Ok this is super cool. I am getting more interested in solar power now. The people at the National Renewable Energy Lab have created a robot that can not only make solar cells in record time, but also test the solar cells it has made while moving on to the next batch. This one-stop solar cell making process reduces the chance of malfunctioning or destroyed solar cells. This means that solar cells would become much more cost effective. Also, there would be no question as to the quality of solar cells due to the fact that EVERY SINGLE ONE will already have been tested by the robot. However, I have some doubts about President Obama's hope to get solar power to become cost-competitive with coal and fossil fuels by 2015. Five years is a long time but not long enough for solar to compete with fossil fuels. I am also interested in these new CIGS solar cells. If they are truly 20% efficient, then solar cells would become cost effective enough for household use.
Read for more info: http://www.nrel.gov/features/20100319_cigs.html
Interesting. The more I hear about solar power the more appealing it becomes, but I wonder, how easy is it for the panels, made of solar cells, to break or malfunction? This leading to making solar panels resistant to the elements as well as man (man with a bat or a stray bullet for example). For these, unknown factors it's gonna take more than five yrs. for solar energy to compete with a behemoth like fossil fuels.
ReplyDeleteThe problem that really is preventing the wide spread use of solar power is cost effectiveness. I'm a little skeptical on how well this robot can actually make solar panels cost effective. For instance creating a robot to be capable of what was described probably takes a lot of money up front. The only way it would become cost effective was if it was mass produced for an extended period of time. It would be hard to sell this because in this economy it is hard for buyers to put up so much money up front without guaranteed results. Since it would be very difficult to quantify how much this would actually save consumers I feel like solar power wouldn't really benefit from the creation of this robot. The cost effectiveness of solar panels relies on the improvements to the efficiencies of the panels themselves.
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