Solar Power Developments
So, I picked up a crappy little local free daily newspaper while I was out and about, today, and found an article that actually sparked my interest enough for me to do a bit more research myself.
Natcore Technologies is claiming to have developed processes that produce solar cells of up to double the industry standard efficiency, at substantially reduced cost (the article I read claimed as little as half the normal cost) with significantly reduced or outright eliminated need for (at least some of the) problematic toxic chemicals normally involved in solar cell production.
Their claimed developments are primarily two-fold:
A) a reduction in reflectance to as little as 0.3% (improving on another organization's work that brought it down to 2% from an industry norm of 4%), with the difference most notable in expanding the productive duration of any given day further to morning and evening as well as to cloudy days
B) a process that would allow the mass-manufacturing of 'tandem cells' that stack multiple layers of solar cells that each absorb part of a light spectrum, while letting other frequencies pass through to be absorbed by further layers
this development is claimed to approach doubling the industry norm for solar cell efficiency
This all sounds pretty awesome to a relative illiterate on the subject, so I thought I'd bring it up, here, and see if others are aware of these developments, and potentially able to offer insight into their meaning (or even validity) without the corporate spin in most of the material I found on the subjects. (the links above were just the ones provided by Natcore's website itself - none of the other articles I found seemed to contain anything notably divergent)
Natcore Technologies is claiming to have developed processes that produce solar cells of up to double the industry standard efficiency, at substantially reduced cost (the article I read claimed as little as half the normal cost) with significantly reduced or outright eliminated need for (at least some of the) problematic toxic chemicals normally involved in solar cell production.
Their claimed developments are primarily two-fold:
A) a reduction in reflectance to as little as 0.3% (improving on another organization's work that brought it down to 2% from an industry norm of 4%), with the difference most notable in expanding the productive duration of any given day further to morning and evening as well as to cloudy days
B) a process that would allow the mass-manufacturing of 'tandem cells' that stack multiple layers of solar cells that each absorb part of a light spectrum, while letting other frequencies pass through to be absorbed by further layers
this development is claimed to approach doubling the industry norm for solar cell efficiency
This all sounds pretty awesome to a relative illiterate on the subject, so I thought I'd bring it up, here, and see if others are aware of these developments, and potentially able to offer insight into their meaning (or even validity) without the corporate spin in most of the material I found on the subjects. (the links above were just the ones provided by Natcore's website itself - none of the other articles I found seemed to contain anything notably divergent)