Stanford engineers leverage heat to make solar energy competitive with oil

Some good news on the solar energy front. Stanford University News reports that Stanford engineers have figured out a way to use both the light and the heat generated by solar receptors to generate electricity, doubling present efficiency making it potentially it competitive with power generated from oil.

The process is called "photon enhanced thermionic emission," or PETE. The process was developed by an engineering group led by Asst. Professor Nick Melosh. The Stanford engineers figured out that by coating a piece of semiconducting material with cesium it made the materials able to use both the heat which is usually wasted by solar panels as well as the light.

"This is really a conceptual breakthrough, a new energy conversion process, not just a new material or a slightly different tweak," said Nick Melosh, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering, who led the research group. "It is actually something fundamentally different about how you can harvest energy."

The new process is better suited for Solar farm energy production, where solar collectors concentrate the suns rays and use the thermal energy to produce power, than with a roof top application.

Because PETE performs best at temperatures well in excess of what a rooftop solar panel would reach, the devices will work best in solar concentrators such as parabolic dishes, which can get as hot as 800 C. Dishes are used in large solar farms similar to those proposed for the Mojave Desert in Southern California and usually include a thermal conversion mechanism as part of their design, which offers another opportunity for PETE to help generate electricity as well as minimize costs by meshing with existing technology.

Even though I am really looking for efficiencies in roof top solar panels coupled with improved battery technology which will allow us to make dependence upon the centralized power grid a thing of the past, it's great to see large institutional solar power generating efficiencies reach the point where it competes with present hydrocarbon based energy, but is also poised to quickly outpace hydrocarbon based energies.

The future of cheap battery power is bright

One of the future innovations I've been anticipating is the revolution in battery technology which should take place over the next few decades. In Robert Heinlein's novel Friday, he depicts a future where a revolutionary leap in energy storage, called a shipstone, leads to the creation of a corporate conglomerate which has extraordinary influence over world events due to it's monopoly on cheap power. Whether or not a revolution in battery technology will ultimately lead to a world governing corporate plutocracy or not, the rapid growth in our ability to store energy cheaply and efficiently promises to offer an explosion in battery powered devices which will change the way we live our lives.

MIT's Technology Review brings to us the recent development of a simple, cheap salt and pepper battery created from cellulose and a salt solution.

Researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden have made a flexible battery using two common, cheap ingredients: cellulose and salt. The lightweight, rechargeable battery uses thin pieces of paper--pressed mats of tangled cellulose fibers--for electrodes, while a salt solution acts as the electrolyte.

The new battery should be cheap, easy to manufacture, and environmentally benign, says lead researcher Maria Stromme. She suggests that it might be used to power cheap medical diagnostics devices or sensors on packaging materials or embedded into fabric.

The advent of cheap new battery technology, coupled with the rapid advances in solar electricity generation, we may soon see a real world equivilant of Heinlein's shipstones. Cheap power stored in cheaply and efficiently. That's a future I've been waiting for.

You Say You Want A Bio-Revolution? Well, You Know...,We All Want To Change The World.

Juan Enriquez Explains The Biology Revolution At TED 2009 from Keith Kleiner on Vimeo.

Hat tip to the blog Singularity Hub.

In 9 minutes Juan eloquently describes how major disruptive advances are coming to human civilization much faster than people realize.

Off the shelf biological components are being created that allow people to build organisms as if they were building a car or a machine.

Tissues and organs that will someday replace our old ones are being grown in the lab.

Man-made mechanical ears and eyes are on a path to not only match the capabilities of their natural counterparts, but shortly thereafter to exceed them.

We will see more and more news about revolutionary new bio-medical technology. In many way's it's exciting to think about being able to grow new teeth or new knees and cartilage. But there is also the danger misuse, that will turn out to be like an evil genie, which once unleashed, will never be captured again and put back into it's bottle.