FYI Sci. American article October 18, 2010, 03:31:50 pm Yahoo Message Number: 117613http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101010133628.htm>Efficient, inexpensive plastic solar cells coming soon Gini Free and Junah, canine xtrodinaire "Kooch" our little red home on wheels "Growing old is mandatory. Growing wise is optional."[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Re: Science Daily (not Scientific American) article Reply #1 – October 18, 2010, 07:09:47 pm Yahoo Message Number: 117617"Efficient, inexpensive plastic solar cells coming soon" So says Science Daily's exuberant headline writer. ;-) But the article says otherwise. Turns out the scientists quoted have not even built a working solar cell in the laboratory, let alone on a production line. All they've done is "observed that [Wannier-Mott] excitons... can travel a thousand times farther in an extremely pure crystal organic semiconductor called rubrene." Nice, I guess, but not something you can put on your roof. ;-) *If* their observations can be translated into actual solar panels and *if* those panels can be produced economically on a large scale, "scientists hope that solar cells based on this budding technology may one day overtake silicon solar cells in cost and performance."Note the key words "hope," "may," and "one day." :-) I'm not trying to be a wet blanket, Gini... just cautioning against getting excited over articles like this. Hardly a day goes by without an enthusiastic report of a "revolutionary" solar panel technology that will "soon" change everything. It's been going on for decades... yet silicon cells are still the most cost-effective way of generating power from sunlight on an RV. That doesn't mean it'll always be that way, of course. It's entirely possible that in ten or twenty years, a discovery such as this one may have real-world applications. But in the meantime, I wouldn't put off buying today's solar panels in the hope that revolutionary new types are right around the corner. It takes many year to go from a laboratory observation of exciton behavior to a mass-produced product.Andy Baird http://www.andybaird.com/travels/
Topic: FYI Sci. American article (Read 2 times)
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Topic: FYI Sci. American article (Read 2 times)
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