5 ms·

A new method of making electricity from sunlight

66 points by spottiness 15y ago

rfrey 15y ago
Link to original paper: http://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/schools/cas_sites/physics/pdf/Ren/237%20Nature%20Materials%2010%20532-538%202011.pdf http://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/schools/cas_sites/physic...
rflrob 15y ago
The question they don't address is what the relative cost of these thermoelectric cells is. I'll grant that they're still in prototype phase, but some mention of the estimates of cost would be nice. I, for one, have no idea how much bismuth telluride costs.
- simonsarris 15y ago
  http://www.jitlab.com/BISMUTH-TELLURIDE-99-999-10G-p/l-282715.htm http://www.jitlab.com/BISMUTH-TELLURIDE-99-999-10G-p/l-28271... 10 dollars for a gram it seems. I guess for some kind of comparison: Copper is $0.008 per gram. Potassium (pure) is $1.50 per gram Magnesium is a few cents per gram
- dkastner 15y ago
  You'll also need plenty of hafnium, titanium, and molybdenum. Not exactly abundant resources. All that just to get a 4% solar->electricity conversion rate. You can put these panels under your solar water heater and get slightly hotter water with an additional trickle of electricity into your home. Maybe you could power a pair of USB heated gloves.
pbhjpbhj 15y ago
>liberating electrons from a semiconducting material such as silicon. Or you can concentrate the sun’s rays using mirrors // Or you can concentrate the suns rays in organic material growing bio-diesel crops. Bit more lag but it's still essentially solar energy capture.
scythe 15y ago
Bismuth telluride is a compound of bismuth and tellurium. This would seem pedantic were it not for the fact that tellurium is rare as gold. There's another tellurium-based pipe dream in the form of cadmium telluride solar cells, which have the lucky coincidence of being highly efficient and very cheap to manufacture. Unfortunately... rare as gold. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%... -- tellurium variously at 0.005, 0.001, and 0.001 ppm, and gold at 0.0011, 0.0031, and 0.004 ppm. So "similarly rare." Friends don't let friends try to save the world with tellurium.
- Daniel_Newby 15y ago
  "There's another tellurium-based pipe dream in the form of cadmium telluride solar cells, ..." Which have the benefit of using a sub-micron-thickness layer of CdTe, so that very large scale production is plausible if new tellurium sources can be developed. (They probably can.) This insane thermoelectric approach uses bulk telluride. Production cannot plausibly ever scale to make this an important source of energy.
  - scythe 15y ago
    Mhm. The math for that one is not too bad, requiring a "vanishingly tiny" amount of Te per m^2, so that our current production gives a little over a gigawatt's worth per year. We'd need "merely" two orders of magnitude increase. (old explanation removed) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadmium_telluride_photovoltaics#cite_note-34 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadmium_telluride_photovoltaics... It's actually more up-in-the-air than I thought about twenty minutes ago -- tellurium has not been widely prospected, and the source du jour is undersea ocean ridges: http://walrus.wr.usgs.gov/reports/reprints/Hein_GCA_67.pdf http://walrus.wr.usgs.gov/reports/reprints/Hein_GCA_67.pdf ( http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:FeKPblDo6GYJ:walrus.wr.usgs.gov/reports/reprints/Hein_GCA_67.pdf+tellurium-rich+ferromanganese+crusts&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESj5ODfjmzgQVMi96rhRj2bXy2i0cTMtgmzZYpX7ieU1VBr8NIf3hOqr1ejrnZ4WFYcALjdJjuuMI49L0wlPyCZzUByMsgZNzRDcUBxZ1EwYYl1rJoakRZVlt8uyg44tuPmfb9IS&sig=AHIEtbTgIIegE-ZaUzTib8mHSTf717Jzrw http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:FeKPblDo6GYJ:w... ) I'm still a skeptic.
- 15y ago
serichsen 15y ago
Cute. Even the current photovoltaic cells do not make economic sense. Why should a five times more inefficient method be better? If anything, they should look whether there are other temperature gradients they could use for this, but I suspect that the conversion still is not great.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
redthrowaway 15y ago
I find it interesting that everyone ignores the obvious, and most common, method of making electricity from sunlight: fossil fuels. It strikes me as odd that there's such a disconnect between what we say and what we mean that the oldest and most prevalent form of solar-generated electricity gets ignored.
Pentel 15y ago
They call it a new method, however God created it. Funny isn't it when we discover somtething it is new?

