Originally published October 1 2003
Solar breakthrough could suddenly make solar power cost effective
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The solar power question has always been an economic one: how much will it cost to "go solar?" The answer for many years has been a simple one: investing in solar equipment has a twenty-year payoff, give or take a few years.
This breakthrough could change all that, bringing the solar payoff into the 3 - 5 year range. At that point, solar power suddenly makes good economic sense. It might even attract the kind of investment necessary to create large-scale solar farms that feed power into the grid at a fraction of the cost of coal, wind or natural gas.
But is all this for real? That will take time to see. Without question, there's a tremendous amount of research focused on solving the solar power economic conundrum, and it's only a matter of time before someone comes up with a way to manufacture solar cells that have a much higher performance-to-cost ratio.
Princeton electrical engineers have invented a technique for making solar cells that, when combined with other recent advances, could yield a highly economical source of energy. The new photovoltaics are made from "organic" materials, which consist of small carbon-containing molecules, as opposed to the conventional inorganic, silicon-based materials. Organic solar cells could be manufactured in a process something like printing or spraying the materials onto a roll of plastic, said Peter Peumans, a graduate student in the lab of electrical engineering professor Stephen Forrest. The first organic solar cell, developed in 1986, was 1 percent efficient -- that is, it converted only 1 percent of the available light energy into electrical energy.
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