zawy

The Tellurium Supernova Has Erupted

Dino, that article is correct: there's no tellurium shortage. There will easily be 1,000 tonnes/yr in 2012 when FSLR is producing 5GW/yr. Right Mark Anthony? Right?? ;) You know what i mean. Keep the faith.

The Tellurium Supernova Has Erupted

I forgot to mention energy storage. If supercapacitors do not pan out soon enough, flywheels are worth looking into. I bought BCON at $1.1 a share. In large-scale production, a $5,000 flywheel the size of a small hot-water heater can store enough energy for days for a solar-cell house. Carbon composite has changed everything in the old world of flywheels. In 5 years carbon nanotubes will cost $4 a pound (the current 5-year trend) and this could make flywheels a super technology in 10 years, keeping up with supercapacitors. There is a theoretical basis for this: as nano gets here, the mechanical and electrical worlds have equal potential.

The short-term for BCON is california needing to even-out the power grid voltage swings. After that, there's a lot of wind farms that need their output evened out.

The Tellurium Supernova Has Erupted

Great comments frflyer. I agree that using thermal solar plants might be more practical (no limit in indium and tellurium) and cheaper. But it really needs desert-like conditions and distribution since the curved mirrors need to stay clean and because of the complexity of the oil-to-water heat exchanger, tubes, tower, and turbine. This means at-home amorphous 100 micon silicon could still compete on a massive scale since CIGS and CdTe can only play a part (like wind) due to material constraints keeping them down to about 1 TWpeak combined (100 to 300 GW 24-hour net, enough for 15% of U.S. needs but spread out worldwide). At-home amorphous units would have a nice "independent" appeal in addition to saving a lot of distribution costs. But it would be nice if people could use 1 sq ft of mirror to provide 150 W of halogen-bulb equivalent light during the day. Using mirrors on the north side of the house to reflect light into windows would be a 80% conversion of sunlight energy into heat (double-pane windows and the mirror itself reflect about 20%). For most houses, simply having a silver roof with an air-gap in the summer and an internal black absorber in the winter would save more energy than a solar cells could produce year-round in a cloudy area. But i don't know how it could be reasonably implemented. Rotating 500 pounds of dirt-dessicant in and out of the sun for drying (and cooling the roof) combined with two cardboard window water-evaporator units and an attic fan can lower in-door temperature 15 degrees below ambient even in high-humidity areas like Mississippi, and not just Arizona and Nevada (they don't need the dirt-dessicant to dry the air).