<[email protected]> wrote:
> While true of normal solar cells, I seem to recall that there are also high > efficiency cells designed to be used with solar concentrators. I'm > guessing that > these will also function at boiling water temperatures. Is this not the > case? > Yes, I recall reading about them years ago. This kind of hybrid approach is a nifty idea, but I believe it has now been dropped because so much progress has been made in conventional PVs. It has been overtaken. This is what has happened to the Ivanpah CSP design. It was a promising approach. Many smart people thought it deserved a chance. Unfortunately for the investors, conventional PV made such rapid progress that by the time they built Ivanpah it was obsolete. It was too expensive. This often happens in commercial technology. Many great computer innovations came and went in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in the minicomputer CPU designs and operating systems, and things like RISC processors. In a competition for the best commercial technology you only have room for one or two winners. Everyone else loses. By that I mean there is usually only room in the marketplace for one or two standards: the PC and the Mac; 33 rpm and 48 rpm records; AM and FM radio; the U.S. NTSC and the European TV broadcast standard. Design engineers could probably come up with many alternatives to these standards that would be better in some ways, but the market can only support a few standards because the engineers, installers, technicians, salespeople and others do not have time to learn multiple standards. Often the technology that wins is not the "best" by every standard. If some other approach had been pursued earlier, it might have deserved to win. Suppose that in the 1990s someone had put a lot of money into solar CSP technology. The cost might have fallen quickly and perhaps today it would be cheaper than PV or wind. The power companies would have constructed many giant CSP installations in the Southwest, especially the Mojave Desert. In this alternative universe, Southern California and Nevada might have cheaper electricity than they do now, most of it from CSP. This did not happen, and by now I think it is too late and it will never happen. In another alternative universe, electric cars performance would not have fallen so far behind gasoline models in from 1900 to 1914. The 1907 gasoline-electric hybrid automobile might have been developed. In this scenario, I think there would have been more breakthroughs in battery technology over the last 100 years, because there would be more incentive, and more R&D money. By now, every car would be electric, OPEC would not exist, and we would not have fought all those wars in the Middle East. - Jed
