PV Gap

Cheryl Said:

Would this be a good stock to invest?

We Answered:

There's still a lot of development in solar photovoltaics that haven't hit the market. Traditional silicon crystal photovoltaic costs about $10 a watt installed but already thin film technology promises to cost less than $1 a watt. CSUN appears to buy silicon crystal from a US company, manufacture traditional photovoltaics out of them and sell them back to the US company. Chances are these are silicon wafers with production defects that they polish the IC's off and embed the power rails to. The hallmark of such solar cells are that the corners appear to be trimmed off (they're octagonal in shape).

They have a niche for the time being but there's nothing in their website that indicates any proprietary technology, just manufacturing capability in an older technology.

Alternative energy is a difficult play, there's no doubt about the ultimate potential but it's still too early to spot the winners and the market is still very dependent on government tax credits. When it does start to take off, I'd imagine that it would be companies like Exxon in the driver's seat.

Neil Said:

Help with solar energy?

We Answered:

theoretically you could use chloroplasts as a sort of "cyborg" nano tech.
you would just need a supporting environment (like that of the cell)

Dwayne Said:

Why not build a national solar energy sytem, to stimulate the economy and wean ourselves off of Arab oil?!?

We Answered:

Technology is on the rise. Solar energy is on the rise. Companies like First Solar and Sunpower are developing and selling solar systems. This is a good thing to wean ourselves off of energy consumption from other sources.

There are many projects happenning as the result of technology improvements and discoveries over the years. Life is unfolding.

Efficiency would have it that the cheapest means of transferring energy is in a localized sense, where energy is harnessed from the sun, the wind, the movement of nature and delivered to deliver necessary goods and services, to heat or to propel necessary beings to desired delivery points.

Most of the past ventures that made money this way were energy generation from large transports including heavy engines and motors that moved energy to it's desired points of delivery.

Lighter durable manufactured textiles and miniaturization of these original engine and motor concepts allows for the transferrance of that energy at far less expensive and more efficient local distribution.

Large distribution entails huge heavy duty power losses through heavy duty highly costly unnecessary use of resources in transmission lines and devices. It is like you driving around in a tank to get to and from your grocery shopping. Not too efficient, is it?

Eventually we are going to wean ourselves off of these huge monstrosities using solar power and nanotech, which eventually developed will provide nearly imaginative virtual reality state transportation almost merely by thinking yourself to where you want to go and thinking yourself to warm yourself etc. Meanwhile there will be more and more miniaturization, which will gradually cost less and less to operate and leave funds for developing the next connection to the think age.

If you look at just air pumps and machinery over the last decades, you can see the efficiency building and the expenses dropping. Take the blower motor on a furnace. Does it have to be that heavy to move air efficiently in a house? What more efficient materials produce adequate heat? Oil is not cheap right now? Perhaps an electric heat with a light weight blower running all the time would be more efficient heat in a house? Less startup current? So we have some things to look at and make changes, and as the devices come in to play, the changes will be made.

I like the wave generation plants that move generators using the pulsing waves. But I wonder how much abuse they can take and how much abuse the transmission lines could take in flex back and forth.... again....losses.

Eduardo Said:

Nanotechnology future or just hope?

We Answered:

Bah Humbug...

...I'm still waiting for the tin foil space suits and the groovy spaceships from the old Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s!

< F L A S H G O R D O N' S A L I V E !!! >

Carla Said:

research in nanotech + solar energy?

We Answered:

Hi there,

If you are interested in both nanotech and solar energy, it helps to understand how nanotechnology can be applied to solar energy.

These days, people are interested in using organic semiconductors to make solar cells. You don't need nanotechnology to make organic solar cells, but the current ones aren't very efficient. This is because light needs to do several things before becoming electricity - it first needs to be absorbed, making an "exciton" or "excited state". Then the excited state has to move to the right place and get pulled apart to make a free electron and hole. Then the electron and hole need to be collected at the electrodes. All of these processes occur on the nanoscale; they are extremely efficient in plants (which do photosynthesis), but very inefficient in manmade solar cells.

People are thinking of how nanotechnology can be used to manufacture more effective organic solar cells. Nanotechnology basically enables you to make structures on tiny size scales, which lets people explore solar cell design on the nanoscale. I can throw out a few terms to help you in your search: cadmium selenide nanotetrapod, charge collection length, exciton diffusion length, bulk heterojunction.

Try reading a few of these papers, and then contacting professors who work on solar energy. The professors will most likely be in the materials science and engineering department.

Hope this helps.