There's new technology happening in the great continent of Canada. Toronto to be exact.
The technology promising to out live, out do, and revive the solar industry is solar paint.
Mr_Farlops writes "Using nanorods and liquid plastic semiconductor, researchers at University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have created a solar cell that can be painted or sprayed onto a surface.
Designed with implementation application in mind the costs plummet.
With China the way it is and the U.S. Patent Office so in debt and far-to the right in meeting technological challenges, the patents are behind five years. This won't do anything to help creations like 'solar paint', besides with perfect re-engineering techniques devised, China tells the U.S. to stuff our patents. If you have not noticed, yet, the U.S. economy will continue to decline.
Who's the technology winner? Why you guessed it correctly, for some time now and right the first time. For other's it is still hard to come to terms-but that's alright-you go on believing that the military is still the perveyor of nanotechnology. WRONG!!!
Corporations want to design, implement, compete yesterday. They want to win-so leave it to China to lead the way, companies will just have to develop, cross their fingers and go for the ride.
No matter how short-it's still a ride.
However, you could be the luckier one's, if you become a partner....(c) Lyle K'ang
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Here's the article-save you some time from registering: ENJOY!
Custom-tailored molecules and spray-on plastic could someday create the next generation of solar cells -- more flexible, more efficient and much less expensive than existing sources of solar power.
Hopes for plastic solar cells have been dangling before scientists for decades, since a U.S.-Japanese research team discovered that plastic can be made to conduct electricity.
The plastic cells would be a cheaper way to fuel anything now driven by solar energy, from watches to billboards to homes.
The latest stride toward producing bargain-priced electricity from the sun's energy, outlined in today's edition of the journal Science, comes from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
They've created a partly organic, partly inorganic solar cell that spits out a tiny bit of electricity but has the potential to be made far more powerful.
"It's excellent progress," said Alan Heeger, the University of California, Santa Barbara, physics professor who shared the 2000 Nobel prize for the discovery of plastic conductivity.
"It's clear there is a fair amount of work still to do, but it points to a new direction, and I'm delighted to see it happen," Heeger said.
Led by Berkeley chemistry professor Paul Alivisatos, the team relied on advances in nanotechnology -- the ability to create or change materials at a minute level, atom by atom.
At that minuscule scale, they tweaked molecules to create electricity-carrying rods so tiny that more than 10,000 would be thinner than a human hair.
Those inorganic nanorods were then combined with the organic part of the operation, a liquefied plastic semiconductor, to create a solar cell that could be sprayed or painted onto almost any surface.
"It's not a big breakthrough. ... It's a step in the field where there's a lot of things going on," said Alivisatos, who directs the Molecular Foundry, a newly created center for nanoscience at the Berkeley National lab.
He believes that with the boom in nanotechnology, scientists are poised for major leaps forward in energy, including solar power and fuel cells.
It could take a decade or more for hybrid solar cells to make it from the laboratory to someone's rooftop system, and much could go wrong along the way, said Robert McConnell, who oversees federal funding of cutting-edge solar research for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
McConnell, who funnels grants to teams across the nation, said the search for better cells to convert the sun's light to electricity is like a horse race.
"With Paul's technology, we now have a new horse in the race," he said.
So far, NREL has spent less than $300,000 funding three years of work by Alivisatos, Berkeley graduate student Wendy Huynh and Janke Dittmer, a Berkeley lab staff scientist.
McConnell has reviewed the next steps the team will take to try to boost their device's electrical output, and he considers them very promising.
"I fully expect Paul to come up with higher efficiency," he said.
Alivisatos and other team members believe their design could be beefed up for use in calculators or other small solar devices in two to five years.
The cost could be as little as one-tenth of what a solar panel costs today, and perhaps one-third less than the lowest-cost panels now in the pilot stages.
Today's solar cells are made of silicon, which is more expensive than plastic. It has to be manufactured at high temperatures, at times in a vacuum -- both costly processes that a plastic solar cell would not need.
Still, costs are declining as manufacturers experiment with thinner layers of materials. Don Osborn, head of renewable generation for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, believes home photovoltaic systems will cost about the same as conventional power within the next eight years.
Osborn has been following the research into plastic solar cells and is "moderately excited" about them.
"But what really excites me is that even without these newer, exotic technologies, we know how to make photovoltaics cost-effective. Anything beyond that is gravy," he said.
I admit I made a mistake-but I did not have sex with that women!
..here's ther article so you don't have to use your search muscles-I'll do the thinking for you...just vote for G.W. (gone waffling).
New plastic can better convert solar energy
Canadian Press
TORONTO — Researchers at the University of Toronto have invented an infrared-sensitive material that's five times more efficient at turning the sun's power into electrical energy than current methods.
The discovery could lead to shirts and sweaters capable of recharging our cellphones and other wireless devices, said Ted Sargent, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the university.
Sargent and other researchers combined specially-designed minute particles called quantum dots, three to four nanometres across, with a polymer to make a plastic that can detect energy in the infrared.
Infrared light is not visible to the naked eye but it is what most remote controls emit, in small amounts, to control devices such as TVs and DVD players.
It also contains a huge untapped resource -- despite the surge in popularity of solar cells in the 1990s, we still miss half of the sun's power, Sargent said.
"In fact, there's enough power from the sun hitting the Earth every day to supply all the world's needs for energy 10,000 times over,'' Sargent said in a phone interview Sunday from Boston. He is currently a visiting professor of nanotechnology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sargent said the new plastic composite is, in layman's terms, a layer of film that "catches'' solar energy. He said the film can be applied to any device, much like paint is coated on a wall.
"We've done the same thing, but not with something that just sit there on the wall the way paint does,'' said the Ottawa native.
"We've done it to make a device which actually harnesses the power in the room in the infrared.''
The film can convert up to 30 per cent of the sun's power into usable, electrical energy. Today's best plastic solar cells capture only about six per cent.
Sargent said the advance would not only wipe away that inefficiency, but also resolve the hassle of recharging our countless gadgets and pave the way to a true wireless world.
"We now have our cellphones and our BlackBerries and we're walking around without the need to plug in, in order to get our data,'' he said.
"But we seem trapped at the moment in needing to plug in to get our power. That's because we charge these things up electrically, from the outlet. But there's actually huge amounts of power all around us coming from the sun.''
The film has the ability to be sprayed or woven into shirts so that our cuffs or collars could recharge our IPods, Sargent said.
While that may sound like a Star Trek dream, venture capitalists are keen to Sargent's invention.
Josh Wolfe, managing partner at Lux Capital, a New York City-based venture capital firm, said while such a luxury may be five years away, the technology knows no bounds.
"When you have a material advance which literally materially changes the way that energy is absorbed and transmitted to our devices... somebody out there tinkering away in a bedroom or in a government lab is going to come up with a great idea for a new device that will shock us all,'' he said in a phone interview.
"When the Internet was created nobody envisioned that the killer app (application) would be e-mail or instant messaging.''
Sargent's work was published in the online edition of Nature Materials on Sunday and will appear in its February issue.
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