3d solar cell successfully manufactured

[woolfe9999]

You are absolutely correct, it is completely and totally about $/watt. There have been tons of "breakthroughs" that would drastically increase the efficiency of solar panels but to date no one has figured out how to manufacture them and be cost competitive. The thing about this particular one that has me excited is that they are able to make them with off the shelf components instead of highly specialized custom equipment (like Solyndria). That SHOULD keep costs down.

I am definitely hoping that this pans out, I am in the solar industry and even if it costs the same per watt as current glass does the total price to have solar installed would still go down due to less labor, racking, b.o.s., etc... Since it appears that the rest of the manufacturing process is the same as traditional glass and assuming their 50% number is sort of close they will have a lot of room to keep it cost competitive.

Yeah I hope it pans out, but have you looked at Solar3D, the company developing this? Its stock sells OTC at .05 per share right now. Its high is .3 per share. The stock did not go up after this press release. It has 2 employees. Sounds like a fly by night operation to me. Even if the tech is legit, they may not have the capital to go much farther than a prototype.

http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/snapshot/historical.asp?ticker=SLTD:US

 

[werepossum]

The 100 carburetor was never a real thing. What's next, the forever lightbulb that conspiracy theorists go on about, too?

This tech is neat but really not worth much until it's mass produced and doesn't cost a crap ton.

We're not that far from a real forever light bulb. For one thing, some of Edison's original (and horribly inefficient) light bulbs are I believe still operating. For another more practical thing, many of the LEDs I specify are now rated for 100,000 hours, and the drivers too are available rated for 100,000 hours. That's almost seventy years at four hours per night, or eleven years operated continuously. And from what I'm told, the only reason they aren't rated even higher is because the DOE limits how much life one can project based on bell curves. (And of course, with LED most of the failures aren't actually failures - since LEDs tend to operate forever, the industry and the DOE set an arbitrary failure point of 70% of original flux, so in theory most of the "failed" LEDs are still operating, just at less than 70% original output.)