Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

Portable Solar Cells

Here's an interesting development in renewable energy:

Portable power: Tiny solar cells show promise
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Researchers have developed some of the tiniest solar cells ever made and said on Thursday the organic material could potentially be painted on to surfaces.

So far, they have managed to pull 11 volts of electricity from a small array of the cells, which are each just a quarter of the size of a grain of white rice, said Xiaomei Jiang of the University of South Florida, who led the research.

'They could be sprayed on any surface that is exposed to sunlight—a uniform, a car, a house,' Jiang said in a telephone interview.
Tags: energy, good news
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  • 4 comments
ivy_broom

ivy_broom

November 9 2008, 19:04:09 UTC 12 years ago

Wow! This sounds very promising! It follows on something I was thinking a week or two ago. I was trying to imagine a realistic and effective way to generate enough portable solar energy in a Motor Home to fully power it without using fossil fuels. I don't own a Motor Home, nor could I afford one at this point in my life, but I was thinking of it as a sort of fantasy possibility. Thanks for sharing.
dianavilliers

dianavilliers

November 9 2008, 20:24:15 UTC 12 years ago

I think you'd still need to suppliment or stockpile energy somehow.

Electric cars are getting ~ 0.2kwh/km currently, so to go say 50km (31 miles) in one hour you'd need 10 kwh of energy. At the surface of the Earth, we get ~ 1kw/m^2, so even if you get 100% efficiency out of your solar cells, have perfect weather and don't want to go at night you're going to need 10 square meters of solar cell array square on to the sun. That's for a car. A motorhome is likely to be less efficient - heavier, and less streamlined.

You could get around this by sitting and charging (supplimented with wind generation perhaps) for a while, so as long as you didn't want to go very far very fast you could be ok. Alternately you could consider getting a sailboat instead.
reileen

reileen

November 9 2008, 19:07:36 UTC 12 years ago

It'd be awesome if they could develop solar-cell paints. Depending on how the final product turns out (what the color is, what kind of finish it has, etc.), you could incorporate it into a outdoor building mural and make something that is both pretty *and* functional!

Hmmm....

Anonymous

November 10 2008, 01:36:43 UTC 12 years ago

Judging by the fact that they do not mention in the article how many watts of power the stuff actually generates, I am guessing that the answer is not high. Volts are just the difference in electric potential between point A and point B; it's not the actual amount of energy you're getting from the system. You can build up 1000 volts of static charge on a fingertip, but nobody would ever suggest trying to power a cell phone based on that.

That is not to say that this new technology is not interesting, promising, or worth following up on. But the fact that the voltage levels are the only thing being recorded suggests to me that amount of actual energy that can be garnered from the system is not yet terribly impressive.