|
Future Energy
eNews IntegrityResearchInstitute.org Nov.
9, 2006 |
1)
Silicon and Sun - Marine sponge holds the key to cheaper, more efficient solar cells.
2) Casimir Force Can be
Controlled
- Modifying charge carriers on the surface does the trick
3)
World Faces 'Dirty, Insecure' Energy Future - IEA World Energy Outlook 2006
just published
4)
Electricity from Sugar - metal catalyst heated to 800°C vaporizes soy oil
to make hydrogen.
5) Alternative Energy Fuels Index - The most comprehensive
alternative fuels pricing CD database
6)
Cheap, Superefficient Solar - Concentrating lens for PV generates a gigawatt in
your backyard
NOTE:
Get a FREE copy
of my DVD on "Future Energy Technologies" with any other DVD
order - "as seen in FE eNews" - TV
1) Silicon and Sun
Kevin Bullis, Technology
Review, Nov. 8, 2006 http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17726&ch=nanotech
|
|
|
|
Daniel Morse holds a species of marine sponge commonly
known as Venus's flower basket. In his lab
facing the Pacific Ocean, Daniel Morse is learning new ways to build complex
semiconductor devices for cheaper, more efficient solar cells. He has an
unlikely teacher: sea sponges. |
|
In his beachfront office overlooking the Santa Barbara
channel, Daniel Morse carefully unwraps one of his prized specimens. An
intricate latticework of gleaming glass fibers, it looks like a piece of
abstract art or a detailed architectural model of a skyscraper. But it's
actually the skeleton of one of the most primitive multicellular organisms
still in existence--a species of marine sponge commonly known as Venus's flower
basket. Morse, a molecular biologist at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, wants to know how such a simple creature can assemble
such a complicated structure. And then he wants to put that knowledge to work,
making exotic structures of his own.
The lowly sponge has come up with a remarkable solution to
a problem that has puzzled the world's top chemists and materials scientists
for decades: how to get simple inorganic materials, such as silicon, to
assemble themselves into complex nano- and microstructures. Currently, making a
microscale device--say, a transistor for a microchip--means physically carving
it out of a slab of silicon; it is an expensive and demanding process. But
nature has much simpler ways to make equally complex microstructures using
nothing but chemistry--mixing together compounds in just the right combination.
The sponge's method is particularly elegant. Sitting on the seabed thousands of
meters below the surface of the western Pacific, the sponge extracts silicic
acid from the surrounding seawater. It converts the acid into silicon
dioxide--silica--which, in a remarkable feat of biological engineering, it then
assembles into a precise, three-dimensional structure that is reproduced in
exact detail by every member of its species.
What makes the sponges' accomplishment so impressive, says
Morse, is that it doesn't require the toxic chemicals and high temperatures
necessary for human manufacture of complex inorganic structures. The sponge, he
says, can assemble intricate structures far more efficiently than engineers
working with the same semiconductor materials.
This primitive creature and a number of other marine
organisms have become an inspiration for researchers who hope to find simpler
and cheaper ways to build inorganic structures, such as semiconductor devices,
for use in computer microchips, advanced materials, and solar cells. The goal
is to make silicon and other inorganics self-assemble into working electronics
in the same way that the sponge assembles silica into complex shapes
(see "Others
in Bio-Inspired Materials,"). Energy-intensive, billion-dollar
semiconductor fabrication facilities might then be replaced by vats of reacting
compounds. But while practical industrial processes are still some way off,
scientists are coming to understand how sponges and other sea creatures perform
their microengineering miracles.
Morse and his team, for instance, are already using
biological tricks learned from the sponge to make new forms of semiconductors
with intriguing electronic properties, including the ability to convert light
into electricity--properties that could be useful in making cheaper, more
efficient solar cells. His group, says Morse, is building "structures that
had never been achieved before."
Start from Scratch
The seawater tanks outside Morse's lab are teeming with
colorful starfish and corallimorpharians, exotic creatures similar to sea
anemones. But Morse and James Weaver, a postdoc in the lab, are more interested
in an unremarkable-looking rust-colored blob: an orange puffball sponge, a
type of sponge that ordinarily lives in rock crevices just off the Santa
Barbara coast. If the Venus's flower basket is the glass cathedral of sponges,
this is the straw hut. The shapeless creature appears not to have a skeleton at
all; but once the researchers dissolve away the living material of its
exterior, a handful of tiny glass needles remain, each only two millimeters
long and thinner than a human hair.
