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Posted on 05/16/2008 8:27:24 AM PDT by Red Badger
Don't you mean "The Man with the Golden Gun"? Goldfinger is where the villian wanted to detonate a nuke at Fort Knox to make his gold worth more.
Probably the biggest news in the story. This is an outstanding accomplishment, which has a lot wider application.
True. The key to the breakthrough is on the other side of the system: cooling the photo cell.
oops! I mixed up the titles.
You're still collecting about the same amount of sunlight, either way.
The advantage of using a concentrator is that lenses are a lot cheaper to build, maintain, and replace than the photovoltaics. You can save a lot of money by reducing the number of expensive components you have to buy.
The maximum amount of energy from sunlight that you can get per area is more-or-less a constant...I'm guessing that all the lens does is take a big area and condense it down to a small one. Hopefully, no one is planning to turn up (or down lol!) the sun to satisfy some power requirement.
I wonder if this PV is more efficient, or can use superconductors to minimize the transmission losses?
I’d like to see the cooling system. I would suspect it requires more than 70W to function.
The big problem with concentrators has always been the heat. It's hell on materials, and with PV you get big efficiency losses the hotter something gets.
The big deal here is that they've found a way to cool the cells so that they're operating at 85 degC, rather than the 1600C that uncooled cells would experience.
Please Freep Mail me if you'd like on/off
Actually, it sounds mostly passive -- almost kinda like high-temp heat pipes:
Specifically, the IBM team used a very thin layer of a liquid metal made of a gallium and indium compound that they applied between the chip and a cooling block. Such layers, called thermal interface layers, transfer the heat from the chip to the cooling block so that the chip temperature can be kept low. The IBM liquid metal solution offers the best thermal performance available today, at low costs, and the technology was successfully developed by IBM to cool high power computer chips earlier.
The big technical problem is removing heat from the solar cell. They do that by moving it to a big heat sink ... and it's no big deal to cool one of those.
I'd forgotten about him. And the little guy from Fantasy Island.
I just wikied him and he was in Superman II and Silverstreak. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifton_James . I’ll have to keep an eye out for him when I watch those movies again.
Thinking like that gets us nowhere and ignores development basics. Cost at the outset is high until production efficiencies kick in and R&D is amortized. Meanwhile, other factors may well come into play that will take the five cent figure and inflate it.
I can't think off hand what might be out there that would be raising the price of energy but give me a while and it will come to me.
Ten years is not a long time. And if you are correct that is only as it relastes to a development schedule dictated by current conditions. Conditions change, sometimes favorable for a project such as this one.
So that I am not confused over your position, are you saying that we should not develop anything if it will have no benefit for 10-20 years? Not quite sure I was following you on this one.
Been 35 years, watching the price sit at $5. Need more time? Fine, but eventually somnebody else will be doing the waiting.
If that is the case - and you put it very well - then you make a valid point. The question then becomes, are we funding a technology that has no hope of producing meaningful results?
If it is private industry, then that is there business. If it is public dollars, then it is cause for policy examination.
Oddly, and contrary to some opinion, the big private investors in solar cell tech are big oil. Shell is a major. There are some $2 per watt products but they are not available to the ordinary consumer. If you are running a publicly funded project you can get this. But, it still isn’t in the five cents range that would bring solar power to 6.5 billion people.
I was just referring to the magical 10-20 years until said advancement sees it way into production/everyday life. The same prediction occurs in every article written about every advancement, yet it RARELY comes to be.
That’s it, nothing more.
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