Posted on 07/29/2016 8:50:46 AM PDT by Red Badger
$74.99 seems like a good price. However, this is at a time when the need for tungsten is down due to the evolution of the light bulb to LEDs. The question is how much tungsten is required for a solar panel? How much tungsten will be needed for, let’s say, a 30 acre solar cell farm? What will that cost? If I were a lawmaker giving out research grants, I would make sure all of the math was done to know the costs for the final product. I am sure the run-of-the-mill lawmaker is only thinking about how to line their pockets and not the practical matters of costs. They would sell their mothers down the river if it lined their pockets.
Typical solar cells are very, very thin. The frame is thick, but the actual cells, the blue areas, are thinner than your average window pane. The substrate is a fragile glass, and the actual 'cell' part is just a film on the glass. So any tungsten used would have to be very thin as well. Tungsten is heavy, just very slightly less heavy as gold................
Maybe, but can you power your car with beans?
I am still waiting for algae oil and new advances in energy storage.
Algae for me seemed to be the perfect answer. Then I learned that Exxon pulled back after four years (and $100 million) when it realized that algae fuel is “probably further” than 25 years away from commercial viability. Doggone!
If works, the space industry is going to beat a path to their door.
Mars!..............................
Nice proof of concept
BUT
My take is you could spend one million dollars on the solar cells described here and due to the very low CO2 content in the air it would take one year before you got enough hydrogen gas from this million dollar array to produce one kilowatt of electricity.
Thus not an investment that can pay off.
Trees are slow users of CO2 and much better at this game
Not enough CO2 content in the air to make these solar cells pay off. They will produce hydrogen gas too slowly and good luck gathering the hydrogen gas from an array of these newly invented solar cells.
What you have is a proof of concept and did the taxpayers get dinged for it?
YES!!!! TAXPAYERS GOT DINGED!!
“......was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. A provisional patent application has been filed.”
You may have missed the irony and sarcasm of my comment.
I got it. I thought it was funny btw.
No the did not invent wood they make syngas the very same stuff the German’s used in WW2 to make diesel and jet fuel on a massive industrial scale. The reaction is named after the two Germans who invented it Fischer - Tropsch which the South Africans use every day to make literately millions of gallons of synthetic diesel.
Syngas is the base material for a number of very valuable and important industrial chemical synthesize reactioins done at refineries world wide in megagram quantities everyday. The break through would be having a process that does not use precious metal catalysts to generate usable quantities of syngas for the direct synthesis of diesel, jet fuel or petrol. The Fischer - Tropsch process doesn’t care if that syngas came for coal, biomass, this solar process it only cares what the H2/CO ratio is which determines if you get heavy paraffin wax, or light alkeanes. If they have a way to take atmopheric CO2 and water plus sunlight and make syngas cheaply it would change the world.
The chemistry to make synthetic fuels via Fischer - Tropsch syngas is well established and commercialized on a global scale. The Chinese use coal, the south Africans also use coal, there is a plant going up in Louisiana that will use shale gas, Qatar uses methane.
The average insolation on the surface of the earth on a cloudless day in the temperate regions is 800 w/m^2, over an 8 hour day about 7 Kwhr of energy would be expected to fall on every sq meter of earth.
Petrol has a HHV of 34 kwhr the max theoretical efficiency is around 90% for photosyntetic reasons so 6 sq meters of surface area would produce a gallons worth of fuel energy per day. The tropics have significantly higher insolation numbers almost 1000 w/m2 and 12 hour day light hours.
Every second of every day more solar energy falls on the surface of the earth than every gallon of fossil fuel humanity has ever burned in all of human history by a couple of orders of magnitude the amount of energy falling on the surface of the earth is staggering.
Actually no syngas is used in massive industrial quantities worldwide everyday to make synthetic diesel, jet fuel, and petrol. it is also used to make synthetic lubricants on a massive scale, you can walk into Wal-Mart right now and buy Pennsoil Ultra Syn oil that is made from natural gas that is steam reformed to syngas then via Fischer–Tropsch GTL reactions to long chain lubricant molecules. They charge $9 a quart for this premium syngas sourced lubricant.
Syngas is a valuable industrial feed stock used around the world in mind boggling quantities on a daily basis. producing it from air water and solar energy is indeed a breakthrough one that if they can scale up would have immediate commercially significant applications in the petrochemical industrial complex.
And if I could gather all the gold dissolved in the oceans, I would be rich beyond my wildest dreams. There is an entropy problem.
Japanese scientists already have a method of gathering uranium from seawater that is close to being economically viable at $200 kg for UOX. no entropy problems there its a matter of ion exchange with a floating polymer that can be reused again and again they have already done limited production runs on the process. the same kind of ion exchange can be done with other heavy metals gold being one of them the issue is and always will be how expensive the recovery process is vs the commodity value of the metal the energy ROI is positive for uranium by a few.orders of magnitude due to the density of nuclear vs chemical Gibbs energies. The next metal coming out of seawater will be lithium and magnetism for high energy batteries may research universities are working on seawater lithium recovery.
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