Recent Advances Move Solar Closer to Equaling Coal Costs

Mother Nature Network has a good blog article reviewing some recent improvements in Solar Panels that will help bring them closer to parity with coal costs. I don’t fully agree with the tone of the full article blaming recent cuts in government subsidies sounds more like sour grapes. I know in politics, especially in the USA, it has become increasingly popular to completely bemoan every decision politicians make. More of this is because of our over the top polarization currently at every level of government. Sorry for getting a little off topic but I always felt the best way to convince someone of your point of view is to make compelling arguments, not to belittle the other option. All it does in this case is give the other side reason to believe that without subsidies solar panels would not have made the advances they have over the past decade. It is like when I tell people I am vegetarian and they ask why and if I respond that eating meat is stupid I stand no chance to think about their the consequences of their actions.

Now the article itself talks about some very good news for the Solar Panel industry. They reference an article from MIT research that shows the potential for nano based panels to store indefinitely. There is another article from a MIT research team that shows a lot of promise of being able to print solar panels on virtually anything. Tests have shown this to have no degradation even after being folded more than a 1,000 times. Another article discusses the potential for a micro solar thermal panel. This would involve directing sunlight towards the panel to heat them up, which can currently only be done in very large systems. Another MIT project is using a virus to space the solar elements of the nanotubes in the exact optimal pattern. The last article talks about a coating to be in windows that could potentially reach 12% efficiency, while retaining the ideal transparency.

Overall it is very exciting to see a lot of good research and development projects in the work and hopefully some that can in the future will lead to revolutionary products. Despite the negative attitude that government should fund every project it is still exciting to see that private investments have increased over the past few years.