Solar efficiency of silicon panels won't be greater than 50% due to heat energy loss. Need a metal that can absorb heat greater and conduct electricity, such as copper.

Beyond my technical paygrade.

Is 50% efficiency not a good rate of conversion from solar to electrical power?

It depends on your point of view. Today's Internal combustion engines run at 30% efficiency, a similar efficiency to today's silicon solar panels. If you think 30% to 50% efficiency is good enough then good for you.

What he's saying is solar is not the energy wave of the future and will not eliminate or even greatly reduce dependence upon oil.

Which everyone already knows...

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Poor Spot! He was tired of being thought of as stupid. "I'm gonna join Mensa," he said to myself, "and then I'll be legally permitted to wear the society's insignia--a tattoo of a little map pin pushed into my flesh--and then everyone'll know that I'm not dumb at all!"
Spot Joins Mensa
by James "Kibo" Parry

The Israelis are building ONE solar energy plant that will supply 5% of their energy needs.

And then there's this from the boys at MIT....

July 31, 2008 11:00 AM PDT
MIT researchers split water to store solar energy
Posted by Martin LaMonica

The key to plentiful solar power is water, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Daniel Nocera.

Nocera and his MIT colleague, Matthew Kanan, on Thursday will publish a technical paper that describes what they claim is a breakthrough in solar energy storage.


The key to MIT's discovery is a catalyst made from abundant materials that can make oxygen gas by passing an electrical current through water more effectively than previous methods.

(Credit: MIT)The idea is to use the energy from solar photovoltaic panels (or another electricity source) to crack water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen gas. Those gases would be stored and used later in a fuel cell to make electricity when the sun is not shining.

The concept is a closed-loop system: running the hydrogen and water through the fuel cell creates water, which can be captured and used again.

The hope is that within 10 years, a cost-effective system that combines clean energy generation with storage can be engineered and available cheaply to people around the world.

"I'm open-sourcing this to let everybody run with it," he said. "My plan is that when people see it, they'll see it's easy to do and they'll start working it."

Artificial photosynthesis
The core scientific discovery was finding a way to break oxygen out of the water with a relatively inexpensive and benign material, Nocera said. The catalyst--made of a cobalt phosphate--can operate in plain water at atmospheric pressure, giving it more potential than existing methods, he said.

Commercially available electrolyzers already split hydrogen atoms from water. A hydrogen filling station, for example, could use an electric-powered electrolyzer to break off hydrogen from water.

A finished system that MIT researchers envision would separate both hydrogen and oxygen. Once stored, both gases would be fed into a fuel cell using a second catalyst like platinum to make electricity.

John Turner, a research fellow in photoelectric chemistry at the National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL), called the work a "significant result."

MIT researchers split water to store solar energy | Green Tech - CNET News.com

Ridiculous statement.

The Israelis are building one solar energy plant that will supply 5% of their energy needs.

Every new house built in America should be required to have solar shingles on it.

That would reduce the need for oil.

Efficiency doesn't mean a whole lot for solar. When I say efficiency here I mean "percentage of solar flux converted to electrical power". As solar advocates never tire of pointing out, the total amount of power that falls to earth as sunlight in one day could power today's civilization for a thousand years or whatever.

No, what's really important for solar is cost efficiency, not photo-electric efficiency. The answer: printing solar cells like newspapers. They aren't very efficient, but who cares, they're cheap. Konarka and Nanosolar are two examples. I really don't think their technology will displace coal or natural gas power as the backbone of industrial power. But they'll do a nice job of counteracting my a/c bill in the summer when the sun comes out.

They are only one part of the solution, but they are getting more and more efficient, and the Israelis are leading the way in this technology.

Give Americans a shot of reducing their energy bills and most of them WILL take it.

But it's about economics, folks.

Does the return on investment work for most of us?

Not yet.

Few of us can afford to get off (or contribute to) the grid right now.

Solar panels have nothing to do with heat. At least from the photoelectric effect studies I've done. Photons of light from the sun enter into the panel. There are individual chambers where wavelengths will reach tiny metal panels. The light excites the metal, which will give off electrons. A circuit is created that loops from the metal, to a generator (more specific term unknown), and back to the chamber. The excited electron creates a flux, thus sending a current through the wire. This happens repeatedly. The work required to remove the electron and the level of kinetic energy given off from freed electron go against each other. So if we have a metal that will easily give off it's outer valence shell electrons, then we will create more voltage from the chamber. Do this a few thousand times every second and that's a solar panel. Currently, people who are installing solar panels on their homes are getting paid from the electric companies for the excess energy they are bringing in. Pretty cool stuff, if ya ask me. Add this along with solar, nuclear, and bio fuels and we'll be oil free in no time.

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Nomdeplume-"you are just upset because I fuck all you lefties up the ass without lube."

What I'm saying is solar energy is more abundant than oil. And to use solar energy we should efficiently harness the energy and even generate the nuclear fusion/fission reactions of the sun here on the earth, so we can have a portable fuel source for exploring the rest of the universe. What happens when the star dies? Then your single source of energy is gone also unless you can generate the same reactions using the same matter as the star. You need the proper balance of night and day to prevent overheating. The earth is a perfect example, it is half light and half darkness. However, too much or too little of anything is bad in my opinion. Too much sun and you will burn up like Mercury or Venus. Too little sun and you will be too cold like Mars.

Are you suggesting we recreate solar fusion/fission because one day the sun will die and we'll be without that energy?

You need to expand on that topic, please.

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Nomdeplume-"you are just upset because I fuck all you lefties up the ass without lube."

HEHE

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Charles_Main

"Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct."
Thomas Jefferson

"Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition."
Thomas Jefferson

for the backup. In my opinion, a solar fusion/fission reactor could power an entire city, or a large ship that we could use to explore the universe. In the sun, fusion occurs when electrons are bombarded into Hydrogen atoms creating helium atoms and releasing energy in the form of photons, the opposite reaction, fission, occurs on the inner part of the sun where a electon is forced out of a helium atom and made into a hydrogen atom. This occurs at extremely high pressure and temperature. If we could find a way of sustaining these chain reactions in a controlled environment, we could have a source of power that could be used for many things.

And in our free country based on liberty.. if someone CHOOSES not to have solar panels... your gestapo of totalitarian socialist enviro-nazi control control will do what?

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Socialism will only work with a society of prisoners, slaves, and robots who can be controlled by the ruling elite (which will always exist in that type of system).

Join the ban bobo brigade! Join the ban kirk company. Just say no to trolls.

And for the idiotic statement of the month...