Harvard, IBM Crunch Data For More Efficient Solar Cells 65
Nerval's Lobster writes "Harvard's Clean Energy Project (CEP) is using IBM's World Community Grid, a 'virtual supercomputer' that leverages volunteers' surplus computing power, to determine which organic carbon compounds are best suited for converting sunlight into electricity. IBM claims that the resulting database of compounds is the 'most extensive investigation of quantum chemicals ever performed.' In theory, all that information can be utilized to develop organic semiconductors and solar cells. Roughly a thousand of the molecular structures explored by the project are capable of converting 11 percent (or more) of captured sunlight into electricity—a significant boost from many organic cells currently in use, which convert between 4 and 5 percent of sunlight. That's significantly less than solar cells crafted from silicon, which can produce efficiencies of up to nearly 20 percent (at least in the case of black silicon solar cells). But silicon solar cells can be costly to produce, experiments with low-grade materials notwithstanding; organic cells could be a cheap and recyclable alternative, provided researchers can make them more efficient. The World Community Grid asks volunteers to download a small program (called an 'agent') onto their PC. Whenever the machine is idle, it requests data from whatever project is on the World Community Grid's server, which it crunches before sending back (and requesting another data packet). Several notable projects have embraced grid computing as a way to analyze massive datasets, including SETI@Home."
Why Efficiency? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't understand why efficiency is so important - $/W seems a much more important measure, given that arid land area is cheap and sunlight is free.
Re:Why Efficiency? (Score:4, Interesting)
LOL. Try actually computing how much land area is required to cover 1% of US electrical baseload given 20% solar panel efficiency and 600W - 1000W incident solar radiation per square meter on a perfectly sunny day in May (e.g. most optimal time of the year.)
You should quickly come to the realization that solar is a complete boondoggle, even at 100% panel efficiency.
Annualized average US power = 440GW. Your 1% of US power is 4.4GW. At 20% of 800W/m^2, that's 6800 acres, or about 10 square miles.
You seem to have a problem with that?
IIRC, about 1/6 of the 90,000,000 acres of corn grown in the US goes to silly schemes to make ethanol, which is 2000 times as much land as your example. That seems like a prime candidate to replace with far more efficient solar panels, especially if the areas with the most dire depletion of aquifers are reallocated first.