Cheap Solar: A Stellar Challenge
24 December 2007, 12:25
Categories: smt-energy-photovoltaic
A recent article by John de Mello and Omar Cheema, titled Solar Power: Slow Watt? points out that the goal of renewable energy production is to reduce costs so that they are below 3¢/kWhr, whereby they can compete with coal and nuclear power generation. This is difficult for conventional inorganic photovoltaic cell technologies, such as Si photovoltaics, which are expensive to produce. However de Mello and Cheema suggest that existing printing facilities could print large-scale Organic PV cells (OPV) of solution-processable organic semiconductors, and there are printing technologies that can print soluble PV materials.
Another approach to producing inexpensive PV cells, recently reported in Nature Nanotechnology, observes that the surface of a material may consist of extremely tiny crystals sitting so close together that sunlight cannot slip out once it has been caught. These nanocrystals are infinitely tiny, however, billions of them can exist in just one square centimetre, which means that altogether they will provide a huge surface area in which sunlight can be caught. Martin Aagesen made the discovery, which has already been so positively received by people in the industry that a limited company SunFlake was founded with regards to starting a production of solar cells based on the new technology. However, many others are working on these third generation photovoltaics by using a range of free-standing nanostructures, such as: carbon nanotubes, graphene layers, and nanorod photonic crystals.
Posted by: The Editors
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