Electricity costs in the states are around 7 cents a kilowatt. That’s pretty cheap. Well, there is your price to beat. Solar power has always been the golden child for environmentalists and alternative power enthusiasts. The reasons are simple: the sun pumps out massive amounts of energy that we can use, it’s clean, and it’s renewable. It can power 10,000 times more than we currently consume. That’s impressive considering how much we do consume currently. But traditional solar cells are ugly and terribly inefficient. The problem lies in the way that traditional solar cells capture the energy and how it loses energy converting into a form we can use in our homes, etc. Traditional solar cells only capture 6% of the light hitting them. Also, the cost on traditional solar cells is around 30-35 cents per kilowatt hour. So, you can see that we need a change.
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Enter nanotechnology. Scientists are working on a high converting nanotechnology polymer that will be cheap to produce and yet yield high energy results. There are three major companies working on technologies: Nanosolar, Nanosys, and Konarka Technologies. Nanosolar is developing solar cells 100 times thinner than conventional solar cells. Nanosys is developing solar technology to embed into construction material. Konarka Technologies is developing light activated plastics. This technology is much cheaper to produce and can also absorb non-visible power sources like infra-red. This would allow for power on cloudy, rainy, snowy days.
(Sources: National Geographic, World Changing, Nanosolar, Nanosys, and Konarka Technologies)
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Interesting technology. BTW, you should say kilowatt-hour rather than “kilowatt.”
yes, indeedie. thanks for the correction. and thanks for dropping in Marc.