Although Morse ultimately wants to understand sponge
skeletons that are more complex, these simple needles are a good place to
start. Scientists have long known that at the core of the glass needles are
strands of proteins, but no one understood what they did or how they related to
the needles' construction. So Morse and his colleagues began by isolating the
genetic code for one of the proteins--which as a family they came to call
"silicateins"--and ran their results through a huge database of known
proteins. They weren't expecting a match, but they found one--immediately. The
protein was similar to a protease, an enzyme found in the human intestine that
is involved in the breakdown and digestion of food.
"It was very bizarre," says Weaver. "Why
does the protein that templates the formation of the glassy skeleton of a
sponge have anything to do with a protease?" The researchers began to
suspect that the silicateins did more than merely serve as a passive template.
Indeed, they found that unlike any other enzyme previously studied, a
silicatein can do double duty. It actively produces building materials such as
silicon oxide--in a sense, by digesting compounds in the seawater--and then
causes the materials to line up along its length to form the needle-shaped
glass of the sponge skeleton. No such enzyme had been discovered, Morse says,
"in all the study of biomineralization, which has gone on for a couple of
hundred years."
Morse reasoned that if silicateins were so good at
producing silicon oxide, they might also be able to produce the types of metal
oxides that make good semiconductors in electronics and in some kinds of solar
cells. He was right. "At 16 degrees Celsius, the temperature at which the
sponge lives in the cool water right offshore from our lab," Morse says,
"this enzyme will catalyze the formation and stabilize the formation of
crystal forms of metal-oxide semiconductors that can't be made conventionally
except at very high temperatures."
The result suggested a less expensive way to make
semiconductors at lower temperatures, but there was a potential problem:
contamination. "A biologist is ecstatic when they get a purity of, say, 90
percent. A chemist is ecstatic when they get a purity of 99 percent," says
Morley Stone, a biochemist who directs research in biotechnology and materials
for the Air Force Research Labs at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near
Dayton, OH. "But an electronics engineer or someone else who needs to make
devices--they want to see materials that have five nines of purity behind them,
at least." He adds, "Oftentimes, when you take these biological
approaches, you can grow some interesting things and get some interesting
morphologies, but they're nowhere close to having the end-state purity that you
would need in a final device."
Morse and his colleagues knew that if they hoped to make
semiconductor materials for cheap but efficient solar cells, they would
probably need a chemical synthesis technique that took its cue from the sponges
but avoided the messy biology. The sponge's secret, they discovered, was that
amine and hydroxyl chemical groups in the enzyme produce the silicon oxide and
assemble it in the required way. That meant that all the chemicals a new
synthesis technique would require could be found in ammonia and water. The
researchers found that by mixing molecules containing the metal oxides'
precursors into water, and then exposing the mixture to ammonia gas, they could
create thin films of highly crystalline semiconductors--materials useful for
electronics. "This is the breakthrough that gets us into the domain of
practical usefulness," Morse says.
Moreover, the crystals have a complex nanostructure that
could improve the performance of photovoltaic devices. Near the surface of the
water, the concentration of ammonia gas is relatively strong, so this is where
the semiconductor crystal starts to form. As the ammonia slowly diffuses deeper
into the water, however, it causes crystals to grow down into the mixture,
producing a thin film that is not uniform but rather comprises a network of
needles or flat plates each merely a few billionths of a meter thick. That
network could be the basis for a more efficient solar cell.
Solar Dreams
The crystalline-silicon solar cells that currently
dominate the photovoltaic market are expensive--so expensive that the energy
they produce costs several times as much as energy generated by fossil fuels.
One reason is the high price of their raw materials. Silicon is extremely
abundant on earth, but it doesn't exist as a pure element; instead, it's bound
up with oxygen and other elements--in sand, for example. Making pure silicon
requires a lot of energy.
To lower the costs of solar cells, researchers have looked
for ways to cut down on the amount of silicon they use. Some have turned to
less expensive thin films made from cadmium telluride or copper indium
diselenide. Extremely thin layers of these new semiconductors can
absorb the same amount of light as thicker slabs of crystalline silicon.
