Comments on: Theoretical Limit Of Solar Cell Efficiency Probably Broken

By: aligatorhardt

aligatorhardt — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 05:17:00 +0000

One of those businesses would be hydrogen production from excessive electricity during very windy times. Hydrogen can be used as back up gas for demand leveling turbines or used for transportation fuel.

By: aligatorhardt

aligatorhardt — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 05:02:00 +0000

Sunshine is not made by men with overactive imaginations and underactive responsibilities. Enough with invalid comparisons. It just makes you sound like a con man.

By: Zachary Shahan

Zachary Shahan — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 10:21:00 +0000

if you want to explain why it’s stupid, it’d be great if you wrote something useful. and in all seriousness, if you are upset about people not being specialists in the field you’re supposedly a specialist in, perhaps try informing people in a friendly and productive way. or just live your life in bitter misery…

By: Zachary Shahan

Zachary Shahan — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 10:19:00 +0000

not seeing the link. try again?

By: Zachary Shahan

Zachary Shahan — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 10:18:00 +0000

it pops up once. and has a very easy to use ‘close’ button. our focus is getting people to switch to cleantech. if you don’t like that, feel free to ignore us.

By: Zachary Shahan

Zachary Shahan — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 10:16:00 +0000

Jetik: 1- the issue of cost simply prices nuclear out of the market — it’s too expensive. get over it. and if you work in the nuclear industry and are quite young (unlikely), you might reconsider your career path.

By: Zachary Shahan

Zachary Shahan — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 10:13:00 +0000

you do realize that nuclear fusion on the sun is a world of different from nuclear power plants on earth, right?

By: Zachary Shahan

Zachary Shahan — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 10:12:00 +0000

wind and solar are already closing them down. the question is really just the speed at which it happens.

By: Hans

Hans — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 13:29:00 +0000

So I call upon the Cleantechnica writers to overcome their apparent shyness and to contact the original researchers for some extra info.

By: Hans

Hans — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 13:28:00 +0000

I have skimmed the Sciencemag article. The “Shockley-Queisser Limit” is not mentioned at all! From this quick reading I understand that: 1) by changing the dimensions of the nanowires their solar cell made a jump in efficiency compared to other nanowire designs and now approaches the efficiency of standard solar cells. 2) the experimental results cannot be explained by simple ray optics*, but a 3D electromagnetic model is needed to describe how the light behaves between the nanowires.

So the shifting of the Shockley-Queisser Limit is either somewhere hidden between the lines, or the PR guy of the Niels Bohr institute made the story a bit more spectacular than it actually was.

*The kind of optics you learn in secondary school, where light is only reflected, absorbed or refracted, but complex electromagnetic interactions are ignored

By: arne-nl

arne-nl — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 17:58:00 +0000

+1e9. I could have written that.

Incidentally I have a solar installation of exactly the same size and it is tremendous fun to run you own power plant. No noise, no smoke, no moving parts, no maintenance. And even without a feed-in tariff, very profitable. Thanks to the mass production kick started by Germany and Spain.

And the best part is that the solar haters can not have the same advantage because their religion forbids it! Losers indeed.

By: arne-nl

arne-nl — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 17:39:00 +0000

Exactly, safe, at 150 million km distance. No refueling needed for at least another 4 billion years.

By: Guest

Guest — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 17:24:00 +0000

Hans; Well put. What about ‘plasmon gates’? Can these artificially amplify photons passing through a nano-crevice to match a material’s bandgap?

By: Bob_Wallace

Bob_Wallace — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 15:46:00 +0000

I don’t understand your post.

But if you actually know Kodak you know that they did a lot of the heavy lifting in the development of digital photography but made a bad decision to stick with film as their major activity. That cost them market dominance and ruined the company.

Stealing investment money is a serious charge. I have a lot of problems with how much some CEOs make, especially how many of them leave a troubled/unsuccessful company with a bundle of cash, but that’s not theft. I wish there was a law against people at the top failing and still making a fortune but there is not one.

We need a major adjustment in some of our business practices. We’re paying people at the top far to much and people at the bottom too little. That, if left unchanged, will destroy our economy. If we don’t do a more equitable distribution of the gains we will destroy the market. People who make only enough to barely feed themselves and their families can’t buy the products they produce.

The Board and CEO of Kodak screwed the pooch. They should have left their positions with an empty pay envelop. The money they got should have been distributed to the employees who had nothing to do with the failure but had to look for other employment.

It’s not about redistributing wealth. It’s about fairly distributing gains.

By: green meenie

green meenie — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 15:39:00 +0000

hey, and when they’re done cleaning up there, maybe they could be sent out west in the US (Utah?) to clean up the massive area of toxic tailings left behind from uranium mining. after that, they could go to work at Hanford.

By: green meenie

green meenie — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 15:35:00 +0000

Troll Alert!!!

By: tommariner

tommariner — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 15:18:00 +0000

I know Kodak and helped invent calculator chips. Never because of something better! If the companies you’ve managed failed for that reason, your board deserves to be fired. And if you stole the investment money you and they deserve to be in jail.
My personal opinion, not connected to any organization.

By: Bob_Wallace

Bob_Wallace — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 14:59:00 +0000

That’s true, Tom. This article is about a possible breakthrough in solar capture. And then someone named Tom started off on a tangent about Solyndra and Romney.

Solyndra basically failed because something better came along and took away their market. Typewriter manufacturers and Kodak film failed for the same reason. The major manufacturers of slide rules closed down within two years of scientific calculators hitting the market.

—

I didn’t say Romney was stupid. But if you actually paid attention to him as he ran for the presidency you would have realized that he’s not exceptionally smart. He won the Republican candidate position simply because the competition was a car full of clowns.

Romney would have backed fossil fuels had he gained office. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Can’t base what he will say on day two based on what he said on day one.

By: tommariner

tommariner — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 14:43:00 +0000

Bob — this blog post is about squeezing energy from every photon from the sun. Its not political. I wouldn’t care if the CEO of Solyndra was Buddhist / Roman Catholic / Libertarian — he failed his country and his company.
And that not-very bright dude graduated from Harvard with both law and MBA degrees.
But I am a proponent of even more computer control of particularly the aiming of the photodetectors — we have gotten some amazing results from coordinated micro mirror “telescopes” and see no reason why it wouldn’t work here. And potentially changing the wavelength — we use “scintillators” to modify frequency / wavelength to what a detector likes better.

By: Bob_Wallace

Bob_Wallace — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 14:06:00 +0000

You really ought to take a closer look at who Romney really is.

He’s just not a very bright dude. He, like Bush, was born with a huge head start and, like Bush, other rich people gifted him with an easy road to very big money.

BTW, the CEO of Solyndra was a Republican. Just thought you ought to know….