DOE Shines $14M on Solar Energy Research

coondoggie writes "Eleven university solar research projects aimed at developing advanced solar photovoltaic (PV) technology manufacturing processes and products got a $14 million boost today from the Dept. of Energy. Photovoltaic-based solar cells convert sunlight directly into electricity, and are made of semiconductor materials similar to those used in computer chips. When sunlight is absorbed by these materials, the solar energy knocks electrons loose from their atoms, allowing the electrons to flow through the material to produce electricity."

Who modded this down.

[Chrisq]

Who modded this down? This is a genuine aid to small short-term variations. See beacon power [beaconpower.com]. I am not sure that such technologies could cope with day/night fluctuations though, for these long period variations probably pump storage hydroelectric [wikipedia.org] may be better. They are probably complementary technologies, as it takes a pump-storage plant about a minute to reach full load from stand-still, or 15 seconds from "hot standby", where the turbines are kept spinning under zero load.

Re:On the basis of the evidence...

[sabaco]

Check out Integral Fast Reactors. They are passively safe (they can't go into meltdown, even if the entire system fails, because the reaction slows down as the temperature increases), they use several orders of magnitude less fuel, and work perfectly well getting fuel as un-enriched uranium or thorium or even depleted uranium and normal nuclear waste (which means that they easily have more than 3000 times as much fuel available as the light water reactors that are currently most common), and they produce orders of magnitude less nuclear waste (on the order of 200 times less) which also has a half life in the range of 200 years (instead of thousands of years). Oh, and did I mention that waste is treated on site, rather than being shipped to some distant storage facility? They are still considered experimental because the only one to operate in the US was canceled because of pressure by John Kerry (thanks a lot) after operating for 30 of the planned 35 years. The only reason that IFRs weren't considered competitive with light water reactors is because waste disposal is essentially free for utilities. (The cost of operations outweighs the improvement in fuel efficiency, but not the real cost of waste disposal.)

We should be building some of those, not more of the current (ancient) reactor designs.

Re:This has to be good news

[baldass_newbie]

Wasn't Gore proposing this back before 2008?

Funny enough, Bush proposed this back in 2001 [whitehouse.gov], right after he took office. But everybody was so upset that Bush and Cheney would talk with oil companies when drafting an energy.
Yet another case where Bush did a lot but nobody noticed, like aid for Africa [time.com].

Re:$14M?

[BlackPignouf]

your SOURCE on that ?

Well, mostly :
- the amount of PWh needed
- some common sense
- and the research center [zafh.net] I work in.

I guess it's still not enough for you, so:
- hydropower is at its peak in many countries (e.g. in the EU) and comes with some massive environmental drawbacks (e.g. "Three Gorges Dam").
- biomass is surely interesting, but should not put more pressure on food supply chain and should be almost carbon-neutral. In Germany, customers already need to import wood pellets from Italy and France in good ol' diesel trucks. Biomass is not renewable anymore in this case!
- windpower provides between 2 to 5 times as less GWh/(km.year) as photovoltaics panels. Plus, you cannot use it right next to where it's needed.
- geothermal? use it wherever possible, but it does not represent so much either.
I go look for some more sources and I come back!
(I already have some, but are mostly in French or German...)

Re:On the basis of the evidence...

[neomunk]

If I remember correctly, it's not that they don't have meltdowns, it's that they are SUPPOSED to be in a state of meltdown. I -THINK-. (too lazy to google)

IIRC they keep the fuel in a hot liquid state and basically keep it covered in molten sodium. They use convection for "pumping" the coolant and can process most nuclear wastes as fuel.

I've always thought the fast integrals were good ideas too, if for nothing else than to process our currently stored wastes.

Re:This has to be good news

[kcdoodle]

The grid has very low losses.
Even over long distances, the losses are only around 2-3%.
Given that 2-3% is actually a very large amount of energy, it still would not justify the energy (and dollar) losses of maintaining a super conducting grid.

Huge mass production of cheap, fairly efficient solar cells could might all of the worlds energy problems.

Re:This has to be good news

[Aglassis]

I think the first solution should be to rush into production the superconducting electric grid part of the Grid 2030 project

I don't think this is realistic with current technology (although I haven't been keeping an eye on what is state of the art).

Superconductors are limited in the amount of current they can carry. IIRC high temperature superconductors are particularly poor in this respect as well as not forming very good wires. But liquid He is so expensive, rare, and energy costly to produce that "normal" temperature superconductors aren't going to be efficient either.

Tim.

The Albany Project [energy.gov] (pdf) used a high temperature superconductor that was cooled with liquid nitrogen and the cable was able to carry a significant load (several times higher than that of conventional high voltage cables).

Re:This has to be good news

[jo42]

$14 million is barely over an hour of the cost of the US occupation of Iraq: senate.gov [senate.gov]

Re:Stable energy sources

[bkr1_2k]

Why do people seem to keep assuming a "one size fits all" solution when these subjects come up? If we individually moderate our consumption (yes I understand that's not very likely to happen) and we incorporate several forms of renewable technology we will reduce our dependence on non-renewables drastically. Each house in the US could be retrofitted with a reasonable solar array for something like $50k. That won't solve all the owner's power needs, but it will put a large dent in them.

Combine that with geothermal heat pumps that drive a radiant heating system (preferably built into the floors for maximum efficiency) and some wind power (a few small wind generators won't do too much damage to the local environment but can help a little bit) and some heat recovery methods built into the plumbing of the house and most people will reduce power consumption by as much as a third or even half since most of our energy usage actually comes from heating a house or water for our personal comfort.

Solar doesn't have to be the "silver bullet" that so many opponents use as a reason not to fund it. It just has to be part of the solution.

Re:Stable energy sources

[sapphire wyvern]

Which is nice in theory, but the energy cost of putting an installation in orbit tends to make the already-unattractive ROI for solar completely unacceptable.

We need space elevators for cheap orbital lift. :)

Re:This has to be good news

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the losses are closer to 7-10% with half being lost in transformers and half being lost in transmission. But this is a nationwide average where most power isn't intentionally sent thousands of miles from its production. If all of the power plants in the country were located in Kansas you would see the losses skyrocketing (probably 30-50%). The big issue with power transportation right now isn't losses but capacity. The Canadians were able to sell power to California during the California energy crisis with efficiency losses (and worse, transmission price 'stacking'), but the grid capacity wasn't large enough and bottlenecks in sections allowed the brownouts to occur without any possible import path. California was about 2 GW short and there were hundreds of GW of free capacity throughout the United States at the time. These capacity problems aren't limited to California and they will need to be solved if renewable power is going to be used in the future. Building a superconducting or high capacity HVDC grid would be very helpful in this situation if it connected to the proper areas and if the capacity of transmission lines around its destinations were large enough.

Re:This has to be good news

[onkelonkel]

Um...No. DC works just fine now. It didn't back a 100 years ago though. "The advantage of HVDC is the ability to transmit large amounts of power over long distances with lower capital costs and with lower losses than AC." - from the wikipedia.

AC got the head start because it's easy to use transformers to raise voltage for transmission lines (high voltage = low current = less IxIxR resistive losses) and transform back down at the user end. Now that we have modern power electronics we can use inverters to do the same with DC.