Morse's fabrication technique could be an inexpensive way to make such thin
films; in addition, the nanostructure that his method produces is particularly
well suited for absorbing light and converting it into power.
A challenge in designing solar cells is making sure that
the electrons dislodged when light hits a semiconductor create a current. When
a photon strikes a solar-cell material, the result is both a free electron and
its positive counterpart, called a hole. If these can be pulled apart quickly
to opposite electrodes, an electrical current results. However, the difficulty
of separating them before they recombine and dissipate energy as heat is
"one of the major roadblocks for higher-efficiency solar cells," says
Aravinda Kini, program manager for biomolecular materials research at the U.S.
Department of Energy.
Morse's structures could surmount this roadblock. The
network of crystalline projections could be immersed in a transparent solid or
liquid electrode. Light would pass through the electrode, where it would be
absorbed by the crystal. Because the surface area of the structured thin film
is high (in one material, 90 to 100 times that of a traditional thin film),
many of the electron-hole pairs generated by the light would be near the
electrode interface; as a result, they could quickly separate, with one charge
carrier moving into the transparent electrode and the other carrier traveling
through the crystal to exit at the opposite electrode.
Already, Morse and colleagues have made more than 30 types
of semiconductor thin films and tested their photovoltaic properties. They are
now working to incorporate the semiconductors into functional solar cells. At
the same time, Morse continues to develop new biologically inspired methods for
assembling materials, with an eye to additional applications, including
semiconductor devices for safer, higher-power-density batteries and smaller
memory chips; he is also interested in creating laminated fibers for
ultrastrong building materials.
But excited though he is by the potential applications of
his work, Morse remains at heart a molecular biologist. Even as he talks about
how his research could lead to better solar cells, he gazes out the window at
the dolphins frolicking in the harbor. And he's still devoted to understanding
the mechanism behind the complexity of the sponge. Once again he examines the
exquisite skeleton of the Venus's flower basket, though he's no doubt seen it
thousands of times. "This was made of glass, by a living creature,"
he exclaims. "It's incredible!"
Other Bio-Inspired Materials
|
Researcher |
Goal |
Strategy |
|
Joanna Aizenberg, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ |
Strong, self-healing building materials
and more-resilient optical fibers |
Understanding how sponges assemble
inorganic materials |
|
Illhan Aksay, Princeton |
Self-healing materials and better biosensors |
Investigating sea-shells and other biological systems |
|
Angela Belcher, MIT |
Better batteries and advanced materials for electronics, energy, and
medicine |
Engineering |
|
Samuel I. Stupp, Northwestern |
Better sensors and solar cells |
Using peptides |
Kevin Bullis is Technology Review's
nanotechnology and materials science editor.
2) Casimir
Force for Good in MEMS Design
2 November 2006, Phys Rev Lett 97
170402, http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v97/e170402
Researchers in the US and Russia have demonstrated that the Casimir force
between two conducting surfaces can be controlled by modifying the density of
charge-carrying particles within the surfaces. The result could have positive
implications for the design of novel microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS.
The mysterious attraction between two neutral, conducting surfaces in a
vacuum was first described in 1948 by Henrik Casimir and cannot be explained by
classical physics. Instead it is a purely quantum effect involving the zero-point
oscillations of the electromagnetic field surrounding the surfaces.
These fluctuations exert a "radiation pressure" on the surfaces and
the overall force is weaker in the gap between the surfaces than elsewhere,
drawing the surfaces together.
The Casimir force can be both a help and a hindrance in the design of the
micrometre-scale mechanical components used in MEMS. It can cause trouble by
causing components to stick to one another, but it has also been exploited to
control the movement of conducting plates in MEMS devices. As a result, the
precise control of the Casimir force would be an important tool for MEMS
designers.
Now Umar Mohideen of the University of California, Riverside
and colleagues have made an important step towards Casimir control by
demonstrating that materials with higher charge-carrier densities are subject
to greater Casimir forces than those with lower densities. The researchers came
to this conclusion by using a contact-mode atomic force microscope (AFM) with a
gold-coated polystyrene sphere of diameter 0.6 microns attached to the
microscope’s cantilever. The sphere was placed near to a silicon plate and the
Casimir force between the two was measured. Two plates were studied – a control
plate and a plate that was doped with impurities to boost its charge-carrier
density by a factor of about 20 000. The Casimir forces differed by as much as
17 pN at 70 nm separation between ball and plate, which is about 7% of the
total Casimir force on the ball and plates.
