Solar Cell Achieves 40% Efficiency

Fysiks Wurks found on the U.S. Department of Energy website news of a breakthrough in solar energy efficiency. From the article: "...with DOE funding, a concentrator solar cell produced by Boeing-Spectrolab has recently achieved a world-record conversion efficiency of 40.7 percent, establishing a new milestone in sunlight-to-electricity performance." A page linked from Wikipedia's article on solar energy calculates the land area that would need to be covered by solar collectors at 8% efficiency to meet the world's energy needs (using 2003 figures). At 40% efficiency, it looks like a square 265 miles on a side in the American southwest would do it.

Re:transport losses?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great. You've been so brainwashed by the media measuring in Libraries of Congress or Size of Texas that now you are forced to convert into those units to understand a size.

Re:transport losses?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up. He clearly knows how to achieve the technological utopia we all long for.

Re:transport losses?

[Basehart]

"Much of the time it is night, and storing that much juice in batteries is impractical."

Doesn't it say in the bible somewhere that it's a sin to stay up after the sun goes down? Regardless, maybe we could get back to a more wholesome existence and put a stop to all that late night fun I hear people having outside while I'm stuck here coding until I go crosseyed.

Re:transport losses?

[buffer-overflowed]

Even the nuclear stuff is solar. Big matter crushing solar explosions of doomy doom.

Re:transport losses?

[Columcille]

Tidal energy comes from our moon. You can thank the Mondochiwan's [wikipedia.org] for waiting too long to align all 5 elements the first time. Bruce Willis hasn't yet waited too long the second time, we still have a couple hundred years for that.

Re:Panels On The Roof

[jez9999]

What I do, in SimCity 2000, is build a few hills. Then, I apply 'water' to each tile of the hill, and build a hydroelectric damn on each one. Best form of power by far; no explosions, breakdowns, and lots of power per square.

Hmm. Wonder how realistic this is. :-P

No streaks?

[maximthemagnificent]

>> At 40% efficiency, it looks like a square 265 miles on a side in the American southwest would do it.

Buy windex stock now, that's all I'm saying.

Re:transport losses?

[maxwell demon]

Not all our energy is nuclear: Tidal power plants don't use nuclear power.

However it's quite obvious that the sun must be shut down as quickly as possible: First, as you aready said, it's using nuclear energy, and of course nuclear energy is known to be bad. But for the sun, it's not even abstract: The sun is known to continuously send radioactive radiation. Fortunately the earths magnetic field and atmosphere are saving us from most of it, but what if the magnetic field fails? Also note that we are already quite certain that the sun will end up destroying all life on earth when (not: if) it finally fails. So we really shouldn't tolerate such a dangerous nuclear reactor so close to earth. :-)

Re:transport losses?

[somersault]

Agreed. It is it the real cause of our 'global warming', and will eventually evelope our planet, turning our great,great,great,great,great,great,great,great[et c] grandkids into crispy pork. With the decline in moral values today they're bound to deserve it anyway, though, so maybe it's not worth the effort.

Re:transport losses?

[plopez]

I would reccomend Nevada as there are HUGE military reservations there. The only problem being is that the giant mutant ants love silicone panels. But I'm sure we could figure sometning out. :)

Wait, I can handle this.

[Grendel Drago]

Employee: Four pounds of grease ... that comes to ... sixty-three cents.
Homer: Woo-hoo!
Bart: Dad, all that bacon cost twenty-seven dollars.
Homer: Yeah, but your mom paid for that!
Bart: But doesn't she get her money from you?
Homer: And I get my money from grease! What's the problem?

No, dummy!

[Trails]

The solution is easy! We use cold fusion to buffer. Since there's no steam circuit to heat up, we can have it going very quickly.

And to those who complai about the weather, once we build the space elevator, we can put solar collector in orbit and beam power down to earth!

With all that power, we can finaly build robots to clean our homes, cook our food, even "companion" models!

Cold fusion, solar energy, space elevators, and robo wives! I think I just messed my mylar pants!