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Roll-to-roll fabricated perovskite solar cells under ambient room conditions

nature.com

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Re: Roll-to-roll fabricated perovskite solar cells under ambient room conditions

#101

Post by gradschoolfail »

pfdietz wrote: post #92
refulgentis wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true: i.e. they use rare metals not rare earth metals . On HN, I hope we can share a correction like that respectfully: after all, they gave good info, except for a one-word slip of the tongue. The critique seems to extend beyond correcting that error, becoming confrontational, questioning motivation and honesty with phrases like "supposedly worked in." and the long bit defending lifespan and enviromental imp…

Which rare metals do they use? Silver for contact wires? If silver supplies were inadequate (they're not) these could be substituted for with copper, if a barrier layer was included between it and the silicon.

Maybe indium in ITO for those fancy transparent front contacts. Or tellurium in CdTe, supposedly still costeffective compared to “thick” Si cells. I would still give GGP a break it can be tricky to venture even small steps outside ones specialty these days

Re: Roll-to-roll fabricated perovskite solar cells under ambient room conditions

#102

Post by fy20 »

londons_explore wrote: post #7

The market need for cheaper solar cells seems to have evaporated, since the vast majority of the cost of solar projects these days is always in labour/land/wiring/inverters/grid connection/maintenance contracts. That means saving a bit of money on the panels in return for lower efficiency is never a good deal.

(In the US)

In my part of EU the cost of getting 10kW of solar installed has gone from around €7000 in 2021 to €2000 or even less today. That is after government incentives, but the incentives have not changed during that time - it's a fixed amount per kW. The price reduction is due to the cost of panels and equipment going down.

Re: Roll-to-roll fabricated perovskite solar cells under ambient room conditions

#103

Post by pfdietz »

gradschoolfail wrote: post #101
pfdietz wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which rare metals do they use? Silver for contact wires? If silver supplies were inadequate (they're not) these could be substituted for with copper, if a barrier layer was included between it and the silicon.

Maybe indium in ITO for those fancy transparent front contacts. Or tellurium in CdTe, supposedly still costeffective compared to “thick” Si cells. I would still give GGP a break it can be tricky to venture even small steps outside ones specialty these days

And, maybe in the future, gallium as a dopant in silicon cells, since it doesn't experience nearly as much light induced degradation as boron does. But dopants are used in very small amounts.

I think some power electronics uses europium silicide (or was that erbium?) as a gate material, so maybe in inverters? Again, the quantities would be small.

Re: Roll-to-roll fabricated perovskite solar cells under ambient room conditions

#104

Post by hagbard_c »

pfdietz wrote: post #91
gergi137 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which rare earth minerals go into solar cells?

No rare earth minerals are in solar cells. This is a famously bullshitty meme that was being propagated by Michael Shellenberger.

A simple search of the 'net will answer the question far better than this attack on Shellenberger. It will show that rare earth minerals can be used in PV panels as doping elements. Interestingly enough it is especially Perovskite PV cells which seem to benefit from the use of these additives [1,2]:

(1) Recently, use of rare earth (RE) ions doped nanomaterials in PSCs, has been identified as an effective means to address the aforementioned issues by expanding the range of absorption spectra minimizing the non-absorption loss of solar photons, enhancing light scattering and improving operational stability.

(2) Rare earth ion doped nanomaterials can be used in perovskite solar cell to expand the range of absorption spectra and improve the stability due to its up conversion and down conversion effect. This article reviews recently progress in using rare earth ion doped nanomaterials in mesoporous electrodes, perovskite active layers, and as an external function layer of perovskite solar cell.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10020...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13877...

Re: Roll-to-roll fabricated perovskite solar cells under ambient room conditions

#105

Post by pfdietz »

hagbard_c wrote: post #104
pfdietz wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No rare earth minerals are in solar cells. This is a famously bullshitty meme that was being propagated by Michael Shellenberger.

A simple search of the 'net will answer the question far better than this attack on Shellenberger. It will show that rare earth minerals can be used in PV panels as doping elements . Interestingly enough it is especially Perovskite PV cells which seem to benefit from the use of these additives [1,2]: (1) Recently, use of rare earth (RE) ions doped nanomaterials in PSCs, has been identified as an effective means to ad…

That's just in the lab. If you buy PV modules right now the cells will not be doped with rare earth elements. And almost everything demonstrated in the lab doesn't progress beyond there (which is fine; that's how technology R&D works.)

I think the closest one could come to making the "REE in solar" claim make sense would be decoloring agents for the glass. Cerium could be used for this, but I think manganese is cheaper.

