Our future energy requirements depend on reaching the 'holy grail' of electricity generation -- finding a cheaper alternative to coal and other fossil fuels. The availability of an alternative energy source would also contribute significantly to energy self-sufficiency in North America.
Every hour, more energy from the sun hits the earth than the world's entire population consumes in a single year. Given this abundance, solar energy is our world's most obvious energy choice. Why, then, is less than 1% of our global electricity supply powered by solar energy? Because the industry has been unable to harness the three critical success factors for global solar deployment -- high efficiency, low cost and high materials availability for deployment on a global scale.
Current solar photovoltaic (PV) technologies generate electrical power by converting solar radiation into an electric current using semiconductor material. The process involved is called the photovoltaic effect (PV). Today, solar PV cannot be realized on a worldwide scale because neither of the two main technologies presented today; crystalline silicon PV and thin-film PV, completely address the three critical success factors. Crystalline silicon PV possesses high efficiency using abundant materials but they are very expensive to manufacture. It wins on two of the 3 critical success factors. Thin-film PV on the other hand is cheap to manufacture but has low efficiency and relies on rare and toxic elements in its manufacture. It wins on one critical success factor. Furthermore most thin-film technologies use dangerous, toxic materials including cadmium telluride and indium among others.
Despite the challenges, the global market for solar PV technology is growing very rapidly. Some analysts predicting solar PV could contribute as much as 10-15% of our global electricity by 2050.
As we seek to move solar energy into the mainstream, we need to retain the industry's green integrity and bypass the pitfalls of electronic waste. Creating safe, affordable solar energy solutions requires research and development that eliminates the sector's reliance the scarce and dangerous elements that are in limited supply, toxic, difficult to mine, or found only in select, sometimes geopolitically unfriendly regions of the world.
At Quantum Solar Power Corp., we are developing NGD™, a solar PV device which we believe will address all 3 critical success factors -- high efficiency, low cost and high scalability through the use of abundant non-toxic materials. We believe Quantum will win on all three critical success factors. Quantum's revolutionary approach to solar PV design will revolutionize the solar power market. We invite other solar technology companies and manufacturers to join our quest to create safe, affordable solar technology solutions that will literally light up the lives of people across the world.
There is no doubt that our predicted energy needs have a "sunny" future. According to the American Solar Energy Society, U.S. manufacturing of PV components -- wafers, cells, and modules -- has increased substantially year-over-year, with growth rates demonstrated at 97%, 81%, and 62% respectively. In 2009, the U.S. solar industry grew 36% to nearly $4 billion and supported the addition of 17,000 new jobs.
It is important for our geopolitical future that we create a clean energy economy along with a strong energy policy. A sunny future for our children demands that we continue to create green sector jobs that replace our dependency on fossil fuels with renewable energy through wind turbines, hydro-electric power and solar photovoltaic technologies that make solar energy a globally deployable, environmentally smart energy source.
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were cheaper. The location is presently both a ruin and source of pollution. There is a resource
exploitation interest in despoiling public lands without use restrictions or repair. Writer will agree
to consider any application to mine rare elements in the USA. I will not allow a return to business
as usual before law protected citizens and their environment. There is an application process for
mining in California. Respect it or like hydrological mining abuse your practice will be terminated.
Solar fluctuates with clouds, time of day and so on.
The best use of solar is the generation of hydrogen which can then be stored and utilized in fuel cells which can be very precisely regulated and provide baseload (even independently of the big generators).
Solar-hydrogen has a bright future. But solar alone can't cut it.
2) Grow and burn willow trees.
Option 2 is significantly cheaper.
Hydrogen is a possibility, but less promising than various other options.
Robotic arms are also needed to make unlimited (and almost free) batteries as well.
If people made all these parts, it would be too expensive and priced right back into fantasy land but people wouldn't charge too much to install them!
Machines work for free and need to be developed to crank out the solar dishes an order of magnitude less expensive than today.
Regular solar panels emit too much heat (infrared is emitted when light hits a dark surface) and would require twice the landspace.
Gallium arsenide solar dishes concentrates such high temps that the laws of physics states that the unused (70% of) sunlight can re-emit in the visible, which can be reflected back toward the sun unimpeded by the infrared absorbing (and re-emitting) CO2 and other GHG's.
I DEMAND this solution! The only disadvantage is that humanity would still have to dig a few holes for mining which is FAR better than the ravages of fossil fueled depletion.
But this solution requires more than just new manufacturing technology, it requires a bold new restriction of the profiteering on every step of every manufacturing process that has so proved disastrous to the current renewable energy market.
Machine made GaAs concentrating solar dish arrays and machine made batteries are the ticket as they can power tens of billions of people at the western standard, thereby allowing Earth to not have to be stripped of resources just to sustain us and so our descendants can become a space based race and solve most all problems.
The solar photovoltaic (PV) industry is growing very rapidly - about 40% annually for the last decade. As far as why it has not grown faster, the main answer is policy - not technology. Sunny Germany has reached about 4% electricity generation from PV, with the Czech Republic and Italy not far behind. The United States lacks this kind of development - in 2010 Germany had 22x our per capita PV capacity - because our piecemeal policies are nowhere near as effective as feed-in tariffs.
The statement about toxicity is a red herring. While cadmium is moderately toxic, there is little danger from either indium or cadmium in either the manufacture or use of these modules, as thin film deposition processes are highly automated. The largest cadmium telluride manufacturer, First Solar, has a dedicated module recycling policy.
Scarcity issues for indium are also a long way off. More relevant is the struggle of thin-film manufacturers to develop economies of scale to compete with low-cost crystalline silicon.
Be wary of claims from small companies with big promises and unproven technologies - particularly if they make a habit of spreading misleading information about the industry.
It's win-win. It generates a market for solar. By the time the project was done, the capacity for inexpensive solar PV and installation would be incredibly high, lowering the cost of private installations, and the benefits of lower air pollution would be an extra bonus we all get to enjoy.