Solar Cells — Made In a Pizza Oven 518
stylemessiah writes "The winner of several Eureka Science Awards in Australia is a crafty chick who devised a way to create solar cells cheaply using a pizza oven, nail polish and an inkjet printer. This was developed to address the high cost of cells and in particular for the world's poorest regions. She wanted to give the ~2 billion people around the world who don't have electricity the gift of light and cheap energy. This could have profound (and a good profound) implications for education and health in those in the poorest regions in the world. And it all started with her parents giving her a solar energy kit when she was 10..."
Competitive with Nanosolar? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Right... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Right... (Score:5, Insightful)
She wants to help the poor people of the world.
So, she found a process that uses cheap, easily accessible parts that would allow people in poor countries to help themselves.
And she patented it. So she can commercialize it.
Fuck off and die, bitch.
Just because you patent it that doesn't mean you have to charge an arm and a leg for it. Some people simply get a patent so others can't steal their idea. Say some gready corp who says hey this is cheap and effective and we can make a fortune even if we up the cost 5000% or more.
Re:Right... (Score:5, Insightful)
She's a PhD student -- she probably didn't have any choice in the matter, as the patent is probably held by the university.
Crafty chick? (Score:2, Insightful)
Aaaaaughhhhhh!
Condescend much?
Re:Right... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's perfectly fine, actually, just as long as you don't claim to be doing everything for the sake of the poorest people on the planet. That's a contradiction.
Chick? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sexist and trivializing characterization. (Score:1, Insightful)
Just so nobody gets the idea that this woman could be a scientist with an important breakthrough, let's refer to her as a "chick" from now on. Or maybe a "babe." In fact, why not emulate Don Imus and call her a "goggle-eyed ho"?
C'mon, Taco. Join the fucking twenty-first century.
Re:Right... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:how many (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not so much the number of cells you'd need to power the oven, that's important. It's whether or not one oven load of cells could produce more energy over the entire lifetime of the cells than the energy it took to bake them.
I have no idea oft he numbers involved myself, but put like that, it doesn't seem nearly so ridiculous. Hell, the cells might still be worth making, even if you loose power on the deal; just think of them as very long life batteries.
Impressive (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, it would of been more impressive if full details were diclosed online for people to take advantage of.
Is it possible to have your patent cake and eat it? The woman is clearly a brilliant engineer and deserves full credit for her work, she also states a worthwhile desire to help people across the world. So is it possible for her to obtain full commercial protection for her invention and then release all the details free for non-commercial use and reduced license fees for the third world? This would be ideal.
After all, no technology is going to change the lifestyles of poor people if they cannot afford to buy/license it.
On the other hand it would be unfair if she learned the Trevor Bayliss lesson the hard way - really clever little gadget swamped by low cost clones from asia from which he gained not a penny. As always I guess the big winners were the lawyers.
Re:how many (Score:5, Insightful)
How many solar cells do you need to power a pizza oven, anyway?
How about two sticks and some kindling [wikipedia.org]?
Highly respectful (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:how many (Score:4, Insightful)
To respond to your other point.. do you mean functional lifetime or projected lifetime? I can easily see them in their projected lifetime compensating for the energy used to bake them. However, their functional lifetime may be significantly lower than projected, either due to natural disasters or the onset of Armageddon.
I'm being serious. Funny mods will not be appreciated. -Eric
sterling (Score:5, Insightful)
headline:
female: "crafty chick turns out clever "invention", wants to "help people" - awwww!"
hypothetical:
male: "a thrifty, socially motivated boy genius has turned industry on its head with an astounding demonstration of scientific innovation and prowess beyond his years."
Re:Right... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not so altruistic? (Score:4, Insightful)
First quote:
"I love working with passionate people who want to help address climate change and poverty"
Second quote:
"it could take five years to commercialise the patented technology"
Re:Sexist and trivializing characterization. (Score:3, Insightful)
"C'mon, Taco. Join the fucking twenty-first century."