Darius Nikbin is a freelance science writer based in the UK
Related Links
Restricted
Links
Related
Stories
The Casimir effect: a force
from nothing
07 November 2006, Rob Edwards, New Scientist.com
news service, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10460-world-faces-dirty-insecure-energy-future.html
The International Energy Agency (IEA) http://www.iea.org/, which
involves 26 governments, says that business as usual could lead to price shocks
and sudden interruptions in energy supply, as well as a huge growth in
climate-wrecking carbon dioxide emissions.
"The energy future we are facing today, based on projections of current
trends, is dirty, insecure and expensive," says IEA's Executive Director
Claude Mandil. "New government policies can create an alternative energy
future which is clean, clever and competitive."
The IEA, based in Paris, was asked by world leaders at the last two G8
summits, at Gleneagles in Scotland and St Petersburg in Russia, to advise on
future energy scenarios. In response, it is today publishing World
Energy Outlook 2006, which examines how countries can reduce their
dependence on imported fossil fuels.
It makes an unprecedented attempt to map out a future in which the rise in
global energy demand is slowed, so that by 2030 it will be 10% less than it
would be with business as usual. The represents a radical departure
from the IEA's traditional stance in favour of unrestrained growth.
The shift could be achieved with a major investment in improving the energy
efficiency of vehicles, buildings, appliances and industrial motors, the IEA
argues, and it would be cost-effective. "An additional $1 invested in more
efficient electrical equipment and appliances avoids more than $2 in investment
in power generation," says Mandil.
The IEA also recommends a rapid expansion in the use of renewable energy
sources, including biofuels for vehicles. It says nuclear power could also make
a "major contribution" to cutting fuel imports and curbing CO2
emissions, but only if governments "play a stronger role in facilitating
private investment".
Under the IEA's proposed scenario, by 2030 global emissions of CO2
would still rise, but be 16% less than with business as usual. But this will
require "strong policy action" by governments, it says, otherwise
energy demand and CO2 emissions could both increase by more than 50%,
threatening "severe and irreversible environmental damage".
Environmental groups applauded the IEA's change of heart, but are concerned
that it has not gone far enough. "This is an important step forward
because it acknowledges that business as usual will not prevent global climate
chaos," says Shaun Burnie from Greenpeace International.
"But the solutions proposed fall far short of the energy revolution
that's needed. And nuclear power is a dangerous irrelevance."
4)
Electricity from Sugar Water
By Kevin Bullis, Technology Review, Nov. 7,
2006, http://cl.exct.net/?ffcb10-fe5e1d787660017c7517-fde017767d6d067b73137972-ff011674776105-fec4127776650574-fe1e137676650d7b711178
Researchers
announce a faster way to make hydrogen from cheap biomass.
|
|
|
|
A metal catalyst heated to 800 °Celsius vaporizes soy oil
to make hydrogen. (Photo Credit: Paul Dauenhauer, University of Minnesota) |
|
A new way to make hydrogen directly from biomass, such as soy oil, reported
in the current issue of Science, www.sciencemag.com could cut the cost of
electricity production using various cheap fuels.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed a catalytic
method for producing hydrogen from fuels such soy oil and even a
mixture of glucose and water. The hydrogen could be used in solid-oxide fuel
cells, which now run on hydrogen obtained from fossil-fuel sources such as
natural gas, to generate electricity. Further, by adjusting the amount of
oxygen injected along with the soy oil or sugar water, the method can be
adapted to make synthesis gas, a combination of carbon monoxide and hydrogen
that can be burned as fuel or converted into synthetic gasoline. The method can
also produce chemical feedstocks, such as olefins, which can be made into
plastics.
Although the results are preliminary, the new catalysis process represents a
fundamentally new way to directly use soy oil and other cheap biomass as fuels;
such biomass now needs to be converted into biodiesel or ethanol in order to be
used as fuels. "Generally, people have steered clear of nonvolatile
liquids--materials that you cannot vaporize," since these typically
produce a carbon residue that stops the process of producing hydrogen, says Ted
Krause, head of the basic and applied research department at Argonne
National Laboratory, in Argonne, IL. By eliminating the need to process soy oil
and sugar water to make volatile fuels such as ethanol, the new method
"opens up the number of available biomaterial feedstocks," he says.
