3 ms·
"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
by 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 agoMhm. 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.