7 ms·

The perovskite lightbulb moment for solar power

• ars 13y ago
  Is this going to be another one of those products that are cheap in small quantities, but are simply not available in large quantities? The reason we keep going back to silicon is the planet (the crust) is basically made out of it. It's available in any quantity.
  • Turing_Machine 13y ago
    "methylammonium trihalogen plumbates" Methylammonium ions can be had from methylamine, which is dirt-cheap (made from methanol and ammonia, usually). Halogens are fluorine, chlorine, bromine, iodine. All common and cheap. Plumbates are lead and oxygen. Again, common and cheap. So, no, there shouldn't be any supply problem. Disposal might need some watching due to the lead, but I doubt this would involve anywhere near the volume that's used in (e.g.) lead-acid car batteries.
    • SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
      > methylamine, which is dirt-cheap The public has already been educated a bit about methylamine as an industrial chemical http://www.cbsnews.com/news/video-behind-the-breaking-bad-train-heist/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/video-behind-the-breaking-bad-tr...
    • ars 13y ago
      Chlorine is available in quantity, but fluorine, bromine, and iodine are not. Bromine and iodine are actually quite rare - there's more uranium than either of those. Lead is also somewhat rare. > All common and cheap. Exactly what I'm talking about. In the small quantities we use currently - common and cheap. In the quantities needed to make energy? Not common at all. > So, no, there shouldn't be any supply problem. Actually, if that's what it's made of there will be huge supply problems. Based on all this I suspect this is the last we will hear of this technology. It works in the lab, but is not practical at scale. Although maybe those elements are just used at ppm levels, and the bulk of this is silicon, then this could work. > but I doubt this would involve anywhere near the volume that's used in (e.g.) lead-acid car batteries. To provide energy at country level scales? It would use WAY more. I once calculated that there is not enough lead on the planet to make enough batteries to store enough energy for overnight use. (In the context of batteries to buffer the diurnal nature of solar energy.)
      • maxerickson 13y ago
        It sort depends on how much material is needed for each unit area of panels. Bromine is apparently abundant in the oceans and annual production is ~half a million tonnes (wikipedia!). On the other hand, 5% of England is billions of square meters. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=5%25+of+the+area+of+England http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=5%25+of+the+area+of+Eng...
        • gilgoomesh 13y ago
          Iodine is very much the same. While there's not a huge amount in the Earth's crust, relative to some elements, it's relatively abundant in seawater and relatively easy to extract – for anyone who really needs it.
      • DennisP 13y ago
        From the article linked by danmaz74, the most commonly studied chemical is CH3NH3PbI3, so lead and iodine are a significant portion. But it's a thin layer on a substrate like titanium dioxide or zinc oxide. They don't say exactly how thin, except to say it's less than several micrometers including the substrate. I'd really like to see numbers on how much of each element would be needed per gigawatt, and compare to what's available. Anyone who doubts that your battery calculation was correct should read "A Nation-Sized Battery" by Tom Murphy, a physics professor at University of California. His other blog entries do a fine job with similar calculations for other energy technologies. https://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/ https://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-ba...
      • deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      • Turing_Machine 13y ago
        > Chlorine is available in quantity, but fluorine, bromine, and iodine are not. All of these are available in quantity. Bromine is available in tank-car lots. Iodine is available in tonne lots. "Lead is also somewhat rare." "Somewhat rare", perhaps, but it only sells for about $1/pound, and 8 million tonnes are produced annually. "Actually, if that's what it's made of there will be huge supply problems." Actually, you're totally wrong. Sorry. "I once calculated that there is not enough lead on the planet to make enough batteries to store enough energy for overnight use." Batteries use multiple heavy plates of solid lead. This is a micrometer scale thin film on a substrate. There's a difference.
  • theoh 13y ago
    Perovskite is also common in "the planet": 93% of the mantle is silicate perovskite, according to Wikipedia. I'm not sure the geological abundance (accessible or not) is the determining factor in the cost of solar cells made with these materials. Edit: actually, it seems from the more detailed descriptions that the perovskites useful in solar cells have a totally different chemical formula from the common geological ones, so your point about abundance of silicon needs to be measured against whatever elements these (presumably synthetic) perovskites contain.
    • pmahoney 13y ago
      "Perovskite" refers to the common mineral as well as any number of materials exhibiting the particular crystal structure.
  • pjc50 13y ago
    This is like saying we'll never run out of coal because carbon is so prevalent: it's not the right form. Silicon purification is energy-intensive, a major factor in the cost of silicon cells. Perovskite and other thin-film technologies potentially have the advantage of it being easier to handle liquids than thin solid silicon wafers; just deposit the final result of the process on glass. A downside of these cells is buried at the bottom of another article: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/tech/photovoltaic-materials/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/tech/photovoltaic-material... especially vulnerable to water damage if the seal fails.
