3 ms·

Yes. I definitely meant the gallium alone and was not including the indium.

• defrost 4y ago
  The wikipedia article on Indium: Production and availability [1] is ballpark okay and puts > the supply potential of indium at a minimum of 1,300 t/yr from sulfidic zinc ores and 20 t/yr from sulfidic copper ores. (ie potential max supply estimate as by product from mining other minerals) This is almost double the current demand. Other industry reports are more optimistic than the source cited here in wikipedia but as a ballpark it'll do. The wikipedia article has a decent description of one facet of the rare earth problem, that these elements are always bound up with other elements and are only economically feasible as by products. The other great issue is the flip side of the same issue; they are bound to other elements and must be chemically seperated after mechanical pre processing .. and this can be lengthy, expensive, and leave acres of toxic waste to deal with. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indium
  • Schroedingersat 4y ago
    If HSJ couldn't push extracting this extra Indium across the line due to lack of Indium whilst being better than PERC and TOPCon PV in every other way, it seems doubtful that one photocatalytic method out of a bunch can displace a PERC cell and an alkaline electrolyser that produce about the same amount of hydrogen per m^2 without the expensive vacuum deposition step. More methods are always good though and hopefully the barriers to commercialising this method (or one of the others) have workarounds.