Solar: V-shaped Christmas Gift

One of my goals in this blog is to avoid, as much as possible, the pitfall of overhyping every purported advance to come along in the alternative energy space. The reason this is a pitfall is that critics can then claim, "oh, that's really not going to change the game... a 10% improvement does nothing when you need to reduce the cost of solar by 67% to make it competitive with coal," and they promptly shift their focus elsewhere.

But I want to point out an article today as a good example of what I see as an overall trend in the alt energy space. In this article, researchers at Stanford claim that a relatively simple step, creating v-shaped PV cells, could increase efficiency of the cells by up to 50%. I find simple advancements like this fascinating not because they offer The Answer by themselves, but because the answer is going to come from a bundle of simple advancements such as this one. There may be ten different areas (shape of the cell, placement, mirrors, new cell technology such as CIGS, etc.) where incremental improvements will be made. Even if you only achieve 10% improvements in ten different areas, the cumulative effect can be massive, and in ten or twenty years we could see a world where people scoff at coal as being too expensive, never mind too dirty.

So without placing too much hope in any one of these advances, it's still great to see them happen.