The process begins when the researchers spray fine droplets of soy oil or sugar
water onto a super-hot catalyst made of small amounts of cerium and rhodium.
The rapid heating combined with catalyst-assisted reactions prevents the
formation of carbon sludge that would otherwise deactivate the catalyst. And
the reactions produce heat, keeping the catalyst hot enough to continue the
reaction. As a result, although fossil fuels are used initially to bring the
catalysts up to the 800 °C working temperature, no fossil fuels are needed to
continue the process. "One of the virtues of our process is it
requires no external process heat--it drives itself," says
chemical-engineering and materials-science professor Lanny Schmidt, who led the
research.
The key to the speed of the reactions is the small droplets. Existing processes
for converting volatile fuels, such as ethanol or biodiesel, into hydrogen are
slower because the fuels are inside pipes, and it takes up to a second for heat
to transfer to them. In Schmidt's process, the droplets heat up
instantaneously--in just a few milliseconds--and the system can be faster,
cheaper, and smaller, he says. The speed makes it possible to produce more fuel
from a smaller reactor, reducing capital costs and potentially making it
practical for a farmer to use a small system on the farm.
Schmidt says the process could probably be adapted to work with other
biomass, such as slurries or powders made from grass or wood, which are now
difficult to convert into practical fuels for electricity generation or
transportation because of their high cellulose content. The ability to create
hydrogen and syngas directly from cellulosic sources would dramatically
increase the amount of fuel that could be made from waste biomass because it
would be possible, for example, to use the whole cornstalk, rather than just
glucose derived from corn kernels, for fuel. Other researchers are attempting
to genetically engineer organisms to convert grass and cornstalks into liquid
fuels such as ethanol (see "Redesigning
Life to Make Ethanol" http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17052&ch=biztech).
Such fuels could help reduce the United States' dependence on foreign oil
and provide a renewable source of fuel that produces no net increase of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere, since the carbon released when the fuel is burned is
recaptured by the biomass as it grows.
Krause says that initial applications of Schmidt's current process will
likely be in producing distributed power in small amounts, since utility-scale
production will be a challenge. For example, controlling the size of the
droplets and the temperature of the system to keep the reactions uniform and to
avoid damaging the catalysts will be harder in large systems.
Schmidt says he's not focusing on commercializing the current technique. His
next goal is to develop the system to work with sources of waste biomass.
Someday it could be possible to use such a system to generate electricity from
lawn clippings.
Pricing data is
completely exportable and covers three years: 2004, 2005 and 2006. Nowhere else can you find
such complete alternative fuels pricing data for all eight AF
fuels. Our data has been painstakingly surveyed and compiled by
the
Alternatives Fuels Index analysts. AFI
is read and trusted by more than 4,000 different organizations and is the
only weekly wholesale pricing benchmark for all DOE approved AF products.
Don't
wait - Order
your AFI Historical Data before November 17th and save $100. Place your
CD order securely online here. |
|||||
|
|
Energy Management Institute, 1324 Lexington
Ave., New York, NY 10128 Email: info@energyinstitution.org
|
||||
6) Cheap, Superefficient Solar
Kevin Bullis, Technology
Review, Nov. 9, 2006, http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17774&ch=energy
|
Solar-power modules that concentrate the power of the
sun are becoming more viable. |
|
|
A worker arranges wafers that will be fabricated into
superefficient solar cells. These cells could help dramatically reduce the
cost of generating electricity from solar energy. (Photo Credit: The Boeing
Company) |
|
Technologies collectively known as concentrating photovoltaics
are starting to enjoy their day in the sun, thanks to advances in solar cells,
which absorb light and convert it into electricity, and the mirror- or
lens-based concentrator systems that focus light on them. The technology could
soon make solar power as cheap as electricity from the grid.
The idea of concentrating sunlight to reduce the size of solar cells--and
therefore to cut costs--has been around for decades. But interest in the
technology has picked up in the past year. Last month, Japanese electronics
giant Sharp Corporation showed off its new system for focusing
sunlight with a fresnel lens (like the one used in lighthouses) onto
superefficient solar cells, which are about twice as efficient as conventional
silicon cells. Other companies, such as SolFocus,
based in Palo Alto, CA, and Energy Innovations, based in
Pasadena, CA, are rolling out new concentrators. And the company that supplied
the long-lived photovoltaic cells for the Mars rovers, Boeing subsidiary Spectrolab,
based in Sylmar, CA, is supplying more than a million cells for concentrator
projects, including one in Australia that will generate enough power for 3,500
homes.
