Now this IS cool.
Arrange cheap, but low-efficiency, solar cells around an optical fiber.
Result would be high efficiency on the surface exposed to sunlight.
Now this IS cool.
Arrange cheap, but low-efficiency, solar cells around an optical fiber.
Result would be high efficiency on the surface exposed to sunlight.
When designing optical fibers for telecommunications engineers try to avoid light "bouncing around" inside the fiber because it causes loss in amplitude of the signal beig transmitted down the fiber. Leave it to my homies at my Alma Mater to come up with a way to turn loss into gain.....again.
You are still going to need significant square footage, to get power. The 24/7, day-night mean for the CONUS is 7 Watts per square foot (averages Phoenix and Chicago, winter-summer, etc) so if you want a kilowatt you’ll need 150 square feet, more or less, even with 80% efficiency.
Note also that the comparison is between zinc oxide planar cells and zinc nanowire cells. What’s the comparison between the nanowire cells and Cu-Si cells or crystalline Si cells?
How much would a million-square-foot array of the new technology cost?
As an investor I read these periodic announcements with caution. Go back ten years and look up how many of these incredible breakthroughs actually worked, in practical terms.
And if you go back to 1957, we should have moon colonies, flying cars, robot lawn mowers (we have robot carpet vacs now), solar power, nuclear power too cheap to meter, and so forth.
The physics is obvious, but the practical problem is going to be making the electrical connection(s).