production process is even supposed to be ridiculously cheap compared to making standard silicon photovoltaic cells, but, as always, there's a rub. The grid collects its oscillating IR energy at ten thousand billion times per second, which is proving to be a challenge to the nerds behind the tech, who are working on a way to convert that to the 50-60Hz power that the world uses. So yeah, it might be a few more years before this one pans out (if it does pan out).
bmflr
For the same reason solar power isn’t called perpetual motion. The energy came from another source and we just tap off of it. The earth rotates around it’s axis and around the sun, There is quite a lot of energy there if we could only tap into it. And no one would call that perpetual motion either, but it would be considered free energy.
Actually I think I understand what I didn’t understand before. You can’t generate energy from heat in an area where there is constant heat, i.e. you need a temperature gradient. In this case it’s absorbing infrared radiation from objects that are hotter than the background heat level, so it doesn’t violate the entropy requirement.
At least that’s how it looks to me, but I’m still not an expert.
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