'Major discovery' from MIT primed to unleash solar revolution

[Sparky]

and major companies sponsoring it. what will the electric companies do? or the major car companies...? they've already killed a nice concept electric car project. let's see what happens.

i'm all for it though, this is great! i never knew why solar power never went full-blown mainstream

GM is working with electric companies (like FirstEnergy) with the Volt. That is the first electric car that is actually somewhat appealing to me, I'm interested in it.

[ryboto]

Quote: Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/oxygen-0731.html


Quote: Cobalt is highly toxic and can cause death. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Poisoning

ha! Good find. I don't see why they're pushing solar so much with this "discovery". So, they find a new catalyst that can split water more efficiently. Why not harness that for H2 production? Couldn't this be a breakthrough for hydrogen powered vehicles as well?

[oohms]

An aussie guy did something similar, but used solar to heat ammonia, which produces other chemicals (and the whole thing is in a sealed system)
http://engnet.anu.edu.au/DEresearch/...chem/index.php

TBH, i dont see any of these being used as a base load solution. They all rely far too heavily on external factors, especially weather.

When i speak to anyone who opposes nuclear power, i simply cannot take them seriously if they can't explain how nuclear fission works. I ask people sometimes too, if it comes up in conversation and you would be surprised by how many people have no idea

[SuporterPoli]

Has anyone read this part:

The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water. When electricity -- whether from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source -- runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.

Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that occurs during photosynthesis

Oh yeah, that would really work well, replace oil with platinum the most expensive metal in the world.

[ryboto]

An aussie guy did something similar, but used solar to heat ammonia, which produces other chemicals (and the whole thing is in a sealed system)
http://engnet.anu.edu.au/DEresearch/...chem/index.php

TBH, i dont see any of these being used as a base load solution. They all rely far too heavily on external factors, especially weather.

When i speak to anyone who opposes nuclear power, i simply cannot take them seriously if they can't explain how nuclear fission works. I ask people sometimes too, if it comes up in conversation and you would be surprised by how many people have no idea

You expect people to know how Fission works? I know a lot of people who couldn't explain to you how electricity works, how a combustion engine works...I mean, I'm all for Nuclear, it's the only source that really makes sense right now, but still, I don't expect everyone to understand it.

[Hornet331]

Has anyone read this part:

Oh yeah, that would really work well, replace oil with platinum the most expensive metal in the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalytic_converter

also platinium is not as expensive as rhodium.

rhodium = 8k$ per ounce, platinum = 2k$ per ounce.

[Xoulz]

Yes, I agree on that also but there does come a time for the "greater good" and if enough people stand up and demand it, it will be done.
Get 50 million people in the US to sign a petition stating that they demand action on these issues in 18 months or those elected officials will NOT be reelected and you'd see fast action.

+10

I think we are all sick of life long stodgy campers.



.

[twilyth]

If anyone is still interested in the science, here is an article from Science News that 'splains it better than the MIT press release - IMHO.

In theory, you would get almost as much energy out as you put in. Not really something to write home about except for the fact that excess solar energy would be used to generate hydrogen during sunlight hours to be used when the solar panels are not producing. Of course that can already be done but not as efficiently.

What would be just as efficient and far less costly to implement would be super capacitors that store charge for days. They probably still have engineering and/or scaling problems but I know there is a line of power tools that use them so maybe it's the fact that there isn't a market for them yet. The first ones were made by Maxell but a quick search didn't reveal any recent articles.

[Bo_Fox]

90-95% of the total energy used in the world comes from gasoline (oil, petroleum) that we use out there for transportation. The energy that we use in home is nothing compared to the energy we use to get from point A to point B, or the energy used for shipping goods.

Now, if that could all be converted into stored fuel cells (ideally rechargeable ones), we're blessed. Only if there's enough Platinum, heh... What's the difference between mining for minerals to build photovoltaic solar panel cells or mining for uranium for nuclear-power plants? The price? So what?!?

Sometimes, I think that money should not be an object, unless rich people wanna die first before running out of """money"""? You guys are right, perhaps money will be the downfall of humanity.

Whoa:
"In the US, the average piece of food is transported almost 1,500 miles before it gets to your plate. In Canada, the average piece of food is transported 5,000 miles from where it is produced to where it is consumed." http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

[initialised]

Maybe this could be used when the EU glazes the Sahara Desert

[nn_step]

They still didn't fix the efficiency problems...

