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davidchapman

Start-up says it can make solar panels out of dirty silicon | Tech news blog - CNET New... - 0 views

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    You can make solar panels with impure silicon, claims Roy Johnson. You just have to know how to isolate the undesirables. CaliSolar has come up with a way to make solar cells out of upgraded metallurgical silicon, according to Johnson, the company's CEO. Electrical grade silicon is 99.99999 plus percent pure, but it costs $150 to $250 a kilogram. Only around 70,000 tons are manufactured worldwide. By contrast, upgraded metallurgical silicon is only 99 percent or so and goes for $20 to $50 a kilo. Approximately 1.2 million tons get made a year. re. If CaliSolar can mass manufacture solar cells with a 14 percent efficiency these solar cells will cost far less than the 16 percent efficiency cells that are common on the market today.
Colin Bennett

Solar Energy Breakthrough at OSU - 0 views

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    The Video Learning Center explains that conventional silicon solar cells operate by reacting with photons in light and create free electrons which flow as current in a circuit. But these electrons only remain free for a very short time. The material the OSU researchers created is not only able to capture all visible light, but also to free electrons for 7 million times longer than silicon. As a result more electricity is capable of being produced than ever before.
Colin Bennett

The Energy Blog: End in Site for Silicon Shortage in Solar industry - 0 views

  • Severe shortages of silicon have plagued the solar photovoltaic market over the past few years. According to a Frost & Sullivan press release a turnaround can be expected this year with polysilicon catching up with the demand
Colin Bennett

The Energy Blog: Emissions from Photovoltaic Life Cycles - 0 views

  • A new report has found that thin-film cadmium telluride solar cells have the lowest life-cycle emissions primarily because they consume the least amount of energy during the module production of the four types of major commercial PV systems: multicrystalline silicon, monocrystalline silicon, ribbon silicon, and thin-film cadmium telluride (CdTe).
Colin Bennett

40-Hour Laptop Batteries - Stanford Silicon Nanowires - 0 views

  • By using silicon nanowires as the anode, in rechargeable lithium ion batteries, instead of graphite the amount of lithium the anode can hold is extended tenfold and thus the battery’s life.
davidchapman

From Silicon Trash to Solar Energy - 0 views

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    IBM announced a new semiconductor wafer reclamation process that uses a specialized pattern removal technique to repurpose scrap semiconductor wafers to a form used to manufacture silicon-based solar panels.
davidchapman

Solar cell maker moves into wafers | Tech news blog - CNET News.com - 0 views

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    Germany's Schott Solar and Wacker Chemie AG have formed a joint venture to produce silicon wafers for solar cells, another sign of how the solar industry is consolidating. Under the deal, Wacker will supply purified silicon to Schott Wacker who will make wafers and sell them to Schott who will make the solar cells. The joint venture will also sell wafer to other solar cell makers.
Hans De Keulenaer

Measuring Solar's Total Impact : Sustainablog - 0 views

  • A new life-cycle assessment study from the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York examined the four most common types of photovoltaic (PV) solar power cells - multicrystalline silicon, monocrystalline silicon, ribbon silicon and thin-film, if you were wondering - to find out how much energy and waste was involved in their creation.
Hans De Keulenaer

Emissions from Photovoltaic Life Cycles - 0 views

  • Photovoltaic (PV) technologies have shown remarkable progress recently in terms of annual production capacity and life cycle environmental performances, which necessitate timely updates of environmental indicators. Based on PV production data of 2004–2006, this study presents the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions, criteria pollutant emissions, and heavy metal emissions from four types of major commercial PV systems: multicrystalline silicon, monocrystalline silicon, ribbon silicon, and thin-film cadmium telluride. Life-cycle emissions were determined by employing average electricity mixtures in Europe and the United States during the materials and module production for each PV system. Among the current vintage of PV technologies, thin-film cadmium telluride (CdTe) PV emits the least amount of harmful air emissions as it requires the least amount of energy during the module production. However, the differences in the emissions between different PV technologies are very small in comparison to the emissions from conventional energy technologies that PV could displace. As a part of prospective analysis, the effect of PV breeder was investigated. Overall, all PV technologies generate far less life-cycle air emissions per GWh than conventional fossil-fuel-based electricity generation technologies. At least 89% of air emissions associated with electricity generation could be prevented if electricity from photovoltaics displaces electricity from the grid.
Hans De Keulenaer

Photovoltaic Moore's Law Will Make Solar Competitive by 2015 (Tech Talk) - 0 views

  • Now there are some new twists and turns—essentially, three very positive developments that would not have been generally anticipated a decade ago. First, silicon-based solar technology has decoupled from the semiconductor industry and is achieving steady cost reductions, so that those following PV discern a kind of Moore’s law at work. In 2005, production of silicon for solar cells already surpassed production of silicon for semiconductors.
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    The key-word being 'kind of'.
Hans De Keulenaer

IEEE Spectrum: Silicon Nanowires Turn Heat to Electricity - 0 views

  • Two separate teams, one at Caltech and the other at the University of California, Berkeley, reported that they could increase silicon's ability to convert heat into electric current by as much as 100 times. If they can use what they've learned to improve silicon even further, or translate their findings to other materials, the discovery could lead to new ways to cool computer chips, build refrigerators, or get more power out of car engines.
Hans De Keulenaer

Wacker & Schott Commission Wafer Plant - 0 views

  • Wacker Chemie AG and Schott Solar GmbH have officially commissioned a new solar silicon wafer factory in Jena, Germany. Wacker Schott Solar GmbH, a joint venture between the two companies, plans to ramp up the factory's annual capacity to 50 megawatts (MW) by the autumn of 2008, increasing total annual capacity to 120 MW by year's end.
Hans De Keulenaer

U.S.'s Largest Solar-Electric Plant Goes Online | EcoGeek | Solar, Written, Energy, Dec... - 0 views

  • he plant uses traditional silicon PV cells and provides enough power to juice about a quarter of the Air Force base. Really, 14 MW is still a pretty insignficant amount of energy. And this plant doesn't approach the production power of Nevada-One, a solar thermal plant. But many people believe that the true future of solar power is converting the sun's energy directly into electricity instead of using the heat from the sun.
davidchapman

Technology Review: Focusing Light on Silicon Beads - 0 views

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    A company in Japan has developed a novel way of making solar cells that cuts production costs by as much as 50 percent. The photovoltaic (PV) cells are made up of arrays of thousands of tiny silicon spheres surrounded by hexagonal reflectors.
davidchapman

Nanoparticles Boost Solar Cell Efficiency by 60% - 0 views

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    Octillion Corp. has announced that a published research study has demonstrated that the same silicon nanoparticles used in development of the company's first-of-its-kind transparent glass window capable of generating electricity, are able to drastically increase the power performance of conventional silicon solar cells.
davidchapman

Technology Review: Silicon Nanocrystals for Superefficient Solar Cells - 0 views

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    A typical solar cell generates only one electron per photon of incoming sunlight. Some exotic materials are thought to produce multiple electrons per photon, but for the first time, the same effect has been seen in silicon.
Hans De Keulenaer

SCHOTT & WACKER Join Forces on Silicon Wafer Production - 0 views

  • Solar-wafer production capacity is set to expand in stages, reaching about one gigawatt/year by 2012.
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