Altered Organism Triples Solar Cell Efficiency 158
An anonymous reader writes "By harnessing the shells of living organisms in the sea, microscopic algae called diatoms, engineers have tripled the efficiency of experimental dye-sensitized solar cells. The diatoms were fed a diet of titanium dioxide, the main ingredient for thin film solar cells, instead of their usual meal which is silica (silicon dioxide). As a result, their shells became photovoltaic when coated with dyes. The result is a thin-film dye-sensitized solar cell that is three times more efficient than those without the diatoms."
When can I buy them? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:120% efficiency! (Score:5, Insightful)
So, with the "breakthrough" a few months ago that three different dyes in a cell could capture 40% of light from the sun, does that make this more efficient than coal?
Well, it doesn't take millions of years to make more when we run out.
Diatoms, what cnan't they do? (Score:5, Insightful)
From toothpaste to DE Filters to solar cells.
I love nature - if mankind paid more attention to it we'd be so much more advanced than we are currently.
Re:120% efficiency! (Score:5, Insightful)
From an energy standpoint, direct solar has ALWAYS been more efficient than coal. How much sunlight do you think was needed to create the coal we burn? How much energy do we use to extract and refine it (when necessary)?
More cost-effective? That's a different matter, and impossible to calculate since we can't even properly measure the true costs of burning coal for electricity.
Re:Diatoms, what cnan't they do? (Score:2, Insightful)
I love nature - if mankind paid more attention to it
Mankind is of and surrounded by "nature". We can't we can't do anything *but* pay attention to nature.
Re:120% efficiency! (Score:2, Insightful)
How long does it take to make a new sun? I mean...it will run out eventually...
When the Sun runs out it won't matter how much coal we have, (or any other energy source) unless we've used it to ship out far, far away from this solar system. Nothing is truly indefinite so your argument is mostly pointless.
Re:120% efficiency! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What will the Libs do? (Score:5, Insightful)
"even the PETA retards aren't that rabid"
Wanna bet? :-p
Re:120% efficiency! (Score:2, Insightful)
Modern coal-fired power plants are at about 30-35% efficiency on average.
In any case, comparing the efficiency of two totally different kinds of energy sources is not necessarily useful for determining which is the better choice. There are also economic (cost of production) and environmental (real cost of GHG emissions, regardless of any state carbon pricing plan) metrics that need to be applied.
The parent commenter should probably notice that it was the OP (pro-coal?) commenter who made the original (sarcastic) 120% claim. The rest of us here clearly understand physics.
Anyone else notice? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like they are "fishing" for some more funding. Oh yes I can.
Re:Lousy Headline (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:120% efficiency! (Score:2, Insightful)
The accrued savings from a raging fusion inferno a million times the mass of the earth whose wispy out layer glowed incandescent for four billion years will be pretty much wiped out by about 200 years of human activity.
Is there where the multi-tasking generation leads us? This has the trappings of someone who actually boarded the bus toward useful cognition, then at the first sign the going was less than 100% straight forward, decided to check out the latest Android killer. The next morning the incomplete thought was picked up off the bedroom floor and tossed into the hatbox beside the front door labelled "father knows best" (just as soon as he unjams his slide rule of universal valuation).
Human society never returns to exactly the same state. We can't actually measure the true cost of anything without making abstractions about myriads of future differences having some kind of linear relationship to present conditions, briefly shared by a fleeting census coalition. The duration of the consensus condition is inversely proportional to the number of people consulted.
This whole thing works a lot better for renewable resources than what we term "non-renewable", which actually means a resource whose replenishment cycle is like watching paint dry in bullet time. Everything in life is relative to our boredom threshold. It's the only metric humans widely agree on.
It also denominates our discussion threads. On a logarithmic scale from 1 to 10, your comment betrays a boredom factor of about 3. The threshold for useful engagement in the multidimensional value space associated with our environmental choices is somewhere around six. Six earns you a seat at the table of meaningful errors.
It will be interesting to see what a generation of multitaskers is able to accomplish on deep challenges. Who knows, it could work.
Re:Anyone else notice? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong with fishing for more funding.
The important thing isn't the efficiency, but the price/performance ratio.
1% efficient cells that are dirt cheap still aren't worth installing on your roof.
95% efficient cells at $50K per square meter are only of interest for satellite applications.
But, a 30% efficient cell that's reasonably cheap is a whole lot more interesting than a 40% one that costs 5 times as much. Taking a cheap 10% efficient tech and making it 3 times better without making it 3 times more expensive is a very useful thing.
Re:Wait till PETA hears about this! (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh dear lord. I don't call that a joke, I call that horrendous. The fact that the website seems to be targeting children gives me chills. If my son or daughter was suddenly upset with my fishing and hunting habit because PETA told her its mean to kill "sea kittens", I'm gonna be marching down to headquarters in my camouflage to take care of the problem MY way.
Fucking PETA. I'm going to eat a creek kitten right now. A trout. And, by the way, PETA, I paid $30 to be licensed to actually catch that trout, and I have a limit to how many I can take daily. The money I paid for that license is used to A. Figure out just how many fish I can catch without too much of an impact on the ecosystem, and B. hatch me new trout for every season.
And I'm gonna wash down my creek kitten meal with some milk. I'll do my best to make sure the milk comes from a cow whose offspring went to the veal factory, and for dessert I'm going to have bear-liver pate spread on bread made with yeast that were genetically engineered to feel the pain of being baked at 350F.
Re:Diatoms, what cnan't they do? (Score:1, Insightful)
Hmmm lets see here, a dam built by a beaver for a beavers purposes is nature, a dam built by man for man's purposes isn't?
The artcile is tagged "PETA" (Score:3, Insightful)
... but diatoms are *Not* animals.
They are eukaryote, but not animals. Plus, PETA doesn't really care about microscopic animals --- they care about the animals you would learn about in a book for children.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromalveolata [wikipedia.org]