Video: Next Generation Solar Cells – Lowering Costs, Improving Performance and Scale
I love watching researchers talk about their passions and work. Apparently, by the end of the next decade, photovoltaics may be “hitting some big potential markets, hundreds of millions of people.”(Via Mit)
Introduction (Via MIT Word)
According to Tonio Buonassisi, we’re “on the cusp” of achieving a competitive technology for capturing the limitless energy of the sun. Buonassisi, in conversation with an MIT Museum audience, describes how, with the work of MIT and other researchers, photovoltaics may finally be coming into its own.
Buonassisi describes solar cells as his “life’s passion” since age 16, but scientists have been laboring somewhat longer to figure out how to convert sunlight to useful power on Earth. In 1954, Bell Labs pioneered the first solar cell. It took 12 thousand dollars’ worth of these “to run an ordinary household toaster,” says Buonassisi. In spite of a great leap forward in the 1990s, with breakthroughs around the purification of silicon crystals and large subsidies for national industries in Japan and Germany, solar energy today constitutes just 1% of total electric generation worldwide.