[adamsleath]

You expect people to know how Fission works? I know a lot of people who couldn't explain to you how electricity works, how a combustion engine works...I mean, I'm all for Nuclear, it's the only source that really makes sense right now, but still, I don't expect everyone to understand it.

there seems to be an anti-nuclear lobby in australia - which i find extremely annoying, im sure there are similar anti-nuclear "lobbyists" - AlGore being one of them (ffs)

based on the premise of what?Chernobyl and 3 mile island?ffs the world has moved on; there are hundreds of nuclear plants around the world that are being run properly with the correct storage of nuclear waste. (sorry you cant dump it in the ocean and expect not to have seriously bad contamination problems, it must be stored safely)

Nuclear plants should take the place of coal fired plants as they are decomissioned - at least to some degree.

bottom line - no-one is prepared to foot the bill in australia because the 'people' and the govt (who represent the people lol) dont want to spend money on new infrastructure - sure, spend more money on more dirty coal plants - that'll solve the energy needs of the human plague it is the governments job to cater for the ever expanding demands of the human plague, as it is the plague that votes with its hip pocket, nothing more., and i expect nothing better from a bunch of energy dependant vermin

it takes a whole lot of energy and mined resource to manufacture solar panels - are they actually worth putting in? are they cleaner and greener than just sucking the nipple of the coal fired stations?

im not savvy with the life cycle costing of roof mounted solar panel systems but their pollution emissions are zero during their...25+ year life perhaps they last longer im not sure
i have heard that some newer panels can have a life span of 40 odd years...?
http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_solar_used.html

http://www.braemacenergy.com.au/prod...y_selection=78
with the 8000$ rebate in australia it's practically a gift from the government.

http://solarpanelrebate.com.au/promo...c-3bc5d0fd230d

Schools Australia wide under the National Solar Schools Program can get a 2kW Solar Panels System with a 100% rebate.

gee why bother when it's free?

australians can expect energy prices to rise when carbon trading taxes are implemented as part of the kyoto agreement; it's just a matter of time. the subsidised incentives are there for home owners (and buyers) to become energy self sufficient; i suggest you use them.

but it's probably cheaper& easier just to keep whinging and whining about rising energy costs.

[sonofahb]

i love how these european green freaks who act as if they know everything come on here and declare global warming as a fact and due to humans. the person on this thread who stated the earth is headed into another ice age is completely correct. warming of the earth has a hell of a lot more to do with the ocean currents then it does the atmosphere. the middle ages was on average 5-7 degrees hotter than is today.(which is huge) well into the beginning of the industrial age, the earth went through a fifteen year long period of cooling.

now regarding this american discovery of storing power from the sun. wow i think its great. but there are going to be some limitations. i know that in 1 square foot of sunlight you have ~ 90 watts of solar heat/light/power. the average american home uses between 18-30 kwh per day. now the square footage on my roof would be enough for my average usage. the problem is peak wattage. suppose my 8000 watt water heater comes on while in cooking dinner on my ~4000 watt stove. the refigerator decides to kick on(~3000 watts?) and then i decide to turn on my tv,(300 watts) the garage door opener pops on(~1000 watts) hairdryer is being used (1500 watts). they will have to make it be able to deliver high amounts of current during peak usage which is the problem with most green energy at the moment.

[Movieman]

i love how these european green freaks who act as if they know everything come on here and declare global warming as a fact and due to humans. the person on this thread who stated the earth is headed into another ice age is completely correct. warming of the earth has a hell of a lot more to do with the ocean currents then it does the atmosphere. the middle ages was on average 5-7 degrees hotter than is today.(which is huge) well into the beginning of the industrial age, the earth went through a fifteen year long period of cooling.

now regarding this american discovery of storing power from the sun. wow i think its great. but there are going to be some limitations. i know that in 1 square foot of sunlight you have ~ 90 watts of solar heat/light/power. the average american home uses between 18-30 kwh per day. now the square footage on my roof would be enough for my average usage. the problem is peak wattage. suppose my 8000 watt water heater comes on while in cooking dinner on my ~4000 watt stove. the refigerator decides to kick on(~3000 watts?) and then i decide to turn on my tv,(300 watts) the garage door opener pops on(~1000 watts) hairdryer is being used (1500 watts). they will have to make it be able to deliver high amounts of current during peak usage which is the problem with most green energy at the moment.