66 points by spottiness 15y ago

rfrey 15y ago

Link to original paper: http://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/schools/cas_sites/physics/pdf/Ren/237%20Nature%20Materials%2010%20532-538%202011.pdf http://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/schools/cas_sites/physic...

rflrob 15y ago

The question they don't address is what the relative cost of these thermoelectric cells is. I'll grant that they're still in prototype phase, but some mention of the estimates of cost would be nice. I, for one, have no idea how much bismuth telluride costs.

simonsarris 15y ago
http://www.jitlab.com/BISMUTH-TELLURIDE-99-999-10G-p/l-282715.htm http://www.jitlab.com/BISMUTH-TELLURIDE-99-999-10G-p/l-28271... 10 dollars for a gram it seems. I guess for some kind of comparison: Copper is $0.008 per gram. Potassium (pure) is $1.50 per gram Magnesium is a few cents per gram
dkastner 15y ago
You'll also need plenty of hafnium, titanium, and molybdenum. Not exactly abundant resources. All that just to get a 4% solar->electricity conversion rate. You can put these panels under your solar water heater and get slightly hotter water with an additional trickle of electricity into your home. Maybe you could power a pair of USB heated gloves.

pbhjpbhj 15y ago

>liberating electrons from a semiconducting material such as silicon. Or you can concentrate the sun’s rays using mirrors // Or you can concentrate the suns rays in organic material growing bio-diesel crops. Bit more lag but it's still essentially solar energy capture.

scythe 15y ago

Bismuth telluride is a compound of bismuth and tellurium. This would seem pedantic were it not for the fact that tellurium is rare as gold. There's another tellurium-based pipe dream in the form of cadmium telluride solar cells, which have the lucky coincidence of being highly efficient and very cheap to manufacture. Unfortunately... rare as gold. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%... -- tellurium variously at 0.005, 0.001, and 0.001 ppm, and gold at 0.0011, 0.0031, and 0.004 ppm. So "similarly rare." Friends don't let friends try to save the world with tellurium.

Daniel_Newby 15y ago
"There's another tellurium-based pipe dream in the form of cadmium telluride solar cells, ..." Which have the benefit of using a sub-micron-thickness layer of CdTe, so that very large scale production is plausible if new tellurium sources can be developed. (They probably can.) This insane thermoelectric approach uses bulk telluride. Production cannot plausibly ever scale to make this an important source of energy.
- scythe 15y ago
  Mhm. The math for that one is not too bad, requiring a "vanishingly tiny" amount of Te per m^2, so that our current production gives a little over a gigawatt's worth per year. We'd need "merely" two orders of magnitude increase. (old explanation removed) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadmium_telluride_photovoltaics#cite_note-34 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadmium_telluride_photovoltaics... It's actually more up-in-the-air than I thought about twenty minutes ago -- tellurium has not been widely prospected, and the source du jour is undersea ocean ridges: http://walrus.wr.usgs.gov/reports/reprints/Hein_GCA_67.pdf http://walrus.wr.usgs.gov/reports/reprints/Hein_GCA_67.pdf ( http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:FeKPblDo6GYJ:walrus.wr.usgs.gov/reports/reprints/Hein_GCA_67.pdf+tellurium-rich+ferromanganese+crusts&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESj5ODfjmzgQVMi96rhRj2bXy2i0cTMtgmzZYpX7ieU1VBr8NIf3hOqr1ejrnZ4WFYcALjdJjuuMI49L0wlPyCZzUByMsgZNzRDcUBxZ1EwYYl1rJoakRZVlt8uyg44tuPmfb9IS&sig=AHIEtbTgIIegE-ZaUzTib8mHSTf717Jzrw http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:FeKPblDo6GYJ:w... ) I'm still a skeptic.
15y ago

serichsen 15y ago

Cute. Even the current photovoltaic cells do not make economic sense. Why should a five times more inefficient method be better? If anything, they should look whether there are other temperature gradients they could use for this, but I suspect that the conversion still is not great.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

redthrowaway 15y ago

I find it interesting that everyone ignores the obvious, and most common, method of making electricity from sunlight: fossil fuels. It strikes me as odd that there's such a disconnect between what we say and what we mean that the oldest and most prevalent form of solar-generated electricity gets ignored.

Pentel 15y ago

They call it a new method, however God created it. Funny isn't it when we discover somtething it is new?