Does that mean I can't use the term 'dude' anymore? It's just so 1800's.
Re:Sexist and trivializing characterization. (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, it would be a lot more likely for people like Taco to catch on if there weren't plenty of women even in tech circles with "Chick" in their username. Hell, what about DevChix [devchix.com] who actually complain about sexism a fair bit?
Just because you find it demeaning, it doesn't mean all women do. Some women happily self-identify as "chicks".
I can give the poor of the world energy ... (Score:5, Insightful)
for a lot cheaper. All I need is a bunch of guys with shovels, and a boat, and we can give the world's poor good old coal. It's our environmental priorities, which we choose, that make energy more expensive. If we all could tolerate soot filled cities, like London in 1880, we could have dirt cheap heat and light and electricity just by burning coal and sometimes making steam with it for power.
The point is, when people make announcements like this, its not to give poor people the most energy, it is rather to give them energy that is fundamentally more expensive, but to lower that window as much as possible.
So let's not say that we are giving the poor the "cheapest energy possible", because, that's not what we're doing.
Re:Pity they did not print the details (Score:5, Insightful)
Link us up, bro'! Or are you just poo-pooing any progress in reducing the cost of solar cells yet again [slashdot.org]? Yeah, I did a little digging. ;-)
Re:Sexist and trivializing characterization. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, dude, I know a lot of really smart chicks. Some chicks I know are even nerds. So don't get your panties in a twist, babe.
Re:Right... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sexist and trivializing characterization. (Score:5, Insightful)
what the hell? (Score:5, Insightful)
"She wanted to give the @2 billion people around the world who dont have electricity the gift of light and cheap energy."
What does "@2 billion" mean? "At two billion?" Maybe "~2 billion?"
Re:Chick? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously...the notion that there are bad words to use is mindboggling. Ok...so lets all get together and ban those nasty words, and then they will be replaced and other words will be used instead. I have heard the word "woman" used in a derogatory fashion more than I have heard the word "chick" used in the same way. So when will people wake up and realize that the actual words being used are just a method for communicating a particular idea or feeling and that changing those words will not change the idea or feeling being communicated.
So I could go with calling you an emotional male making irrational claims about degrading women, or just say whiney bitch. Same statement, but one is clearly more efficient.
Re:Sexist and trivializing characterization. (Score:1, Insightful)
Interesting... call someone a "chick" and several are quick to get offended, but porn is mentioned in some way in most stories/comments on this site, without so much as a peep from the pc crowd. I guess that degrading women is pretty disgusting as long as its a different kind of degradation than what the porn crowd does routinely.
Re:Chick? (Score:5, Insightful)
Chick isn't inherently derogatory on the part of the speaker. i use it to mean 'a female who is neither a girl, nor an old lady'. My girlfriend uses it the same way. Think of it as the English equivalent to Mademoiselle. On it's own it is as derogatory as dude. If the speaker uses it as a pejorative or to be dismissive, that it the speaker, not the word. People can do that with any word. Just as anything can be taken too far or misused. Put in the hands of humans and something bad might happen. If a listener takes offense when none is intended, that's on the listener. Sometimes people LIKE to be offended. They get off on it. Some people act offended to impress their friends, or some chick at the bar. "Oh, he's a feminist".
And it is odd that we make special note of achievement when a 'minority' does something. For some reason we care that [person] is the first [label] to do something. If a white guy does something, so what? If it is novel that someone of x group did something, like say, a child composing a concerto, then sure... mention away. Otherwise i think by now we as a culture should be over it. Never underestimate the power of guilt.
Re:Right... (Score:2, Insightful)
Right. The big evil corporation is going to make these things at 10 times the price. Hmm... how will they get people to buy when the people could just make their own. I know... they're going to corner the market on pizza ovens and nail polish.
Now, let's say she does have a patent. She can decide who can produce it. Maybe she makes license terms that say for the first 5 years it can only be used to provide electricity for people who don't currently have it.