I won't debate your first paragraph as I'm not knowledable enough on the subject.
The second paragraph is an easy one though: "Grid tied solar"
You still are tied into the electrical grid and when your needs are higher than your system can deliver you are taking it off the grid and when your system is generating more than your needs you are putting that electrical power back into the grid.
Cake..White cake..It's done now and it works.
The issue with solar right now is in cost and payback.
Last year I did a cost analysis of doing it on my house.
A 48x26' split-level,2200 sq ft, typical US blue collar single family home.
Electrical usage( not heat or hot water) is app 2700 KW/H/month
KW/h=$.145 cents here.
Cost of the parts(Panels,Inverter,etc) was app $80,000.00 to generate 3000 HW/H/Month..That's parts, no labor, I could do the job myself.
Expected lifetime of the panels was 25 years. 10 years for the inverter.
Payback worked out to 26.5 years.
Now thats simple numbers with no interest figured in on a loan as there would be so you can see the numbers aren't there for anyone to invest in it.
The price of the panels has to drop by at least 20-30% before this becomes viable.
From a financial perspective it is also an investment for a younger person IF and when the panel prices drop.
In 26 years if I'm still around I'll be 81..

[Marvin_The_Martian]

If anyone is still interested in the science, here is an article from Science News that 'splains it better than the MIT press release - IMHO.

In theory, you would get almost as much energy out as you put in. Not really something to write home about except for the fact that excess solar energy would be used to generate hydrogen during sunlight hours to be used when the solar panels are not producing. Of course that can already be done but not as efficiently.

What would be just as efficient and far less costly to implement would be super capacitors that store charge for days. They probably still have engineering and/or scaling problems but I know there is a line of power tools that use them so maybe it's the fact that there isn't a market for them yet. The first ones were made by Maxell but a quick search didn't reveal any recent articles.

Thanks I really didn't get it what exactly was more efficient but your link made that clear ( kobalt instead of platinum, they don't understand the chemistry involved but it works ( the wonders of science.. idk how it does it, but it does! ) ).

Like I said I was doing the same process in my physics kit when I was 8 or so.

[xlink]

Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that occurs during photosynthesis

Has anyone read this part:

Oh yeah, that would really work well, replace oil with platinum the most expensive metal in the world.

CATALYST...

that means it doesn't deteriorate in such an instance, it merely enhances the rate at which a reaction occurs.

[Marvin_The_Martian]

Xlink even better they are replacing the platinum with kobalt ( though idk how plentyfull kobalt is ).

[$a1Ty]

bloody hell, would people jump off the solar cell bandwagon

its uses more energy to make the damn panel then you get out of it in its entire life cycle

who cares about storing the energy, improve the effeciency of solar cells by a lot, or move on to something that is er better.....

[Eson]

I dont belive in solar power, not in my country anyway. When we need the power most, there wont be any sunlight since the sun will not be over the horizon for meny if any hours.

[Shintai]

I dont belive in solar power, not in my country anyway. When we need the power most, there wont be any sunlight since the sun will not be over the horizon for meny if any hours.

It works fine in Denmark. So I dont see why not in Sweden.

[zabomb4163]

oh yeah... the only problem photovoltaic has right now is price, if it gest cheaper, lets say 2-3€ per m² and has a efficency of 2-3% hell yeah i take that any day over nuclear energy. With that price efficency doesn't matter. I just plaster my roof with that.

Nuclear energy is only a short term solution, we already consume more uran than it is mined and it doesn't get better, there are 93 plants planed worldwide with 24 in china alone.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/info.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing
currently we use 0.7% of the uranium mined. The rest is put into "storage." For the last 30 years the number of nuclear power plants has remained constant and thus we have 30 years of 0.7% usage. At current usage the other 99.3% would get us 4,200 years. Thats just the uranium we already have stored above around at the nuclear power plants. Not including reserves in the ground. If you include the reserves in the ground we are talking about in the 10's of thousands of years.

summary of features
-zero emissions
-practicially unlimited energy source
-minimal land usage (solar and wind use quite a bit)
-reliable (solar and wind are not)
-safe (pebble reactors are impossible to melt down)
-self-sustaining (billions in subsidies are not required)
-environmentally safe (producing solar panels requires the manufacture of many toxic chemicals...same for the plastics wind turbines are constructed from)

[Shintai]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing
currently we use 0.7% of the uranium mined. The rest is put into "storage." For the last 30 years the number of nuclear power plants has remained constant and thus we have 30 years of 0.7% usage. At current usage the other 99.3% would get us 4,200 years. Thats just the uranium we already have stored above around at the nuclear power plants. Not including reserves in the ground. If you include the reserves in the ground we are talking about in the 10's of thousands of years.

I would say thats quite a wrong statement by a massive magnitude.

