New Mostly Plastic Super Efficient Solar Cells

[Cap-Z-ro]

" California Institute of Technology (Caltech) researchers said the wires are made up of 98 percent plastic, potentially lowering the cost of photovoltaics by using just 1/50th the amount of semiconductor material used today. In tests, the experimental solar cells demonstrated over 90 percent quantum efficiency, compared with 25 percent for the best silicon solar cells."

More here...

http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223000119&cid=NL_eet

Regards...

[mscoffman]

These solar cells apparently use the nanoscopic light
antenna process where the optical photons are "received"
by silicon antennae with great efficiency, rather than the
standard electron capture method...standback...this is
great news! "Good work"; to the researchers.

:S:MarkSCoffman

[silverfish]

These solar cells apparently use the nanoscopic light
antenna process where the optical photons are "received"
by silicon antennae with great efficiency, rather than the
standard electron capture method...standback...this is
great news! "Good work"; to the researchers.

:S:MarkSCoffman

Sounds promising, and I hope the transition to an affordable commercial product proceeds smoothly.

[powercat]

Great link, solar panels are the best form of free energy at the moment, I wonder how many years it will take before we can buy these ones off the shelf.
Thanks for posting
cat

[Mark69]

Yes, hope this gets moving quickly.  The problem will be that someone (big oil) will buy this up and it will disappear.  Then no one will benefit and we will continue paying a lot for energy.

Mark