• danmaz74 13y ago
  An older but more detailed article about this: http://cen.acs.org/articles/92/i8/Tapping-Solar-Power-Perovskites.html http://cen.acs.org/articles/92/i8/Tapping-Solar-Power-Perovs...
• af3 13y ago
  RIP organic photovoltaics.
  • chm 13y ago
    Not so fast. We're working on it.
    • af3 13y ago
      We too ;)
• aaron695 13y ago
  These sorts of comments always set off alarm bells for me - "If we could capture approximately 1% of the X on Y" I think in a lot of countries the labour costs are the major factor in the price. If this is true then what we really need is longevity and efficiency rather than cheaper panels.
  • dredmorbius 13y ago
    It's a useful statistic, particularly as it places a minimum bound on the land area requirements. In fact most renewables (solar, wind, biomass, wave, tidal power) can be translated into land-use requirements: so many kW/m^2 or MW/hectare. Useful conversion: 1 kW/m^2 is about the average insolation at Earth's surface, which translates to 10 MW/hectare, or 1 GW/km^2. Knowing that 1% of the incident sunlight on Britain would provide the nation's energy requirements, and that solar cell efficiency is 20%, means that Britain could be energy self-sufficient with 5% of its land-area covered with PV cells. The land area of the UK is about 229 million km^2, so roughly 11.5 million km^2. Knowing what the material requirements per m^2 for perovskite solar cells would give us a first-order bounds check on how viable the technology might be for this application. The challenges for solar are not just cost (of which installation and infrastructure costs are a significant component), but substrate abundance and, unmentioned by this article, storage. Still, it seems an interesting development.
• InclinedPlane 13y ago
  The biggest roadblock to widespread adoption of solar as a baseload power source is the storage problem. Photovoltaics stop producing power when the sun goes down, that's not just inconvenient it's unworkable with the way power is used today. Until we can economically shift the output curve of solar power plants to match demand rather than supply it will always fill no more than a niche. Today the only way to do this is to work in concert with hydropower, but that is a very limited solution. Also, it's not strictly necessary to solve the problem on a large scale, even at a small consumer-grade scale it could be helpful. If every house had a battery pack or supercap bank or what-have-you and it allowed for smoothing out power demand or perhaps enabled charging electric vehicles overnight, then it could have a huge impact on energy usage patterns. Even with the PV -> battery -> battery losses it would still be a substantial net win.
  • Gravityloss 13y ago
    That's only a problem that's much farther down the road, say when solar penetration goes above 10% or 20%. In the mean time you could just throttle hydro plants and natural gas plants to account for both usage variations as well as wind and solar production variations. Too bad coal is very very cheap right now.
    • InclinedPlane 13y ago
      It's a problem preventing solar penetration beyond a niche market. It also, as you point out, prevents solar from actually displacing existing power plant capacity. That means that solar power comes at an extraneous cost, since it doesn't obviate the need of building even a single non-solar power plant. Those are big problems and it's not as though we're magically going to start building lots and lots of solar power capacity without solving those problems. The sooner their tackled the faster those technologies will be on the amortization/improvement train and their costs will fall. Solar and wind are today just sideshows in power production, if you want them to be otherwise the smart move is to invest in storage technologies.
      • mikeyouse 13y ago
• higherpurpose 13y ago
  This is why I never understood the argument "but solar is so expensive right now", when it was still very early days for solar investment. If you start pouring the billions of dollars nuclear gets into solar panel research, and bring it to a high enough scale, you eventually start getting not just a real alternative, but potentially a much better alternative to any other energy source. Once we "fix" the cost of solar panels, then we need to figure out how to store solar energy cheaply and easily, too, and then it can be a source of energy that's not just for day time and sunny seasons, too.
• CamperBob2 13y ago
  EU regulators, the people who brought us lead-free solder, are going to love the "plumbate" part. It might as well be plutonium.
  • 31reasons 13y ago
    I guess you can isolate the cells in a clear glass sandwich.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • thrownaway2424 13y ago
    You're not one of those RoHS deniers are you? I hate to break it to you, but EVERYTHING made in the last ten years is made with lead-free solder and ta-da: it all works perfectly well.
    • aidenn0 13y ago
      Yes, they've figured it out now. There was an ugly transition period though.
      • analog31 13y ago
        Agreed, but I'd add that the transition period coincided with the switch to water based flux processes, and the headlong rush to China. All of those things involved their own sets of birthing pains.
    • rasz_pl 13y ago
      Yes ,everything ..except automotive, agricultural, aviation, health and so on basically anything that is even remotely critical is exempt.
    • CamperBob2 13y ago
      Over the past few years, pretty much everything critical has been built with standard SnPb solder under various RoHS exemptions. Most of those exemptions have recently expired or are expiring soon. It is far too soon to pat yourself on the back over the apparent absence of adverse consequences.