However, as also said earlier. We got plenty of uranium in the ground. But its just getting more and more expensive to digg out. That means prices are rising fast and nuclear power equally to increase cost. Also the supply of cheap fuel from old russian nukes and such is close to an end.

In dec. 2001 the price on NA UF6 was about 30$. In dec. 2006 it was 200$. And atm its artificially low due to recycle of nuclear weapons.

Uranium mines are getting empty, new needs to be open. The estimate is we can make 300 times more, but at 10x the cost.

In 2005...

• Supply from mines was 102.5 million pounds
• Demand was 171 million pounds
• The gap was 68.5 million pounds.

Must be alot of..."storage".

summary of features
-zero emissions
-practicially unlimited energy source
-minimal land usage (solar and wind use quite a bit)
-reliable (solar and wind are not)
-safe (pebble reactors are impossible to melt down)
-self-sustaining (billions in subsidies are not required)
-environmentally safe (producing solar panels requires the manufacture of many toxic chemicals...same for the plastics wind turbines are constructed from)

Holy crap...
Zero emissions. Same as everything else. Tho you do know cooling towers?
Unlimited..yes...but at a very very high price if demand keep going up.
Minimal land usage? No..you want large safety zones. You dont want to be a neighbour to one.
Safe? Highly radioactive materials aint safe. Just because it cant do a melt down doesnt mean it can expose alot of radiation and radioactive materials to the surroundings.
Self-sustaining? No. There is large goverment funding behind nuclear plants. Else they would build coal due to cheaper prices.
Environmentally safe. See safe, plus the waste disposal is...safe? I think not. And for solar panels and windmills etc you can recycle. With nuclear waste you need 40000 or so year storage somewhere. A nice present to future generations.

I could say alot better things about nuclear plants. But it would be none of the above if compared to renewable energy sources.

[twilyth]

he's talking about waste generated already that is sitting at plants because it hasn't been reprocessed. Anyway, breeder reactors make more plutonium than they consume so running out of fuel would NEVER be a problem.

pebble bed reactors are relatively safe. They're gas cooled and can't melt down. If individuall pebbles are damaged you can have problems but nothing on the scale of Chernobyl or 3 mile island. Reprocessing would handle most of the waste just like they do in France.

Technological advances will eventually make it possible to decontaminate waste. You can already transmute elements in a particle accelerator - it's just not cost effective.

[Hornet331]

I would say thats quite a wrong statement by a massive magnitude.

However, as also said earlier. We got plenty of uranium in the ground. But its just getting more and more expensive to digg out. That means prices are rising fast and nuclear power equally to increase cost. Also the supply of cheap fuel from old russian nukes and such is close to an end.

In dec. 2001 the price on NA UF6 was about 30$. In dec. 2006 it was 200$. And atm its artificially low due to recycle of nuclear weapons.

Uranium mines are getting empty, new needs to be open. The estimate is we can make 300 times more, but at 10x the cost.



Must be alot of..."storage".



Holy crap...
Zero emissions. Same as everything else. Tho you do know cooling towers?
Unlimited..yes...but at a very very high price if demand keep going up.
Minimal land usage? No..you want large safety zones. You dont want to be a neighbour to one.
Safe? Highly radioactive materials aint safe. Just because it cant do a melt down doesnt mean it can expose alot of radiation and radioactive materials to the surroundings.
Self-sustaining? No. There is large goverment funding behind nuclear plants. Else they would build coal due to cheaper prices.
Environmentally safe. See safe, plus the waste disposal is...safe? I think not. And for solar panels and windmills etc you can recycle. With nuclear waste you need 40000 or so year storage somewhere. A nice present to future generations.

I could say alot better things about nuclear plants. But it would be none of the above if compared to renewable energy sources.

what shintai said, just to add the actual uran production/consumption numbers:

as of 2007:

• 41.279 tons world wide production
• 64,615 tons required

most of the gap is filed by the scraping of nuclear warheads but they are limited.

new mines are comming online, but they cant keep up with the rising demand, now that everyone wants to build powerplants.

And even with the new reactor typs you have nuclear waste that has to be dealt with, as shintai mentioned.

[krogen]

Cost of the parts(Panels,Inverter,etc) was app $80,000.00 to generate 3000 HW/H/Month..That's parts, no labor, I could do the job myself.
Expected lifetime of the panels was 25 years. 10 years for the inverter.
Payback worked out to 26.5 years.

That's considering the cost of electricity will stay relatively close to what it is now? If it goes up by a significant amount in the next few years, solar power will probably look like a good alternative.