PV Gap

Scott Said:

Did you read about the 100% efficient Solar Panel?

We Answered:

Your article states, "...This combination of materials also utilizes the entire visible spectrum of light energy, translating into a theoretical potential of almost 100% efficiency..."

Current solar cells only use a portion of the visible spectrum, but none utilize 100% of ANY portion of the spectrum. It appears to be a pretty big leap to go from a full-spectrum panel to a 100% efficient full-spectrum panel.

One curious thing to consider, a 100% efficient panel would appear pitch black, but never get warmed in the sun.

Richard Said:

Sci-fi/fantasy novel - Energy, everywhere!?

We Answered:

vacuum energy

wikipedia:
Vacuum energy has a number of consequences. In 1948, Dutch physicists Hendrik B. G. Casimir and Dirk Polder predicted the existence of a tiny attractive force between closely placed metal plates due to resonances in the vacuum energy in the space between them. This is now known as the Casimir effect and has since been extensively experimentally verified. It is therefore believed that the vacuum energy is "real" in the same sense that more familiar conceptual objects such as electrons, magnetic fields, etc., are real.
Other predictions are more esoteric and harder to verify. Vacuum fluctuations are always created as particle/antiparticle pairs. The creation of these virtual particles near the event horizon of a black hole has been hypothesized by physicist Stephen Hawking to be a mechanism for the eventual "evaporation" of black holes. The net energy of the Universe remains zero so long as the particle pairs annihilate each other within Planck time. If one of the pair is pulled into the black hole before this, then the other particle becomes "real" and energy/mass is essentially radiated into space from the black hole. This loss is cumulative and could result in the black hole's disappearance over time. The time required is dependent on the mass of the black hole but could be on the order of 10100 years for large solar-mass black holes.

Unsolved problems in physics: Why doesn't the vacuum energy cause a large cosmological constant? What cancels it out?

The vacuum energy also has important consequences for physical cosmology. Special relativity predicts that energy is equivalent to mass, and therefore, if the vacuum energy is "really there", it should exert a gravitational force. Essentially, a non-zero vacuum energy is expected to contribute to the cosmological constant, which affects the expansion of the universe. However, the vacuum energy is mathematically infinite without renormalization, which is based on the assumption that we can only measure energy in a relative sense, which is not true if we can observe it indirectly via the cosmological constant.

The existence of vacuum energy is also sometimes used, outside of mainstream physics, as controversial theoretical justification for the possibility of free energy machines. It has been argued that due to the broken symmetry (in QED), free energy does not violate conservation of energy, since the laws of thermodynamics only apply to equilibrium systems. However, consensus among particle physicists is that this is incorrect and that vacuum energy cannot be harnessed to do usable work. In particular, the second law of thermodynamics is unaffected by the existence of vacuum energy.

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Leona Said:

How can we convert sound energy into electrical energy and we have to store that???

We Answered:

You would need a huuuuge membrane, hung up similar to what a loudspeaker looks like. Then you have coil in the center of that membrane, and that coil moves inside a permanent magnet. The coil produces AC-like electricity (very little), and you can rectify and store it in a battery.