Solar Sunday is my weekly roundup of renewable energy and energy efficiency news from around the web.
In both cases, the idea is the same: use nanowires to more efficiently conduct electrons from the collection surface of the solar cell to an electrode. Contemporary thin-film solar cells provide no direct conduit for electron travel.If the process scales well, it has the potential to dramatically improve the efficiency of next-generation solar photovoltaic panels.
“If nanowires are going to be used massively in photovoltaic devices, then the growth mechanism of nanowires on arbitrary metallic surfaces is an issue of great importance,” said Paul Yu, a professor at UC San Diego, and a member of the project team which published the nanowire research. “We contributed one approach to growing nanowires directly on metal.”
Green Improves Job Satisfaction
If employers want to increase job satisfaction, a little shrubbery apparently goes a long way. Workers are happier when offices have plants and windows, a new study found.American office workers spend an average of 52 hours a week at their desks, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. Some might argue that not all that time is spent working, but still, all those hours in windowless offices with artificial light can take their toll.
A few green additions could have a large effect on worker happiness, according to the study led by Tina Cade, an associate professor of horticulture at Texas State University, and Andrea Dravigne of the San Marcos Nature Center.
“We pretty much found out that if you had windows and plants or even if you just had plants in your office, you were more satisfied with your job,” Cade told LiveScience. “We thought it was important for offices because a lot of times people are looking for ways to keep employees happy and do all these expensive things like put in a daycare or a workout room. Maybe for less investment they could put in a few plants in strategic places.”
Soils contain more than twice as much carbon as the atmosphere according to estimates (Food and Agriculture Association of the United Nations, FAO). Increasing the amount of carbon naturally stored in soils could provide the short-term bridge to reduce the impacts of increasing carbon emissions until low-carbon and sustainable technologies can be implemented. A group called Soil Carbon, based in Australia, makes the case for soil carbon storage in a presentation available in English, German, Spanish, Italian, Mexican and Portuguese. The Soil Carbon report includes impressive photographs, such as those above, demonstrating the difference between well-managed and poorly managed soils.
IBM has leveraged their computer-chip cooling know-how into a highly effective solar concentrator design. Bench-scale testing of the design (as pictured) shows an order of magnitude increase in solar power output from a unit cell. Other designers have worked out CPVs with similar concentrating lenses, typically paired with a tracking device. The cooling part of IBMs’ design is the cool part: something no other designer has access to, presumably.
Maciej Radosz and his colleagues at UW decided to use activated carbon and other carbon-rich materials — much cheaper alternatives — to adsorb the CO2. While previous studies had suggested that high pressure conditions were needed for the carbon-rich materials to work effectively, Radosz intuited that separation could also occur under low pressure/temperature conditions — a gamble that paid off when he put it into practice.The researchers are now working on scaling up the process and on making the carbon materials more selective; if successful, they believe it could drop the cost of CCS to $20 a ton, or less than half current prices.
Japanese electronics conglomerate Sony Corp (6758.T) said on Sunday it has developed dye-sensitized solar cells with an energy conversion efficiency of 10 percent, a level seen necessary for commercial use.Dye-sensitized solar cells, which use photosensitive dye and do not require costly and large-scale production equipment, are seen as a promising next-generation solar cell variety and potential threat to silicon-based solar cells.