Re: Roll-to-roll fabricated perovskite solar cells under ambient room conditions

#106

Post by tullianus »

pfdietz wrote: post #105
hagbard_c wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple search of the 'net will answer the question far better than this attack on Shellenberger. It will show that rare earth minerals can be used in PV panels as doping elements . Interestingly enough it is especially Perovskite PV cells which seem to benefit from the use of these additives [1,2]: (1) Recently, use of rare earth (RE) ions doped nanomaterials in PSCs, has been identified as an effective means to ad…

That's just in the lab. If you buy PV modules right now the cells will not be doped with rare earth elements. And almost everything demonstrated in the lab doesn't progress beyond there (which is fine; that's how technology R&D works.) I think the closest one could come to making the "REE in solar" claim make sense would be decoloring agents for the glass. Cerium could be used for this, but I think manganese is cheap…

Cerium is common in solar coverglass used in space, but I'm not sure I've heard of it being used for terrestrial applications.

Re: Roll-to-roll fabricated perovskite solar cells under ambient room conditions

#107

Post by ElevenLathe »

mlyle wrote: post #77
sandworm101 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If it's cheap enough, you can tolerate failures But you just can't. When you are using lots of tiny things all connected through each other then you have less tolerance for faults, not more. One bad connector can mean that an entire run of shingles is dark. So even a 1% fault rate, if you have a few hundred connections in each run of shingles, means that basically nothing is connected. Or think of a long fence. On…

Most of what you say was anticipated by the comment you replied to: > > I do agree you need big panels to not have excessive labor from connections. > You're just setting yourself up for a long day of checking connectivity only to have the fence shift again. If only we had ways to make long runs of wiring relatively reliable. My point is: there's second order effects: expensive panels need to have as high of a capaci…

There are also non-linearities. Obviously there are some regions in in the cheapness/efficiency/durability space that vastly increase the practical ability to deploy these things. If we had 99% efficient panels that cost pennies per square meter, and last for years, then lots more applications could potentially open up. A 50% cheaper panel may not unlock that now, but it brings us closer.

Even if we never get to any of these thresholds, its worth a shot. Cleaning up the energy sector needs to be all-hands-on-deck and people researching this stuff doesn't preclude policy changes (subsidies, federal job guarantee/new CCC, etc.) to address the labor angle.

Re: Roll-to-roll fabricated perovskite solar cells under ambient room conditions

#108

Post by science4sail »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #29

Here is the graph of exponential installed solar capacity [1]. Like Moore’s law, continuous technological innovation and investment will be required to keep the pace. We just hit 1 terawatt— and doubling time seems to be about every 3 years. So… 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128,512,1028, 2056 terawatts in 30 years? With 20% capacity, that’s equivalent to >300,000 Million Tons of Oil (MToE) per year. Current global energy consump…

* That Wikipedia link gives an average global energy consumption of 4.810^12 watts (assuming 11.63 TWh per MToE). The solar insolation of Earth is about 210^17 watts The total power output of the Sun is about 410^26 watts. The total solar power output of the Milky Way galaxy is about 410^37 watts

Assuming exponential growth and assuming 20% utilization, that gives us

A fully solar economy in ~13 years * Kardashev Type 1 in ~59 years * Kardashev Type 2 in ~272 years * Kardashev Type 3 in ~381 years

Re: Roll-to-roll fabricated perovskite solar cells under ambient room conditions

#109

Post by chris1993 »

WillAdams wrote: post #67
sandworm101 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> other stuff that was going to use labor anyway (shingles, asphalt, siding, etc) No. None of that ever works. Everyone has the "good idea" of cramming PV into some other product thinking that doing so will somehow reduce labor. It never does. Solar shingles are typical. They sound great but in reality require hundreds or thousands of electrical connections all spread over the moving flexible surface that is a woode…

PEV in metal roofing seems more workable.

Attaching to the roof requires screwing fasteners through the metal in fairly arbitrary positions based on the underlying framing. It’s not going to be easy to have electric connections.

Re: Roll-to-roll fabricated perovskite solar cells under ambient room conditions

#110

Post by WillAdams »

chris1993 wrote: post #109
WillAdams wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PEV in metal roofing seems more workable.

Attaching to the roof requires screwing fasteners through the metal in fairly arbitrary positions based on the underlying framing. It’s not going to be easy to have electric connections.

Normally folks only put holes through the lifted up/corrugated sections (so as to minimize the likelihood of leaking) so all the area in-between (the larger flat sections) are where the electronics/solar arrays would go.
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