Right. That's going to get those big businesses to make the things and sell them for dirt, to people who have nothing but dirt.
Try not to get your panties in a knot every time you see the word 'patent'.
There are three utilities for a patent.
Using it to set up a monopolistic business and pricing the device higher than Cost+ReasonableProfit.
Selling it to an existing business so they can do so.
Patent trolling, supporting a leisurely lifestyle by placing a perpetual tax on those who would like to bring these devices to the citizenry of the world without continuing to productively participate in society.
This is an assault on the worlds poor. Plain and simple. The sort of thing you see in a world that is based on the rule of law, rather than the willing co-operation of free men and women. It's scummy, all the more so because it's being presented as the antithesis of what it actually is.
Re:Sexist and trivializing characterization. (Score:5, Insightful)
Join the fucking twenty-first century.
This might sound like nitpicking, but people seeing women as equal to men isn't a "twenty-first century" concept. In fact, 2400 years ago Plato was already defending that, for example, if a woman is capable of governing a state, she should be allowed to, not blocked because of her sex.
We should stop being chronocentrists, which is as much a discriminatory state of mind as ethnocentrism. A given year, or a collection of years, has no attached value. Something happening "in the 21st century" isn't better just because it's happening "after" whatever came before. Ideas, such as that women and men must have equal rights, must be judged in themselves, not because of when they appeared, or when they became mainstream, or when they stopped being mainstream, or whatever.
So, while I agree with your sentiment, I must disagree with the way you express it. Calling for someone to change his behavior because of the "age" or "era" in which he lives is to incur in the "appeal to authority" fallacy. In fact, the only intellectually correct approach is to defend an idea by its own merits, not dwelling into its "ageity" at all.
Do more, or less, than this, and what you'll be doing won't be a rational defense of an idea, but merely a rhetorical one. In other words, politics, not reason.
Coa (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually, if you take into account the social, human, and environmental costs of coal production, you really can't call coal cheap.
the coal industry has taken a toll on Appalachia and its people.
Re:Right... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are three utilities for a patent.
Using it to set up a monopolistic business and pricing the device higher than Cost+ReasonableProfit.
Selling it to an existing business so they can do so.
Patent trolling, supporting a leisurely lifestyle by placing a perpetual tax on those who would like to bring these devices to the citizenry of the world without continuing to productively participate in society.
Four: Keeping a big, greedy, monopolistic company (or patent troll) from patenting the design first, thus forcing everyone to pay.
Not every patent-holder is evil, and not every company that sells something is trying to rob you. Only most of them.
Re:sterling (Score:2, Insightful)
While I'm not saying that your point is invalid - we do need to be conscious after all of the message we send via the phrasing we choose - I think that bringing up this argument here is only serving to do the opposite of the intention. What SHOULD be showcased here is the accomplishment, not the gender of the person who did it. Cheap solar cells to the poor masses is an incredibly noble cause. But by shining a spotlight on the fact that the original poster here used the words "crafty chick" (which I'd imagine weren't even meant to be demeaning), you are taking the focus away from what is important here.
As a male feminist, I hope to see less usage of words like "chick" and "girl" (if she is in or beyond her teens, she is a woman). But when we focus on things like this, we steal the wind from the sails of people like "crafty" here more so than the poor characterizations we are complaining about.
Re:how many (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Highly respectful (Score:3, Insightful)
And you call this woman a girl? That's much better.
Re:Right... (Score:3, Insightful)
As thePig said, patents are a good way to prevent a large company from putting your small company out of business. Most people interested in doing good for their community (or the world) can't make enough money from their product to out-produce a massive corporation; if they want to keep making money, they have to have a tool to prevent big businesses from immediately competing.
Sure... if you release it for free they can't patent it, but they can sure offer your widget at a lower price... right up until you've gone under, at which point they can -- and will -- raise the price again. Show me some proof that things can't work as I say, and I'll accept your argument. Until then, just keep telling me it's bullshit, and I'll keep thinking you're wrong.
