12-Year-Old May Hold Key to Solar Energy

I mean, I'm sure the kid is smart and all (and no doubt has had some help from his parents) but the media-hype to technical-details ratio here is off the charts.

“We have demonstrated that we can extract electrons using this approach,” Ready said. “Now we need to get a good baseline to see where we compare to existing materials, how to optimize this and what’s needed to advance this technology.”

If he is right, solar panels with his 3D cells would provide 500 times more light absorption than commercially-available solar cells and nine times more than cutting-edge 3D solar cells.

So apparently there is some advantage to 3D cells, apparently related to multiple light interactions:

"Regular solar cells are only 2D and only allow light interaction once," he said.

It's still not apparent what the basis is for the 500x light absorption figure. Seems to me that the most meaningful basis is the footprint of the device, but that is not clear from any story I've read on this subject.

Maybe they are 500x more efficient in the UV, but in that case it's a meaningless number because the Sun emits very little energy in the UV.

At the moment I've got no idea what he _actually_ did. Obviously, parts of this story are complete BS (e.g. 500 times). Is there something genuinely worthwhile? I haven't read a sufficiently detailed article to figure it out.

Although it is rather low on facts and high on hype.