More new solar cells.

[fool]

Sunpower A300

Not quite as splendiferous as the indium nitride things jtr posted a while ago,
But these look like being available much sooner. Seeing as the advantage the A 300 has over conventional cells is that all the contacts are on the back of the cell I can’t see why, a few years down the line, it wouldn’t be possible to use indium nitride or some other more efficient than silicon pv material.

 

[Buck]

Speaking of solar powered, is there a way to have anti-reflective solar panels so your neighbor isn't blinded?

 

[jtr1962]

20% efficiency in a production cell isn't bad. No mention of cost though. Until these things approach the cost of conventional roofing they probably won't appeal to the average home owner, although I plan to do a cost analysis eventually and see what the payback period would be.

 

[Clocker]

I did small solar energy design project with solar energy back in the day...you might find it interesting. This file I found doesn't appear to be the final version but most of it is there...

http://www.wideopenwest.com/~kharper/solar.zip

You'll need at least Word but also Excel if you want to look as some of the data...

 

[Clocker]

THere is a cost analysis in there....jtr

C

 

[jtr1962]

Very interesting analysis Clocker, and thanks for sharing it. I wish PCs were common when I was in school. It would be nice to share some of my projects with everyone here. I still have most of them. Maybe one of these days I'll scan them and use OCR software to digitize them.

 

[mubs]

Sharp is up to some tricks.

 

[jtr1962]

Cool. 8)

Now maybe instead of hybrids you can cover the roof and hood of a car with these, and have the battery get recharged while the car is parked. No fuel, no engine, no paying for electric to recharge the battery. I haven't done an anaysis, but I think the amount of solar energy falling on an area the size of an average car in a day (~25 to 100 kW-hr depending upon time of year and latitude) is more than sufficient to power the car maybe 50 or 60 miles, even accounting for the inefficiency of the solar cells and energy to motion conversion process. This covers 99% of trips. You can rent a regular car for the 1% of trips where you might need more range than that.

Next time the roof needs to be done on my parent's house I plan to convert to solar power and have a new meter installed that allows me to charge the electric company for surplus power. I've heard of people who actually earn a pretty decent living doing this. It's long past time that solar power was seriously looked at.

 

[sechs]

These aren't production yet? Three years ago, they were talking about solar membranes made with advanced polymers. While not as efficient as our favourite glass boxes, the membranes would have been insanely easy to deploy and nonreflective. The theory was that this stuff could be used to replace hot-mop roofs -- turning millions of acres of city rooftops into electricity generators. Perfect help for the big city transmission issues.

What is the net cost of solar-generated power these days? Some were were forcasting that it'd be competitive with single-cycle natural gas generation by now.