Re:Ftw. (Score:3, Insightful)
Female is also sexist, as it is a term applied to a single sex. As it dude, man, woman, lady.
Re:how many (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, but this is a case of that energy cost not being wasted cost - if you're doing this in a building that needs heating, there's your heat source. It's a furnace for the building, and it makes solar panels. Two uses for that same energy. As long as you don't remove the panels from the building while they're still hot, you haven't wasted _any_ energy in making them.
Co-generation has been around for a while - another example would be running the radiator for your generator into the house, blow air through it. What would have been waste heat, now gets dumped into the space where it's useful.
A lot of these "studies" that claim to look at how much something costs, consider just how much fuel it takes to run the oven or whatever, and don't consider the possibility of uses of "waste heat" like this. So yes, more piggybacking on your post than disagreeing with it - the payback time you mention might be even sooner, if they were gonna burn that fuel to heat the place anyway.
Re:how many (Score:2, Insightful)
Step 2 still isn't "free" energy. In fact, go price out those renewable energy sources. I seem to recall California residents have the option of paying for the energy sources they choose. Funny how they can't seem to get excited about 10x to 15x the cost of base load power sources.
Step 3 cracks me up. How are they being deployed? Trucks, or ships? What do trucks and ships use as power? What? Diesel? No wait, stick it on an aircraft carrier, which is nuclear. Oh, you can't win. Ha ha ha. Oh, sure, like they're going to dust off the ships at the maritime museum and sail them to Africa, then carry it by oxcart to the center of a remote village.
This is an interesting article because it is do-it-yourself. I respect the engineering here. But please don't be fooled into thinking this is some holy grail. It is a lot like that peanut sheller idea: give folks the tools to take care of themselves and they will live better lives.
Last point: why is it these billions of hungry people, stumbling around in the dark are not taking care of themselves? I mean, we are talking about entire provinces and even nations at some point, right? Some of these countries don't even have banking systems in place. No real estate agents, no loan specialists, no financial planners... Let's just take a page from Sim City and recognize that there are entire nations and provinces full of illiterate, primitive settlers. Back in the "Age of Sail" this was grounds for empire building. Honestly, if China said the following, I wouldn't mind: "hey, this random pathetically poor country in Africa has lots of arable land, and well, they are starving. We're gonna go conquer them, feed them, and build there. Anyone got a problem with that?" The sovereignty of these struggling countries really is begging for conquest. For the good of the people. Look what England did to India. A model colony, really. Even Hong Kong was a colony. These ideas are over the top, and I'm asking the question, not making a suggestion.
Re:Ftw. (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose calling males 'guys' or 'dudes' is also sexist, then?
Seriously, some people are way over-fucking-sensitive. Probably not yourself.. but the people that decide on what's "politically correct" should be sent to mental asylums, or perhaps become antagonists in a Jane Austen theatre production.
Re:how many (Score:3, Insightful)
I know this is humor, but...
You heat hot water to get hotter water, or better yet, steam. In fact one of the limiting factors in steam power isn't the hot side, but the cold side, assuming you want to have your water in a closed cycle. Once the steam has done its work, lost its energy, and condensed back into water, it's not cold water. The most visible feature of a nuclear power plant is usually the cooling tower, not the containment vessel. That tower and the energy to run it is a testimony to how important it is to efficiency to cool the outgoing water - and we still wouldn't call it "cold" with all of that.
It didn't go "whoosh", I simply chose to respond seriously, for some odd reason.
Re:I can give the poor of the world energy ... (Score:1, Insightful)
for a lot cheaper. All I need is a bunch of guys with shovels, and a boat, and we can give the world's poor good old coal. It's our environmental priorities, which we choose, that make energy more expensive. If we all could tolerate soot filled cities, like London in 1880, we could have dirt cheap heat and light and electricity just by burning coal and sometimes making steam with it for power.
The point is, when people make announcements like this, its not to give poor people the most energy, it is rather to give them energy that is fundamentally more expensive, but to lower that window as much as possible.
