Nantenna to increase solar energy capture threefold - DomesticFuel.com

[Bill USA]

http://domesticfuel.com/2011/05/16/nantenna-to-improve-solar-capture-threefold/

One of the drawbacks with solar energy is they only collect, on average, 20 percent of available sunlight. To address this problem, University of Missouri engineer Patrick Pinhero, an associate professor in the MU Chemical Engineering Department, is developing a flexible solar sheet that will capture more than 90 percent sunlight. Pinhero notes that energy generated using traditional photovoltaic methods (PV) of solar collection are inefficient and neglects a large amount of available sunlight. His team has developed a thin, moldable sheet of small antennas called nantenna that can harvest heat from industrial processes and convert it into electricity. The idea is to extend this technology to a direct solar facing nantenna device that would, in essence, collect heat and sunlight.

Along with his university research team, Pinhero is also working with Garett Moddel, an electrical engineering professor at the University of Colorado as well as his former team at the Idaho National Laboratory. Together they have developed a way to extract electricity from the collected heat and sunlight using specially designed high-speed electrical circuitry.

“Our overall goal is to collect and utilize as much solar energy as is theoretically possible and bring it to the commercial market in an inexpensive package that is accessible to everyone,” Pinhero said. “If successful, this product will put us orders of magnitudes ahead of the current solar energy technologies we have available to us today.”
(more)

[TheWraith]

1. Once again, I'll believe it when I see it.

So many "revolutionary breakthrough" articles in so many fields, and almost none of them have panned out.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

3. Too many people are selling miracles so the evoluntionary improvements get ignored

Hail Mary approaches to large scale power development and management are for fiction. Real operators of real grids know better. For example, renewables are great stuff, but there have been issues with integrating them into the grid. We are a lot better at it that we once were, but its still not perfect. It is incremental progress in lowering demand, cleaning up the generation process, increasing renewables etc that will get things better, not some magic bullet.

[thereismore]

2. You need a heat sink to get energy out heat. I am sceptical. nt