hydrogen economy is here!

11.21: news.gear/solar for 50cent per watt!:

Making the entire cell using a roll-to-roll process

gives the company an advantage over other

thin-film photovoltaic companies that print on glass,

which is heavier and limited to smaller areas,

says Solexant CEO Damoder Reddy.

"The cost benefit is dramatic,

allowing us to produce cells for 50 cents a watt," he says.

First Solar, a thin-film company that uses vacuum deposition

to print its cells onto glass,

has manufacturing costs of 85 cents per watt.

Nanosolar, another company making nanocrystal solar cells,

uses a different semiconductor that requires chemical reactions

to take place during printing,

which increases the complexity and expense of the process.

"We print a preformed semiconductor,"

which eliminates such steps, says Reddy.

The company's first product, which Reddy says

will sell for $1 per watt next year,

will contain a single layer of the nanocrystals.

The company is currently developing other types of nanocrystals

that are more responsive to different bands of the solar spectrum

in the hopes of boosting its cells' efficiency.

"Ultimately we want to make a multilayer, broad-spectrum cell,"

says Reddy.

. For a truly disruptive project, check out the open-source framework

for solar monitoring .

11.23: web.phy/solar/water to hydrogen was prev'ly requiring platinum:

. what was the big deal about getting {oxygen, hydrogen} out of electricity;

I saw that in grade school

-- what I didn't know was that they were

only able due to the presence of a very rare

and expensive catalyst: platinum .

. now the hydrogen just got much cheaper !

. heard about the latest update on scifri radio:

Daniel Nocera

The Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy and Professor of Chemistry

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Home-Brewed Electricity

. a report by an international expert on solar energy

in the November 2 issue of ACS' Inorganic Chemistry,

. Daniel Nocera describes a long-awaited, inexpensive method for solar energy storage

that could help power homes and plug-in cars in the future

Daniel Nocera making hydrogen fuel from water:

. Scientists have long known how to split water into hydrogen and oxygen,

but unlike plants, they've needed high temperatures and harsh solutions,

or rare and expensive catalysts like platinum.

[without the platinum, the loose hydrogens just stay unbound,

increasing the acidity, and complicating containment]

Nocera's catalyst is the first made from

cheap, abundant materials (cobalt and phosphate)

that works in benign conditions: a glass of water at room temperature.

The crucial insight that makes this possible came to Nocera in 2004,

when biologists figured out plants' water-splitting machine.

They learned that the machine falls apart regularly,

requiring the leaf to rebuild it from scratch.

They too could let the catalyst break down,

then use a small amount of solar energy to reconstruct it, again and again.

'Major discovery' from MIT primed to unleash solar revolution

a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science.

"This is just the beginning," said Nocera,

principal investigator for the Solar Revolution Project

funded by the Chesonis Family Foundation

and co-Director of the Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Center.

"The scientific community is really going to run with this."

'Major Discovery' Primed To Unleash Solar Revolution:

Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera's lab,

When electricity runs through the electrode,

the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode,

and oxygen gas is produced.

Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum,

that can produce hydrogen gas from water,

the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction

that occurs during photosynthesis.

The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water,

and it's easy to set up, Nocera said.

Nocera hopes that within 10 years,

homeowners will be able to power their homes in daylight through photovoltaic cells,

while using excess solar energy to produce hydrogen and oxygen

to power their own household fuel cell.

Electricity-by-wire from a central source could be a thing of the past.

This project was funded by the National Science Foundation

and by the Chesonis Family Foundation .

Solar Revolution Project

. announced a $10 million grant

to develop technology to make solar power mainstream.

The Chesonis Foundation donated the money for research in three areas:

materials to improve conversion of light to electricity;

storage;

and hydrogen production from solar energy and water.

Called the Solar Revolution Project,

it will provide funding for 30 five-year fellowships in solar energy.

The idea is to pursue "blue sky" research,

in an effort to fill the void between corporate-funded applied research

and the limited amount of federal money dedicated to basic science research in solar,

said Ernest Moniz, the director of the MIT Energy Initiative.

"There are some really hard problems that need to be solved

for the really big breakthroughs to come," Moniz said.

"The underlying science of photosythesis

is extremely complicated and not well understood at the electronic level."

As part of the campus-wide MIT Energy Initiative,

the university already has other ongoing solar-related research initiatives,

including the recently announced

MIT-Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems.

The Solar Revolution Project funding is meant to be flexible to allow researchers to

pursue breakthrough technologies.

A solar leadership council will be formed to coordinate activities among

different research efforts at MIT, Moniz said.

The Chesonis grant will also help fund a

solar energy research report,

modeled on the university's influential reports on nuclear and coal.

Although the power is free, solar electric panels are relatively expensive

because of the large up-front cost.

Solar power is small fraction of the overall electricity production in the U.S.

--just half of one percent in 2007,

according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

. to bring costs down, Researchers and solar companies are trying to develop

large-scale manufacturing technologies and higher solar cell efficiency

The Chesonis Family Foundation was founded by Arunas Chesonis,

an MIT graduate who is CEO of telecom company Paetec Holding.

another better solar panel:

Even though it is only the size of a postage stamp

-- compared to the usual solar collector area that spans 4 x 4 feet --

the cell is much more efficient in collecting and reusing solar energy.

The lens focuses incoming sunlight onto the solar cell.

Microchannels at the base of the module

transfer energy in the form of heat and light to wires contained inside.

Each vertical stack of lenses rolls and tilts like a track blind,

keeping the surface of the lenses faced to incoming sunlight

as the sun changes position in the sky throughout the day.

Incorporating these new cells into arrays

could make solar energy an option that is competitive with other energy sources .

12.18: news.gear/could Double Solar efficiency:

Technology Review Dec. 18, 2009`Hot Electrons Could Double Solar Power

. Boston College researchers have built solar cells

that get a power boost from the blue light portion of sunlight

(whose energy is normally lost in heat).

The solar cells could, in theory,

result in efficiencies as high as 67 percent of the energy in sunlight,

compared to 35 percent with ordinary solar cells...