This sounds great, but for some years we hear of various discoveries that will greatly increase solar panel efficiency. Why are we still at 22%-ish?
Meanwhile silicon and CdTe solar cells continue to decrease in price and increase in efficiency year after year. At this point the current technology is cheap enough to be profitably used to supply power in many regions of the world. Any one who says we need a break through in solar to make it economic is wrong. At this point the solar panels themselves are less than half the cost of a solar installation.
Nearly all press releases talking about efficiencies over 50% are just talking about unpractical theoretical limits that would require cooling the solar cells to freezing temperatures or other schemes (i.e. talking about the carnot limit instead of the shockleyy-quiesser limit).
Blame journalists for hyping this because of the climate change focus.
I am involved in actively looking for better materials and better sources of energy. The reality is that there are no fundamental breakthroughs since oil and nuclear.
No matter what you hear we just haven't had anything that fundamentally changes the game.
So instead of actual breakthroughs in the fundamentals, we get marketing, branding, and communication. But this is not something that can be fixed with that, it's physics, not product innovation
We will most likely get fusion (far out) fuel cells (even further out) before we get any fundamental breakthroughs here.
Solar and wind is less than 1% of world energy consumption and is not expected to be more than 3-4% in 2040.
Energy is not a product/market problem it's a physics problem and we haven't had any major breakthroughs in that space for a long long time.
https://www.iea.org/weo/?fbclid=IwAR3eH1AFcRSPSEit8JINLCMvE_...
Incremental improvement and economic forces do matter. Solar is now cheaper than coal in many climates, and we are seeing the effects.
Of course, there are still many problems to be solved. But we're also working on incrementally on solutions to those. For example, battery cost is falling precipitously. "grid scale battery" was not a thing a decade ago, now you see installations popping up regularly.
I'd like to see cold fusion as much as the next guy, but dismissing incremental progress is foolish.
http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/181766/IntGenbyFuel20...
The state produces by far the most electricity of any state, too. It's almost twice as much as Florida.
https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=TX
Unfortunately it's also a huge petroleum and natural gas producer. About half of the energy used in the state is for industrial use, much of it for the oil and gas industries. On the bright side, natural gas is displacing coal in the meantime while solar and wind are not replacing it fast enough. It needs to get better, but things could be much worse.
Electricity is only ~20% of the entire energy usage as far as I remember.
That doesn't mean it will work at scale for society which is the primary issue.
The key thing to look for is energy density as that will be more likely to give society a bang for the buck.
Distributing solar cells out with the capacity factor of solar isn't economically feasible for society and neither possible as a main source of energy.
Nuclear and Hydro to some extent Thermal none of them are in vogue.
Look at the capacity factor of wind and solar, add to that the huge areas they need and the fact that they are intermittent and you start to get a glimpse of the problem.
This is neither economically nor technically feasible. You can't generate as much as you think and you can't do it at a cost that makes it feasible generally for society not even with lowered cost.
Currently, we are talking 1% of world energy consumption not expected to be much more than 3-4% in 2040 and that's despite huge investments and all the political goodwill you can ask for [1] Keep in mind that the numbers you normally see displayed is for electricity not for energy. Electricity is only a subset of energy.
Furthermore, investments in solar and wind is decreasing especially when you take china out of the equation. [2]
And again. Lab results or theoretically possible advantages most of the times aren't feasible in reality and at scale.
[1] https://www.iea.org/weo/?fbclid=IwAR3eH1AFcRSPSEit8JINLCMvE_...
[2] https://www.globalresearch.ca/growth-renewables-stalled-inve...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DsX2rpPW0AIVORG?format=jpg&name=...
Aren't you still connected to the traditional grid anyway?
A giant leap in solar efficiency doesn't solve the storage problem, and the storage problem doesn't need a magic physics solution, just large scale heads down engineering. My point is: solar is efficient enough now, and a sound economic choice. I make enough power in a year just with my roof for my house and car. I do need a storage solution to do power leveling, which is what I use the grid for now.
When you factor in the infrastructure to support you when you don't have power yourself then it suddenly looks less economically sound.
That's the point.
Modest estimate would be 200 000 over the last 30-40 years.
Some of it must relate to energy.
There are plenty of patents on energy just not many fundamental breakthroughs.
Automobile manufacturers have produced small numbers of fuel cell vehicles since the turn of the millennium:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell_vehicle#List_of_mode...
I'm not making claims about the actual merits of fuel cells, mind you. But claiming they're further out than fusion is bizarre. Some people are driving them around today. Nobody is generating net power from fusion today.
I am talking about the kind of fuel cells which can be used by wind and solar to store energy and distributed economically feasible.
We are not even close to that. If you know of anything, by all means, please let me know as the group I am part of would invest in it in a heart beat.
I don't know of anything like that either. Small fuel cells rely on expensive precious metal catalysts and large ones have too much capacity to be a good match for the distributed generation sector.
A technology that is commercially available but too expensive at present for large scale adoption, like fuel cells, is more mature than a technology that hasn't been demonstrated even in a cost-is-no-object context. That's why it's strange to hear fuel cells described as even further out than fusion power.