4 ms·
Disclaimer: I am not a physicist, and most of this is from memory relating to DIY experiments ~2 years ago. * Copper oxide panels are not new. * They are much
by debacle 14y ago
Disclaimer: I am not a physicist, and most of this is from memory relating to DIY experiments ~2 years ago.
* Copper oxide panels are not new.
* They are much less efficient than silicon panels.
* Cu2O is much more expensive than silicon.
- ktizo 14y agoMy guess is that the copper oxide would be much cheaper to work into much thinner sheets than silicon, which is also expensive to purify, so although the raw material may be more expensive, the processing costs and volume used might be where the savings are made. Also, the abstract on the referenced paper seems to indicate that the efficiency of this design is reasonable. I didn't go beyond the paywall to find out more though. Photovoltaics (PV) are a promising source of clean renewable energy, but current technologies face a cost-to-efficiency trade-off that has slowed widespread implementation.(1, 2) We have developed a PV architecture—screening-engineered field-effect photovoltaics (SFPV)—that in principle enables fabrication of low-cost, high efficiency PV from virtually any semiconductor, including the promising but hard-to-dope metal oxides, sulfides, and phosphides.(3) Prototype SFPV devices have been constructed and are found to operate successfully in accord with model predictions. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/nl3020022 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/nl3020022
- ori_b 14y agoYou can deposit thin films of silicon on to, say, ordinary glass. Usually, this is done with CVD, although I think epitaxial growth is also a popular technique. The problem is that this tends to produce amorphous silicon, which is not especially efficient. There is a good deal of work to get to the point where monocrystalline silicon thin film cells are viable outside of the lab, though.
- Joakal 14y agoActually, there's a way to make thinner silicon sheets; A particle accelerator bombards these wafers with hydrogen ions: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/122231-solar-panels-made-with-ion-cannon-are-cheap-enough-to-challenge-fossil-fuels http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/122231-solar-panels-made-...
- caladan 14y agoThat's what I thought as well. Silicon is basically.... well, sand, isn't it?
- kragen 14y agoIn the same way that aluminum and iron are basically sand, yes.
- Tuna-Fish 14y agoGoing from sand to pure polysilicon is extremely energy-intensive and expensive.
- debacle 14y agoCu2o is still about 2-3x as expensive, though.
- mchannon 14y agoSilicon wafers (cheap ones) cost about $150/kg. Polysilicon (good luck making a wafer out of it) costs about $30/kg (market has crashed). Copper costs about $7.50/kg.
- Daniel_Newby 14y agoIt's not terribly energy intensive. You want to see energy intensive, pick up a beer can. Aluminum is electricity in solid form. Silicon is capital equipment intensive. It is processed in batches. While each batch is being processed, it ties up an expensive processing station for a long time.
- mchannon 14y ago1 pound of metallurgical grade silicon takes about 1 pound of coal and 1 pound of wood chips. 1 pound of polysilicon takes about 2 pounds of metallurgical grade and even more energy. 1 pound of wafer takes about 2 pounds of polysilicon and even more energy. Aluminum probably doesn't take as much energy but the difference is Silicon's energy is cheap (coal and wood chips for the first step).
- ErikHuisman 14y agoYes, silicon panels are not the only solution. Although not as efficient as silicon other techniques have other qualities that make it commercially viable (price, scaling, maintainability) as explained in this video by nano solar http://www.nanosolar.com/nanosolar-technology-overview http://www.nanosolar.com/nanosolar-technology-overview