So let's not say that we are giving the poor the "cheapest energy possible", because, that's not what we're doing.
Dude the 1800s called and they want you back. People aren't being mean by not just burning coal to get cheap power. London didn't stop burning it to shaft the little guy people were dropping dead at a frightening rate. Living there was like chain smoking a carton of cigarettes a day. China is getting a hard lesson in the joys of coal. They had to virtually shut down a city to keep athletes from dropping dead. I know that wasn't as much coal but some was because they had to cut back on power. Clean coal is a slogan not a reality. There are no clean coal plants. There's one prototype plant under construction. Coal also gives little gifts like mercury. Wonder how mercury gets into the fish? It's a trace metal in coal but when you burn large amounts it concentrates in fish so that trace amount turns into dangerous levels. How? little fish get eaten by bigger fish up the food chain. Why are the only viable solutions the ones that allow the individual to go on wasting energy? Here's a 411, all mineral based fuels are finite and will eventually run out. Fusion will save us? It's been 20 to 50 years away since the 70s, I started following it back then. We may see Duke Nuke Em Forever before we see Fusion if we ever do. There's no solid evidence that it's practical. The sun does it effortlessly because of mass, something we lack in terrestrial plants. Coal is the cheapest and dirtiest fuel we have. Can we possibly consider options like driving smaller cars and switching to high efficiency bulbs before we go back to good ole London town. I know it's fun to watch pigeons coughing up blood but sadly so do people when it gets bad.
Re:how many (Score:3, Insightful)
I probably agree with most of what you wrote there, so you meant this as a good thing right?
Re:how many (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:how many (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll bite.
Your idea is essentially the old "white man's burden" concept from a century ago: justifying colonization based on the idea that the subject peoples get better infrastructure, better culture, and a better religion out of the deal. If you overlook the racist implications, it sounds good in theory, but in practice the results are a mixed bag. This is because what really drives colonialism isn't some sense of altruism, but solely the material benefits of the colonizing power; any benefits derived by the colonies from the process is accidental.
A good example of this is the Belgian colonization of the Congo. Yes, the Congo got railroads out of the deal (set up not for the Congolese, mind you, but for the exploitation of ivory), but the costs were horrific. Millions of natives were murdered, millions more killed through disease, starvation, and over-work in forced labor camps; hostage-taking and rape became institutionalized forms of "persuation"; severed hands became a sort of currency. The area's natural resources were plundered to exhaustion, all in order to make one man in Europe very wealthy.
I'm not suggesting that China would descend to the same depths if it were in control of Africa, but make no mistake: colonialism is by its nature a fundamentally unequal relationship, and colonizers expect very large returns on investment. (Look up "Boston Tea Party" if you're curious why America is no longer Britian's colony, despite all the supposed benefits of colonization). Far better for these countries to run their own affairs, and concentrate on the things that will make a real difference: better government, better education, stable finances. That way the profits of whatever investments they make will go towards improving their own country, instead of some rich colonizer.
Re:"Crafty chick" (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe not being an a-hole, but history shows that if something is truly DIY, the patent system doesn't impose a barrier to doing it yourself, just to doing it and selling it. See the history of the cotton gin for what I'm talking about.
I suspect that they see the business as making the varnish/dye/ink being used, and kits, which does make sense if selling that is economical, and in a few decades the original patent expires, though I'm sure there will be updates.
-Peter
Re:Chick? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because, like it or not, the fact that a manufacturing hack came from a women is one of the unusual and noteworthy elements of the story. We can argue whether the lower interest of women in such fields is due to cultural or genetic influences, but it certainly exists.
(My opinion is that women are probably, by nature, less interested in certain subjects then men, and vice versa; and societies probably grow to reinforce this, pushing sexes into certain roles. For example, perhaps women, by nature, generally tend to be better at nurturing children; then society tries to codify the rules, putting ALL women into a nurturing role, not allowing ANY men to take a nurturing role.)