The thinking behind concentrated solar power is simple. Because energy from
the sun, although abundant, is diffuse, generating one gigawatt of power
(the size of a typical utility-scale plant) using traditional photovoltaics
requires a four-square-mile area of silicon, says Jerry Olson, a
research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory,
in Golden, CO. A concentrator system, he says, would replace most of the
silicon with plastic or glass lenses or metal reflectors, requiring only as
much semiconductor material as it would take to cover an area the size of a
typical backyard. And because decreasing the amount of semiconductor needed
makes it affordable to use much more efficient types of solar cells, the total
footprint of the plant, including the reflectors or lenses, would be only two
to two-and-a-half square miles. (This approach is distinct from concentrated
thermal solar power, which concentrates the heat from the sun to power turbines
or sterling engines.)
"I'd much rather make a few square miles of plastic lenses--it would
cost me less--than a few square miles of silicon solar cells," Olson says.
Today solar power is still more expensive than electricity from the grid, but
concentrator technology has the potential to change this. Indeed, if manufacturers
can meet the challenges of ramping up production and selling, distributing, and
installing the systems, their prices could easily meet prices for electricity
from the grid, says solar-industry analyst Michael Rogol, managing director of Photon Consulting, in Aachen,
Germany.
But the approach has been difficult to implement. "It has not delivered
on the promise, mostly because of the complexity of the systems," Rogol
says. The goal is to engineer a concentrating system that focuses sunlight,
that tracks the movement of the sun to keep the light on the small solar cell,
and that can accommodate the high heat caused by concentrating the sun's power
by 500 to700 times--and to make such a system easy to manufacture.
In the face of this complexity, many have decided to focus their research
efforts on cutting the cost of traditional "flat-plate" systems. This
is done through making them thinner, to decrease the amount of semiconductor
needed, or through turning to cheaper, though less efficient, organic
materials. But now several companies claim to have developed reliable systems
that can be manufactured on a large scale. For example, SolFocus
is making a system that combines the concentrators and cells in one sealed
package by employing manufacturing techniques similar to those used to make
automobile headlamps. This way they can easily be created in large quantities,
according to the company's CEO, Gary Conley.
As for the use of superefficient solar cells, critics originally said that
although the cells worked well in the lab, it would be unlikely that their high
efficiencies could be maintained in large-scale manufacturing. Unlike
conventional solar cells, which use only one type of semiconductor (silicon),
these more efficient cells, called multijunction cells, are made from layers of
three types of semiconductor. This approach is meant to overcome a major
limitation of silicon: although it can absorb photons from most of the spectrum
in sunlight, it does so inefficiently, converting into heat, rather than into
electricity, most of the energy in high-energy photons from the blue and
ultraviolet parts of the spectrum. The multijunction cells use three materials
designed to efficiently convert light from different parts of the spectrum, the
result being that much less is converted into heat and much more into
electricity.
All of the materials must be carefully engineered to work with the other
materials, and they have to be assembled under very clean, well-controlled
conditions. So in the 1990s, when this type of cell was still experimental,
people called it "a laboratory curiosity that could never be manufactured
in large volume," Olson says. "Now Spectrolab on their production
floor does better than we do in the lab. So it basically blew that myth out of
the water."
Other factors that have limited the use of concentrated solar, such as
aesthetic objections to mounting concentrator systems on suburban rooftops, may
largely restrict applications to commercial buildings or arrays in the desert.
But the advances that have come about, along with growing demand for solar
and a shortage of silicon feedstock, have made concentrated solar photovoltaics
attractive.
"There's a lot of uncertainty in this area, where historically there's
been a lot of hype that just hasn't been delivered," Rogol says. "The
biggest news for me is that serious solar people, over the course of the last
year, have made notable commitments to concentrators."
FE eNews is
provided as a public service from www.IntegrityResearchInstitute.org
where DVDs from each of the speakers from COFE2 are available
upon demand. Ask for a
free DVD of "Future Energy Technologies" in the comment section of
the order page when ordering any other DVD.